RoboCop: Rogue City Promises Big Ideas, But Can it Deliver? | Gamescom 2023

ign.com:

There’s a moment in RoboCop: Rogue City where the future of law enforcement gets to show a little of the man behind the mask. He corners a reporter he’s been tracking, who reveals she has intel that could indict OCP, the evil megacorp who made RoboCop in the first place. She broke into OCP HQ to get that info, so technically she broke the law. But she had to do it to get what she needed. So RoboCop has a choice to make: he can detain her, an act that will ensure that the OCP-run cops will seize the evidence and destroy it, covering up the company’s crimes. Or he can show his human side and let the journalist go, allowing her to continue gathering evidence. It’s a tough call.

According to the developer, decisions like these – whether to be empathic or a hard-line officer of the law – will impact the game’s ending. But having seen how it plays out both ways in this instance, it’s difficult to see the bigger implications. If you bust the journalist she just shouts a handful of expletives before being dragged off by the police; let her go and she says you’re helping the city… but how? It certainly wasn’t clear in the demo I played at gamescom 2023.

Another example the developer gave focussed on a graffiti artist who RoboCop tracks and captures. If you let him go he continues to scrawl on walls around Detroit, but their message is positive. Bust him and he writes ‘RoboCop is a dick’ on every wall he can. It’s a fun aside but I want to see how the choices a player makes have real impact, if indeed they do.

For now, the focus of this demo was primarily gunplay, as RoboCop is called to a heist at a nearby OCP bank. He’s not the first on the scene – a SWAT team is ready to enter, supported by a handful of ED-209s, and what follows