If you know one thing about Crime Boss: Rockay City, it’s the cast. Revealed with a bombastic trailer during The Game Awards, the game stars Michael Madsen, Kim Basinger, Danny Glover, Michael Rooker, Damion Poitier, Chuck Norris, Danny Trejo, and more. Plus it’s a first person shooter. That’s about as much that I knew about Crime Boss: Rockay City when we got the email about the game releasing on next-gen consoles. Over the last week, I have spent quite a bit of time in Rockay City, Florida and in this review I can only hope to convey the surprise and disappointment I experienced while playing the game.
Instead of a story synopsis, let me first start with the genre. Yes, Crime Boss: Rockay City is a first-person shooter but it’s more importantly a roguelike live service game. There are a few different game modes in the package with an emphasis on co-op crimeplay either with friends or bots. The goal of the campaign is to build your crime empire as Travis Baker until he inevitably catches a stray bullet to the chest and loses it all. When he does, you do too, and the game starts all over again.
So how does one grow a crime empire? Well, this isn’t a tutorial but it’ll suffice to say that it involves running some operations, making some phone calls, and gawking at your assistant. I will admit that conceptually, I can get behind Crime Boss: Rockay City. As satirical as I am in describing it, the idea of sitting at a desk to plan your next move and then hitting the streets to lead your gang in turf warfare is a cool one. I just don’t think that it works well with the roguelike genre. But that is something I will get into later, once you understand the game better.
The Crime Boss: Rockay City gameplay loop, at a high level, is picking a task on the map, selecting your crew, and playing through the mission. These can range from robbing a store to defending your turf. In this regard, the game can be compared to PAYDAY 2 and it certainly has some of that DNA in it. And credit where credit is due, the game gives you a decent amount of freedom in executing a mission. Take a jewelry store robbery mission for example. You can obviously waltz in through the front door, guns blazing. You can also hold the place up to get people to cooperate with you. Or you can take the silent route and find a way to the back, disable the cameras, and go from there.
The problem is that it’s all really repetitive. As you play through the game, you will come across the same types of missions over and over again and while there are a few options on how to complete the jobs, you exhaust them fast. This means that by the fifth or sixth time you do a jewelry store heist, it gets a bit boring. I encourage tackling each mission differently to push the staleness away for as long as possible and, if you have friends, you can get a bit more mileage out of the game, but having none, I was left to play with the recruitable bots.
Talking about bots leads to a conversation about the AI so let’s talk about the friendly ones first. The gang members you hire can join you on your mission and, if playing solo, I recommend you bring them along because they can pick you up when you go down. Playing solo, if you go down, you’re out of the game. That reason is the only reason they’re tolerable. Friendly bots are often dumb, not knowing what to do or even where to take cover. So often I would turn around with two bags of loot slung over my shoulder to find them just running around like they forgot something in the car. And when I threw my bags into the getaway van they just ran back to me like a lost puppy. You can take control of the bots too and get the loot yourself, but if the cover is blown, it’s hard to risk the main man Travis Baker, for a dimwit you hired before the round started.
Enemy AI is a bigger surprise mainly because they’re just as dumb. I struggle to find a meaningful difference between them. They both charge in recklessly with complete disregard for human life. I don’t need my cop AI to tactically check corners as they enter a building, but when cops start firing in the direction of civilians or stand out in the open looking confused it’s immersion-breaking. If one was immersed to begin with. I really tried to give Crime Boss an honest chance and despite feeling the sameness of the missions, I kept trying to stealth. If you know anything about me, I like to stealth in my video games. But the stealth mechanics are just not fun here. It’s easy to get spotted from long distances, the aforementioned AI is stupid, and it seems that no matter what approach you take to be quiet, something goes wrong.
To make matters worse, when a gunfight breaks out, enemies often turn out to be bullet sponges. I can understand if heavily armored SWAT teams are hard to take down. But when gang members in tank tops are taking half a clip of body shots to bring down, it can get a bit ridiculous.
