Crime Boss: Rockay City was one of the bigger surprises to come out of The Game Awards last year: a brand new video game property from a relatively unknown studio, featuring a star-studded cast of relatively well-known actors – with a hard release date just a few months away, no less! The slick, colorful reveal trailer definitely turned some heads, but it also raised some eyebrows, since it focused more on who is in the game rather than what you’ll actually be doing.
After an hour and a half of hands-on time with Crime Boss: Rockay City, I now have a much clearer idea of what it actually is, but I also came away even more skeptical that it can actually achieve what it’s setting out to do.
Crime Boss is fundamentally a first-person shooter, but it aspires to be an ‘organized crime game,’ meaning stealth, strategy, and careful preparation will likely yield more favorable results than going in guns blazing. The obvious comparison to make is to Payday, the co-op bank heist series, but my time with it felt more like Left 4 Dead.
Three modes will be included at launch. There’s Baker’s Battle, the single-player campaign where players take control of Michael Madsen’s character Travis Baker and help him become the titular crime boss of the eponymous Rockay City. There’s also Crime Time, which consists of quick heists that can be played alone or cooperatively. Those earn you quick cash to unlock new crew members, gear, or contracts.
The mode I previewed, Urban Legends, is the happy medium of the two. Much like Left 4 Dead, these six “mini-campaigns” consist of several unique missions interspersed with cutscenes to tell a loose story. Up to four players can play cooperatively, with bots available to pick up the slack. Unlike Left 4 Dead’s lean arcade-like roster, Rockay City has players picking their character from a sizable rogues’ gallery of royalty-free goons, henchmen, crooks, ne’er-do-wells, rogues, and so on. In the other modes, these crew members all have to be unlocked with money earned on previous jobs, but in Urban Legends, each job has a specific set of characters to choose from.
The diverse group of characters is fun, aesthetically, but the variety might be to the gameplay’s detriment. Each character has a list of distinct traits that presumably have some impact on gameplay. For example, Booth is “Resilient” and “Trained,” whereas Big Joey is “Vigorous” but also “Deficient.” Meanwhile, Mr. X is “Devoted, Valiant, Rock Solid, Trained, Rock Solid, and Stout,” but he’s also “Tearful” and a “Bleeder.” Did you get all that? Okay, now imagine you’re parsing that information while your three squadmates are waiting for you to ready up so they can go steal cocaine and shoot people, already.
Each character also has a loadout consisting of two weapons and a special item. There’s something extremely funny to me about a cold-blooded hitman rolling up to a job in his black sharkskin suit, strapped with a Steyr AUG and a gold-plated Desert Eagle, but also carrying eight (8) small rocks which he can throw as distractions. Did he… bring them from home, or pick them up outside? Meanwhile, other characters seem woefully unprepared, only packing a sidearm and a melee weapon. Would you rather bring a knife to a gunfight, or perhaps a bat?
After all the emphasis on this being a game about stealth and strategy and not going in guns blazing, the first mission we played had us shooting up a rival gang’s party to send a message to its ringleader, Hielo, played by Vanilla Ice. It’s possible this mission could’ve been handled stealthily with lethal precision, that wasn’t the case for our squad of three first-time players and a PR guy who’d probably played the mission twenty times that day. It devolved into a hectic firefight in a matter of seconds.
I’m not sure if guns were underpowered or if the enemies were just bullet sponges, but it felt like I had to unload almost an entire clip into a low-level goon to put him down. We eventually went up against a higher ranking member of the gang, who had the beefy health bar of a boss, but behaved like a regular enemy, so it was a little comical to see four of us pumping bullets into him while he crouched in a corner. A few missions later, I picked a shotgun loadout, which was able to one-shot most enemies, including some of the more heavily armored ones, so I’m inclined to think there are some balancing issues. That, or Vanilla Ice’s henchmen are high on PCP.
Unsurprisingly, Crime Boss has some Grand Theft Auto DNA, including a star-based wanted level. Doing enough crime stuff will attract the attention of the Rockay City police force, and since doing crime is the main objective, they make regular appearances. After killing the rival gang’s senior bullet sponge, the cops arrived and our final objective was to make it to the getaway van. A couple of us got downed while fumbling to get to the van, but it was still considered a successful mission, so we moved on to the next one.
This was the running theme of my time playing; comical ineptitude from a squad of first-time players somehow resulting in a win state, repeat. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I’m not sure what you call failing at something once, classifying it as a success, and moving on, having learned nothing from your mistakes. We restarted two missions because the game crashed, and replayed the last one because we actually failed it completely. By which I mean I grossly underestimated the volatility and blast radius of a gas can, and accidentally blew up the whole squad by shooting it.
Other missions had more varied objectives, and a wider margin of opportunity to take different approaches. Several had us entering restricted areas to steal drugs, and in some cases the optional objective was to remain undetected, so it’s possible to do some careful reconnaissance, take down enemies silently, and get out with minimal fuss, but it takes more practice than I was able to get. It doesn’t help that all enemies are immediately on high alert the second one of them spots you.
A few missions are designed to go sideways. On the character select screen, one mission had a suspiciously simple objective of completing a drug deal, but the drug deal goes bad no matter what the players do, and the mission is basically run-and-gun from the start. In several missions, the getaway van blows up the second you reach it, and you’re instructed to find another exfiltration point while being shot at by police helicopters and rival gang members. What’s funny is that the same van gets reused. Seeing your van in one piece after it blew up in your face is a huge relief, but then it gets blown up again, which is just heartbreaking. That van was just days from retirement.
Based on the marketing alone, there’s an argument to be made that the gameplay of Crime Boss: Rockay City isn’t its main selling point so much as its cast is. Michael Madsen, Michael Rooker, Danny Glover, Danny Trejo, Kim Basinger, Chuck Norris and Rob “Vanilla Ice” Van Winkle might not be A-listers these days, but they’re definitely household names. Crime Boss by no means takes itself too seriously, and it’s clearly an homage to over-the-top action movies of the 80s and 90s. However, in Urban Legends, the cutscenes are so detached from the gameplay it feels less like renting one action movie from Blockbuster, and more like flipping between two movies airing simultaneously on different cable networks in the mid-90s.
Sadly, the way the celebrity cast feels most closely connected to the game is they also sound like their main objective is to make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time and GTFO. This is some of the worst voice acting I’ve heard in a game in recent memory. Chuck Norris literally sounds like he’s reading his lines out loud for the first time, not particularly sure of or remotely interested in his motivation. After losing, he’ll kneel over your corpse and ponder “Why did I beat you this time?” with the same energy as David Lynch reading a weather report.
Basinger, Glover, and Rooker’s characters have a similar air of bewilderment, but are at least trying. Rooker’s character regularly bursts into maniacal laughter mid-statement, which makes it sound like he really just read these lines for the first time, but is also genuinely cracking up at the idea of calling someone a “butthole gerbil.” Vanilla Ice’s character speaks in rhyme, but with the cadence of someone talking normally, kind of like Roadblock in the original G.I. Joe cartoon.