Recent reviews by Keramane

In its current state, I'm nonplussed. The visuals are nice, the mechanics are neat, but whoever thought 40k favour was a proper price to keep yourself from being eaten for awhile while simultaneously trying to fend off enemy forces and active sabotage either greatly overestimates the player's skill (mine specifically) or assumes you already know where all the attacks will come from so you can build properly.

I'll wait until release to see how it fares, but at present I'm a little under the thumbs-up.

It's pretty good.

If Steam had a Meh rating, I'd give this game that.

The building is clunky and the later walls have conflicting textures making for unappealing designs. The plot is bland at best and absolutely predictable, the enemies are pretty generic in their AI and tactics and only get harder when they're made into HP sponges. The world is designed decently but you very quickly see not only repeated buildings but entirely repeated neighborhoods and complexes with little adjustments. Some buildings are entirely unfurnished and others are furnished nonsensibly in ways that make the world feel shallow. There are no facial animations, but the camera is focused on your face during cinematics/conversations for far longer than the gesticulating makes sense for. The NPCs in the story are two-dimensional and have no real depth. I have literally no attachment to any of them.

The visual design of the monstrous deviations is great. The same cannot be said for the ones we catch (they all look like childish mascots or occasionally like inanimate objects). The atmosphere around the boss encounters is great, but immediately detracted by the invisible-walls in every arena that are way too far in from the edge, causing for clumsy combat and cornering that makes no sense.

There is almost no music save the car radio and that is minimal at best. The battlepass' free side gets you one little trinket out of the shop and some very minor cosmetics. The paid side gets you more cosmetics but doesn't give enough shop credit to get the entire battlepass' roster of collectibles.

I'll not even get into the massive amount of small bugs that need squashing.

As it stands, I rate this a 5.5/10. It might improve, but they have a long way to go and at best, I might see a 7/10 in a few years time.

Take 2 took an IP I loved and screwed over the team that was making it before firing them. If this game gets finished (proper finished, not thrown out an airlock wrapped in duct tape) then I'll be shocked.

I'm doing my part, for Managed Democracy!

The game is pretty fun, and while there are (currently) some pathing bugs, everything runs pretty smooth

After years and years of seeing the IPs I love being brought back as a sludge of garbage with the sole purpose of emulsifying my nostalgia into some money-printing paste, RoboCop: Rogue City is a welcome sight. It stays absolutely loyal to the series I know and love and does right by the fans. From the heavy stomp of RoboCop's boots to the cheesy one-liners, the VHS tapes and the green-scan lines, everything is exactly as it should be. I love nearly everything about this game.

If I were to have one complaint, it would be the Audio. There is simply not enough music, and there are times where the voice actors are muted against the background sounds. However, what music is around hits well (especially in the last few missions) and while some of the secondary NPC voice acting is... rough, its easily something that can be ignored when you're placed in a game this good. It's a must-play for any 80's / 90's kids; you will not be disappointed.

Whether it's purely bad luck or just consecutive setbacks, I have found myself stymied and losing on even the easiest difficulties. Either some NPC runs across the map to claim the city site nearest to my capital, or some foreign nation poisons me on our first meeting, or I'm beset by raiders from a Tribe I've not only a truce with but am married into (and can't attack their launching site without starting a war with their other 8 locations).

If this is a game about grand strategy and not about dumb luck then I must be too stupid to play. Either way, I have found it endlessly complicated with little gain and have not found a lick of enjoyment in the unending suffering thrown at me.

I want to like this game but the stuttering is so bad in some places that it's unplayable. I'll definitely change this to a thumbs up when they fix that.

This review is less a hard-pass and more of a "It's not great, but has great potential"

The core element is there, fetch rocks, mine, get ore, build up, automate, move along. However, the late-game unlocks for mining and automation don't really feel like upgrades at all. The Miner Drones are so slow as to be basically worthless, hauling one ore at a time, and having the only benefit of bypassing the manual flattening and relocation process for the miners that would otherwise be vastly faster. The upgraded smelter and constructor do make copper and iron smelt faster, but is otherwise a gatekeeper for later techs, doing nothing else with any expediency. And while a game like this would propose making MORE smelters and constructors, the power demand is very high and the power supply is very low. Coal generators eat up 1 coal every 30 seconds, and while the auto-collectors for asteroids are great, you can't filter what ores they should prioritize so I have - on a few occasions - gotten no coal to sustain my work. Hunting coal-bearing planetoids becomes critical, and even then, just to maintain status quo. Solar gives almost no energy and uses some gold, but can scale up to the point of making energy moot, reversing the entire thing to being unbalanced. NPCs walk through walls, there are neat wall textures with no slope-variant, there are corners but no inverted corners so diagonals can't have roof designs or anything.

These are all things that will be fixed in time I'm sure, but for now, is so glaring that I can't really enjoy the game as-is.