Speaking of ridiculous: the cast. Yes, let’s go back there for a bit because it is still the best thing about this game. I had such little motivation to continue playing the game and if not for the crazy cast of characters, I probably would have stopped a lot earlier. There’s a certain allure to seeing some of these Hollywood actors digitized and, in most cases, de-aged in a video game. They very much so play over-the-top caricatures of what they’re known for, be it Chuck Norris’ quippy sheriff or Kim Basinger’s curvy assistant, and I was totally down for that. However anyone who is planning on playing the game just for the cast should know that certain characters, like Danny Trejo’s Dragon, don’t appear in the game very much at all.
That being said, while the cast is extensive, they’re writing and performances are often not. Dialogue frequently dances the line of being poorly written or just entirely improvised. Also poorly. And the delivery within a given conversation can feel very disconnected as if two completely different conversations have been stitched together. I also want to point out that while there are cutscenes that show characters interacting, too much of this game’s dialogue is played over a black screen before missions. If you have a cast this extensive, the game has to be cinematic (even if the narrative isn’t so) and nothing is quite the opposite of that like dialogue delivered over a blank screen like a lazily edited podcast.
Crime Boss: Rockay City does try to be cinematic with certain story-focused missions popping up between the usual thoroughfare, but these don’t land their marks. There are a few flashbacks centered around Ranger, for example, and the game manages to make the mine-filled forests of the Vietnam War feel boring. The pacing of these story missions is bad and the objectives are far too simple. The game attempts to deliver a serious experience here and while they have the necessary explosions and yelling, they rarely manage to capture the intensity like Call of Duty: Black Ops did over a decade and two console generations ago. Be it running through tall grass while being fired upon by a sniper or crawling through tunnels not knowing what’s around the corner, these missions sound better on paper than in execution.
We’ve almost covered all the bases here but there are some more things I need to touch on. Before I go further, I do want to throw in a positive note and say that the game’s soundtrack is pretty good. It fits the general vibe of the story and setting and I enjoyed that. The game can also look pretty good at times. I played on the PlayStation 5 and while it was never anything to write home about, it did have its moments. And playing the DualSense controller, I am happy to see the developers take advantage of the haptic triggers for the weapons. That plus the FOV slider are nice touches to the otherwise unexceptional gameplay.
If you’re wondering about performance on the next-gen consoles, I, unfortunately, don’t have great news. The game offers both Performance and Quality modes but they both have their drawbacks. Visually, the game seems to have an odd filter on it at times that pops on certain textures and I couldn’t find a way to disable it. Overall, I played the game in Performance mode and I experienced small hiccups during gameplay. These were expected and negligible for the most part but any leniency I had for them disappeared with the numerous bugs. While the console release doesn’t seem to be as buggy as the PC release was a few months ago, the game is still buggy, from glitchy objects to out-of-sync menus that don’t show the right content.
This brings me back to the top. Crime Boss: Rockay City is a roguelike that doesn’t have a good gameplay loop. It has a cool concept but in execution, there’s a lot left to be desired. The game has rough writing and delivery, dumb enemy AI, and a frustrating amount of bugs. It also doesn’t help that seemingly the entirety of Rockay City is built using the same building blueprints. The game tells you that you’re hitting a unique warehouse or infiltrating a store on the opposite end of town but they are so similar I initially didn’t even realize that they were supposed to be different. If the narrative of this game was presented to me in a different manner, maybe as a short six-hour (three-hour?) first-person shooter campaign like Battlefield Hardline, I might have enjoyed it more. But the roguelike gameplay loop makes death more of an annoyance than a challenge.
You add all that up and Crime Boss: Rockay City is a really tough game to recommend. It’s not awful, and I think with friends there is fun to be had for a few hours. But playing solo, it’s hard to even laugh at the game’s shortcomings. The star-studded roster that the game so proudly advertises cannot unfortunately salvage the broken parts of this flawed first-person roguelike. If you do pick this one up, then you will be happy to know that there are both free and paid content drops on the way, though I would be thoroughly impressed if the game is supported for the planned three years. Crime Boss: Rockay City is available now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. A review code was provided by the publisher.
