Crime boss: Rockay Citya game that was announced last year with a trailer that looked like the world’s most inappropriate April Fool’s joke (it was December), it’s out! You may not know this because no one talks about it.
When a game is good, people talk about it. If a game is bad, people talk about it. If a game is bad in a way that makes it interesting, it’s talked about, and if a game is bad in a way that’s incredibly funny, then it’s talked about again. Maybe it’s a 1000-word impression piece Kotaku.commaybe it’s a few tweets maybe it’s a video series about glitches and glitchesthese are all ways you — or anyone, anyone — can talk about a video game.
This is important because talking about a video game is the only way we as a culture keep a game alive. I don’t want to get it either in At The post – which doesn’t have the bandwidth for it – but discs on a shelf are just lumps of plastic, and code on a hard drive is just 1s and 0s lying around. It’s us experience them to build memories/opinions about them and then share them with other people who make video games what they are. what is all thiswhat I write, what you read, the communities you form and participate in, if not just a great way for us to share our thoughts on video games?
Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that there’s room and latitude to talk, love, or hate almost every video game on the planet. Except Crime boss: Rockay City. Which nobody (except me here in great distress) is talking about, even though it’s been out for almost a month now. And now I know why.
I “played” this in that you can sit down and experience this game. And I haven’t been able to verify it or even give my impressions of it, in the usual “hey look at this” kind of way. I was so disgusted with its packaging, so in awe of how it does absolutely everything wrong that it sets out to do, that I feel like I have to write this and put it on the site just for someone else to reassure me that any of this is going to happen actually happened.
Rockay City is a fever dream. It’s the outline of a video game inked with tormented ghosts from the 80’s and 90’s. It’s like a rogue powerpoint presentation for a blockchain game, only with sections that contain actual gameplay. Here’s the game’s launch trailer – it’s out, you can buy it and you can even play it – to show I’m not making it up:
Michael Madsen took the burden of 1000 lives to the recording studio for this and none of them performed well. Serial asshole Chuck Norris is so lifeless that a text-to-speech system from the 80s could have delivered his lines better. Kim Basinger and Danny Glover’s agents should be fired in the sun for this. And Vanilla Ice… well, Vanilla Ice is really great here, I can’t say anything bad about Vanilla Ice.
There’s something in there Rockay City in the most qualifying sense, since there are words in the English language that come after other words, but whether these form complete and coherent sentences is up for debate. There is also a storyline, as well as the key graphic and promo tweet for a Grand Theft Auto Online Mission has a plot.
There’s no vision here about “here’s some stuff that guys who got into the Johnny Depp trial and whose two favorite movies are might seem cool.” Reservoir Dogs And scarface“. There’s also no context or cohesion, although visually everything has the same generic crime-game sheen you’d expect from a clone of a clone of a GTA Clone on Xbox 360. Watch Rockay City is to be shaken round the heart of a Shipping containers full of Ed Hardy jeans and Steven Seagal movies.
How is it actually to play? See above. You sneak around a bit, shoot some guys – who are often just innocent people and who take one much of bullets – then you shoot a lot more, because Rockay City never know when to turn down the volume. It’s a level 99 crime boss mobile game with the violent aspirations (or lack of a moral compass) of a late ’90s PC shooter.
Rockay City had spent real money on it, paid for real Hollywood exposure. It was a crime game, it had guns, it spent enough marketing money that it kind of showed up in one Kotaku.com announcement postshould have meant it something To someone. Still, to our collective credit, we flatly dismissed this game. The game not only sucks, that too idea sucks from it. It’s a disaster on a conceptual level. Nobody talks about it, nobody plays it; The game is only available on PC but not on Steam, and its official subreddit has… 242 members.
I can not say it Rockay City is good. I can’t say it’s worse than I’ve already described (However, here’s the Metacritic page if you’re looking to broaden your horizons). I can’t say it’s so bad it’s good. I honestly don’t think traditional video game quantifiers work here. This isn’t a 2023 game release, it’s a black hole in the middle that sucks light and energy and flushes old actors into its emptiness.
