I won’t lie to you, the truth is I wasn’t expecting much from Crime Boss: Rockay City. It may have been a bias, but recent coverage of the trailer, coupled with the delays, the play-by-service perspective and the fact that it won’t be coming to consoles for a few months, has made it a hot commodity …the ones I didn’t have much faith in when I started my analysis process. However, I was surprised because although this game has some obvious issues and serious issues that it needs to fix, it’s still a fun title to spend many hours with.
Set in a city similar to Miami in the 90’s called Rockay City, the idea of the game is to put yourself in the shoes of the criminal protagonist Travis Baker (Michael Madsen) as he wages war against rival gang bosses in the sun-kissed metropolis, all with a little help from allies like Casey (Kim Basinger) and Gloves (Danny Glover) and while dodging the sheriff-led police and law enforcement agencies Norris (Chuck Norris). Of course, they are not entirely unknown. The gameplay essentially revolves around completing robberies to fund your empire landing (Michael Rooker) does the dirty work of claiming and defending territories across the city.
In practice, Crime Boss: Rockay City is basically a first-person shooter. The game will tell you that you need to plan and be smart when it comes to heists, but going flat out and leaving a trail of dead bodies is just as effective, and actually a lot easier, than trying to plan. Because? Because (as he often tells you) Crime Boss is not a heist game
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Luckily, the gunfights and shooting are excellent. If you’ve played Far Cry, you’ll see many similarities to the Crime Boss feel, as the weapons seem a little heavy and unwieldy, but at the same time give a realistic feel in the hands of a criminal, unapproved by the military to handle a full-auto firearm trained. Crime Boss doesn’t have problems with weapons and controls, but rather with activities and everything else.
And I say that because Crime Boss: Rockay City is a one trick game. If you enjoy digging into a small level, smashing boxes, cracking safes and blasting vaults with drills while keeping hordes of incredibly stupid cops at bay, then this game has it in spades. In fact, he basically has it exclusively. Every heist mission (whether it’s a bank, jeweler, warehouse, mall, etc.) boils down to doing exactly the same thing, which means Crime Boss’s campaign and other game modes are very repetitive. . And before I get into what at least tries to save the campaign from this purgatory, I just want to say that the Urban Legends and Time of Crime modes are nothing more than ways to play these raids without the campaign suite of options, to support them . . . They lose their charm almost immediately.
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But never mind the campaign. This is where you’ll spend most of your time in the game, and thankfully the roguelike nature and range of options keep things interesting. Since you can’t let the Baker boss die in a mission, it’s game over and you have to start over, your choices do matter, although the roguelike nature makes the game easier as you progress (ie said I almost beat the game in the first game and only lost because i was greedy to rob a jewelry store which just goes to show how pathetic the AI and challenge is). Player Choice contributes to this by letting you decide who to recruit, what territory to attack, what weapons to own, what job to do next, what assets to buy to increase your wealth and reputation, and a whole bunch of other things that make being a boss more exciting. It all comes together to keep you lost in the campaign, even as the voice acting, characters, and narrative do their best to draw you away.
For many, Crime Boss: Rockay City’s star-studded cast is probably its biggest draw, but with that comes a lot of disappointment as some of the characters are downright exhausting. I’m a huge fan of Michael Rooker, but his character, Touchdown, is so cartoonish that it’s exhausting to engage with as he speaks exclusively in football rhetoric and metaphor, and when I say exclusively, I mean it . Then there’s Casey (Kim Basinger), who’s just there to be eye candy and sexualize the game. The rival bosses (Vanilla Ice and Danny Trejo) carry very little weight in the story (not to mention), and worst of all, Chuck Norris’ sheriff is so bad that it seems like Norris only gave the half-hearted performance to take the check and run.
The narrative is also unmemorable and flat, and when the gameplay loops of shooting cops, stuffing bags with drugs, gems, gold, and cash, and then transporting them to a delivery vehicle (which I did in the four days I had to , was fun Check out the game) doesn’t grab you, so Crime Boss: Rockay City has absolutely nothing else to hold your attention and entertain you.
Despite this, the game seems to run well on my PC (RTX 3090 and 11th Gen i9 CPU), with a solid and smooth frame rate when playing on maximum graphics settings. But just because it looks pretty flashy and works well at a basic performance level doesn’t change the fact that certain aspects, like the AI, are downright atrocious. If you intend to play alone, you should know that you must shout orders to your squad to prevent them from taking to the streets and being gunned down by the police, and tell them that they must do whatever what is required is a little initiative. At the very least, the police level the playing field a bit, charging you in an incredibly predictable formation that requires very little thought and strategy to overcome. Of course, the solution to any of these problems is to play cooperatively, but as we all know, finding and scheduling a play session with three friends isn’t always easy.
In short, Crime Boss: Rockay City isn’t an absolute disaster of a game, but it’s not a title we’ll drink the winds to. For anyone looking for a flashy, ’90s-inspired payday (because there’s enough heist focus that you’ll want to compare the two) that focuses its gameplay on an FPS, then this will add at least a couple of hours of fun to your Want to devote time to something more travelling.
