Crime Boss: Rockay City is a game that should never exist for a number of reasons. Morally, the acting quality of “Hacking Up in an Elevator” comes from its old-fashioned stunt work with an elder abuse vibe. Technically, it was a disaster. Visually, it’s a sterile, over-shiny migraine of cheap assets and muddy textures. Aurally, it’s like being stuck in a Superdrug queue next to a tiny radio playing Absolute Radio 90s. In spirit, it feels like a canceled Xbox 360 launch game, a clumsy artifact from an era when video games were awkwardly and desperately taken seriously as adult entertainment.
Crime City Boss Man is a roguelike first-person crime shooter management sim with a standalone co-op campaign, since no one involved can decide what the game should actually be, assuming it’s not an elaborate tax write-off . You’re Michael Madsen in a cowboy hat, a character you probably vaguely remember appearing in any number of mid-crime movies released over the past forty years. You’re here to take over crime-ridden Rocky City – a metropolis inspired not by Miami, but by the multiple-deleted Miami inspirations found in other video games and movies that have tried hard See, these games and movies are desperate to capture the real grime and fringe of late 80s/early 90s media.
Your path to domination is a series of smaller-scale heist missions and more straightforward shootouts, interspersed with some tedious book balancing and micromanagement—often through a blunt cutscene with your secretary, a woefully forgettable Kim Basin Grid sounds like she’s only here by court order. The heist mission is like an early alpha version of Payday 2, where there’s no guarantee that Telegram’s stealth kill won’t pass through the guards harmlessly. You can hire and equip up to four thugs, each with their own unique quirks, that can be switched to at any time, or at the mercy of remedial robot intelligence, before heading to the inventory warehouse or shopping mall.
All these options for planning and crew building don’t really make much sense in the game itself–within an hour, I quickly realized that the best way to play this game is to do everything myself. AI team members are used to breaking into the line of sight of cameras and guards. Playing it as a single-player stealth game reveals how limited the frustum is, and there’s ample visual feedback whenever someone glances in your direction, and nine times out of ten you can find a way to the objective by The easy route to a successful loot (often just by moving slightly to the left or right) and crouching back and forth in front of the escape vehicle.
Aside from the fun, most of the time you’ll be doing more straightforward turf takeover missions, which involve watching your men get mowed down by bullet-sponge enemies you toss grenades until a chunk of the city map turns blue. You’ll experience what Crime Man Boss City is all about during opening hours. But really, all of that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how viscerally unpleasant the whole thing is.
Aging actors’ bizarre, aging puppets’ chattering dialogue sounds like it was generated by an AI forced to watch Reservoir Dogs 3,000 times. Those who should have spent their retirement on the golf course, with the conviction of reading menus, through tortured metaphors and casual expletives. Lazy misogyny streams from every pore. The shots featuring the coughing and stuttering are completely untouched and even subtitled, as if even the sound director couldn’t resist asking these poor people to subject themselves to the further indignity of reading this shit a second time. Everyone sounds like they were recorded in various “home studios” (Hollywood slang for “linen cupboard”) 1,000 miles apart. Given that every aspect of the game’s narrative is completely ambiguous and meaningless, it’s impossible for either of them to understand the broader strokes of their characters or plot.
The cast is frankly a weird range of 80s-90s pop culture icons. Chuck Norris is probably here because of an early 2000s meme, not Texas Ranger Walker. The reason for the vanilla ice here is simply beyond comprehension. Danny Trejo already has a history of starring in soulless nostalgic masturbations made by hackers who don’t understand the period they’re in after the two slasher movies. The fully-knit nature of the episode could just be a result of these guys calling back.
You can’t help but wonder how many inquiries from Ingame Studios go unanswered. How many agents of forgotten movie stars are buried forever in their trash folders. The cast was too hot to be 100% intentional, made up entirely of people who had absolutely nothing else going on that weekend. How many conversations fade away, and how many conversations end without fruit? Anyone trying to explain to Eric Roberts what a roguelike is? Did Cheech Marin’s agent sit him down and try to convince him that Xbox Game Pass is the best deal in gaming? Did DJ Jazzy Jeff retweet the PowerPoint about ray tracing?
The whole effort is such a hopeless and totally different mess of cool guy aesthetics and inspirations. Feels like there should be something for NFT integration. It’s all so embarrassing. I’d rather be caught playing some absolutely depraved hentai visual novel than this totally immature mood board for a 50 year old dad with a CD player. So should you. Video games can be much better than this. They can be funnier, smarter, sexier, sexier than that. This has all the edge of a Will Smith track, without the impact of a Will Smith slap.