Crime Boss: Rockay City is tantamount to elder abuse
This tepid, try-hard crime simulator serves as a final indignity to the handful of faded stars who bothered to call back.
Crime Boss: Rockay City is a game that quite simply shouldn’t exist, for a litany of reasons. Morally, the ‘accosted in a lift’ quality of the performances from its stunt cast of washed-up has-beens carries a grotty air of elder abuse. Technically, it’s a disaster. Visually, it’s a sterile, overly-shiny migraine of cheap assets and muddy textures. Aurally, it’s like being stuck in a Superdrug queue next to a tinny radio blasting out Absolute Radio 90s. Spiritually, it feels like a cancelled Xbox 360 launch game, an awkward artefact from a time when videogames were embarrassingly desperate to be taken seriously as adult entertainment.
Crime City Boss Man is a roguelike first-person crime shooter management sim with separate co-op campaigns because nobody involved could decide what this game should actually be, assuming it wasn’t conceived as an elaborate tax write-off. You are Michael Madsen in a cowboy hat, a character you probably vaguely recall appearing in any number of middling crime movies released over the last forty years. You’re here to take over the crime-ridden Rockay City - a metropolis not so much inspired by Miami as it is inspired by several-times removed inspirations of Miami seen in other try-hard videogames and movies desperate to capture the authentic sleaze and edge of late 80s/early 90s media.
Your route to domination is a series of bite-sized heist missions and more straight-forward shootouts, interspersed with some tedious book balancing and micro-management - usually via a stilted cutscene with your secretary, a tragically oblivious Kim Basinger who sounds like she’s only here under a court order. Heist missions play out like an early alpha build of Payday 2, where telegraphed stealth takedowns aren’t guaranteed not to just clip harmlessly through a guard. Before heading out to a stock warehouse or shopping mall, you can hire and equip up to four goons, each with their own particular quirks, who can be switched to on the fly or left at the mercy of a remedial bot intelligence.
All of these options in regards to planning and crew building don’t really amount to much in the game itself - within an hour I quickly realised that the absolute optimum way to play this game is by doing absolutely everything yourself. AI team members have a habit of blundering into plain view of cameras and guards. Playing it as a solo stealth game reveals just how limited the cones of vision are, and with ample visual feedback alerting you whenever someone is glancing in your direction, nine times out of ten you can successfully ace a heist by finding an easy route to the loot (usually no more involved than going a bit to the left or a bit to the right) and crouching back and forth to the escape van.
Outside of these delights, most of the time you’ll be doing far more straightforward turf takeover missions, which involve watching your guys get mowed down by a bullet sponge enemy that you lob grenades at until a nice chunk of the city map turns blue. You’ll experience the entirety of what Crime Man Boss City has to offer in its opening hour. But really, all of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to just how viscerally unpleasant the entire thing is.
Uncanny, de-aged puppets of decrepit actors sputter dialogue that sounds like it was generated by an AI forced to watch Reservoir Dogs 3000 times. Men who should be spending their retirement on the golf course plough through tortured metaphors and scattershot swearing with all the conviction of someone reading a menu. Lazy misogyny drips out of every pore. Takes featuring coughing and stutters are left in completely untouched, even subtitled, as if even the sound director couldn’t bring themselves to ask these poor people to subject themselves to the further indignity of reading any of this s**t a second time. Everybody sounds like they were recorded 1000 miles apart in various “home studios” (this is Hollywood slang for “linen cupboards”). The idea of any of them understanding the broader strokes of their characters or their plot is an impossibility given how completely ill-defined and pointless every single aspect of the game’s narrative is.
The cast is a frankly bizarre range of 80s to 90s pop culture icons. Chuck Norris is probably here because of the early-2000s memes rather than Walker, Texas Ranger. Vanilla Ice is here for reasons that simply cannot possibly be fathomed. Danny Trejo already has precedent for starring in soulless nostalgia wanks made by hacks who don’t understand the period they’re cribbing from after those two Machete movies. The completely bolted together nature of the plot is probably just a result of these being the people who called back.
You can’t help but wonder how many inquiry emails from Ingame Studios went unanswered. How many agents of forgotten movie stars have one resting forever somewhere in their junk folder. The cast is too much of a grab-bag to have been 100% deliberate, consisting solely of the people who had absolutely nothing else going on that weekend. How many conversations petered out, how many dialogues amounted to nothing? Did somebody try to explain what a roguelike is to Eric Roberts? Did Cheech Marin’s agent sit him down and try to convince him that Xbox Game Pass is the best deal in gaming? Was DJ Jazzy Jeff forwarded a PowerPoint about raytracing?
The entire endeavour is such a desperate and disparate mess of badly aged cool guy aesthetics and inspirations. It feels like something that should have NFT integration. It’s all just so embarrassing. I’d rather be caught playing some absolutely depraved hentai visual novel than this completely underbaked mood board for fifty-year-old dads with laserdisc players. And so should you. Videogames can be so much better than this. They can be funnier, smarter, sexier and sleazier than this. This has all the edge of a Will Smith track and none of the impact of a Will Smith slap.