On paper, Crime Boss: Rockay City is bombastic, star-studded and promises a city-spanning adventure about a criminal organization’s rise to the top. However, the actual game is anything but. The gameplay is unbalanced, buggy, repetitive and boring. The celebrity-filled cast is exciting at first, but crude and humorless writing weighs heavily on previously announced appearances from characters voiced by Michael Madsen, Michael Rooker, Vanilla Ice, and more. The single-player roguelite campaign lacks all of the genre’s typical snags, and bugs can prevent progression at critical points in a playthrough. Multiplayer works, but the two cooperative modes offer the same mindless rotation of missions that you’ll play dozens of times throughout the campaign. All of this combines to create an aimless package not worth playing with experiences that perform significantly better in other games.
The star of the show, for better or for worse, is the cast of Crime Boss. Kim Basinger, Danny Glover, Chuck Norris, and more lend their likeness and voice to these characters, but instead of feeling like the big Action B movies of the 1980s or ’90s, the game clearly aims to go back to where Kitsch and cheese are played on purpose and the performances feel hollow. Simply put, the writing style is bad. Rooker’s Captain Touchdown and Madsen’s Travis Baker are the worst offenders, constantly barking lines like, “Who are the losers? They are! Who are the winners? We is” and called rival gang members “fruitcake”. Other barks, like characters who refer to the Khan criminal organization as just an “Asian gang” or call the same gang “savages” and “commies,” feel lazy, obnoxious at times, and very much like a ’90s action movie in the worst possible way.
These celebrity appearances attempt to improve an otherwise predictable and dreary story about Baker’s gang rising to the top of the organized crime empire, but they don’t. Instead, they make the buggy and repetitive gameplay, where you often hear them in cutscenes before and after missions, all the more excruciating to play through. In the single player roguelite campaign, your goal is to take over more and more territory across Rockay City, attacking rivals’ territory, defending your own and completing robbery missions to get money, drugs, jewelry and more. But routine gameplay, bugs and a lack of balance make this impossible.
After selecting a crew of gang members, some of whom are the same models with color-changed clothing, you begin a mission. Your goal could be to rob a bank, warehouse, armored vehicle or mall – you’re always taking someone’s goods or money. The missions lead you to believe that Crime Boss requires a healthy dose of immersive sim stealth and action, but none of its systems support that. Sometimes I can waltz right into a place, grab what I need, and escape in just a minute in my van. Sometimes I’m prodded into delving into the game’s rudimentary stealth systems, but then I’m immediately scolded for it by Nasara, the man in the ear. In any case, most missions end with either a ridiculously quick and easy escape or a long and unfair firefight. Crime Boss’ Grand Theft Auto-style heat system brings swarms of cops, SWAT members and more to bring me down, and at times it felt like they were made of cardboard — at times steel. When I failed, I rarely felt that I could do something better next time to improve my chances of survival; it just felt like the game had let me down.
When I wasn’t robbing banks and armored vehicles, I was attacking or defending the precinct from rival gangs. This is where the worst bug popped up almost every time, but not before the game’s “soldiers” system rendered an already flawed task impossible. To defend and attack turfs you need money to cover the costs and soldiers to lower the risk from high to medium or low. Each new day in the campaign, which brings more money to my organization, I was attacked by more gangs in different territories than I had soldiers and money to defend, and I automatically lost my turf as a result. But even when I had the soldiers and money to defend my turf, a recurring bug made these missions impossible to complete. In order to defend your turf, you must defeat a certain number of enemy soldiers and sometimes their captains. But the enemies were invisible every time I loaded into one of these missions. All I could see were their guns hovering in the air. So I almost always lost those turf battles.
If you lose enough terrain, you won’t make the money you need to complete missions, and as a result of that one constant blunder, the entire run is ruined, like a set of dominoes predestined to fall. And annoyingly, at the end of a run, a cheesy cutscene of Sheriff Norris breaking the fourth wall and asking me what I did wrong in that run plays. I could see this as a cute meta-addition to the game, but when failure rarely feels like my fault, it’s especially cruel to hear Norris ask those questions.
Various other bugs added to the experience. Certain tasks require you to pay a set amount, usually $40,000 or more, which is a lot when you might only have $150,000 to spare. After paying, the cutscene would repeat and the game would ask me to pay again. If I declined, I was booted out of the cutscene conversation and back to the beginning. Sometimes pausing a scene would interrupt the cinematics but not the audio, ruining sync for the rest of the duration. Menus froze, forcing me to go back to the main menu, and captions were often incorrect. After doing a multiplayer mission, almost every time I launch the game, the game asks me if I want to join my previous session, except I can’t because that session was hours or even a day ago.
Even when my experience wasn’t plagued by bugs, I found myself having to play through repetitive, excruciatingly boring missions with unremarkable gunplay, uninspired stealth, and lackluster action. Strange interstitial missions try to break this monotony, like one where I lived my gang member’s Vietnam War member’s nightmare, but they fail just like the main missions. The game tries to shake things up in a few other ways, but every time it tries to stray off the path, it’s reminded that the core of Crime Boss – its systems, gameplay, and characters – don’t work. And as a result, everything else collapses.
Crime Boss: Rockay City proves that star power isn’t everything. In fact, it’s a reminder that celebrity cast won’t do anything for a game if there’s nothing interesting or fun to support it. When run-ending bugs crop up, Crime Boss sucks, but even if I complete a mission flawlessly, I’m witnessing a painfully boring take on organized crime. At its best, Crime Boss works – I can shoot guns at enemies, empty bank vaults and warehouses for loot, watch cutscenes with recognizable faces and voices, and grow my empire – but it never captures my attention in any meaningful or memorable way. Instead, it pushes me further and further away, leaving me with no desire to ever return to Rockay City.
