RoboCop: Rogue City brings the crime-fighting cyborg to the realm of first-person shooters
A RoboCop first-person shooter on modern hardware, what a timeline this is
RoboCop: Rogue City is a new first-person shooter coming to PC and consoles in 2023.
Publisher Nacon announced the surprising game during its July 6 showcase. The reveal trailer opens with what I'm assuming is a drone's-eye view of Detroit, a city so crime-infested that hoodlums and ne'er do wells have apparently made off with the damn ground, leaving only a foggy abyss like we're back in Neversoft's Spider-Man. As our narrator asks "Who, or what, will send these crooks on the run and restore peace to all citizens once and for all?" buildings begin to sprout from the abyss like so many concrete stalks of corn. Little-known game development fact: you've got to plant your building assets three to four months in advance and water them regularly.
So yes, the reveal is a whopping 49 seconds long with exactly zero seconds of gameplay and two seconds of RoboCop himself – or at least his pistol-packing and admittedly quite awesome legs – so in case there was ever any doubt from the release date alone, this project is clearly early in development. Details are thin on the ground, too. All we know is that RoboCop: Rogue City will be some sort of FPS and it's planned for consoles – presumably including the PS5 and Xbox Series X given the 2023 release date – and PC.
"Become the iconic hero whose part man, part machine, all cop as you attempt to bring justice to the dangerous, crime-ridden streets of Old Detroit in RoboCop: Rogue City," Nacon teased in a tweet.
Rogue City is in the works at Teyon, a studio you may know from Terminator: Resistance, which was not terribly well received, or Rambo: The Video Game, which was also panned like the Colorado River upon release. Here's hoping that the third try is indeed the charm when it comes to video game adaptations of iconic action films – or that RoboCop: Rogue City at least winds up being so endearingly dumb-fun that it's still a good spectacle in its own right.
Explore the making of 1993's RoboCop Versus The Terminator with this Retro Gamer deep-dive.
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Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with 12DOVE since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.