RoboCop Review. Disappointing.

[AnOldMan]

DISAPPOINTING!!!!

I'm sure I'm one of the first to play this through on it's most difficult setting (Extreme). To give you an idea of how I did, the missions are rated, 'A' being the highest you can achieve, from what I can tell. I got 'A' on all but one mission.

I enjoyed the game, its mechanics, its story, its graphics, etc. But I didn't enjoy how hard it was to gain XP for ability enhancements. And then, after finally building a decent RoboCop, that could make it through the story, I discovered YOU CANNOT TAKE YOUR XP WITH YOU! You can't use your now bad-ass build on a 2nd play through of the game. YOU RESTART AT ZERO!!! This is unforgivable. No highly acclaimed game since 2005 has made that mistake.

More annoyingly is how the game tries to force your decision making. I played through like a normal law-biding citizen or cop might. Uphold the law, issue warnings where more appropriate than citations. The game totally screwed me on XP for that. And nearly all the dialog options make a show of wanting you to condemn OCP and capitalism. If you don't, no matter how neutral your choices, the game makes you out to be a capitalist, OCP guard-dog, only out to screw the every-man, and rewards you with little to no XP for your interactions. I get the movies pushed that view, but even in the movies, Robocop was portrayed as more or less neutral, concerned only with upholding the law. It would have been nice if the game had adhered to that.

And for those, like myself, who pre-ordered, and got the extra weapon (OCP's shotgun) and cosmetics (Blue and Battle Damaged Robocop skins), there's a bit of an in-game frustration there, too. You cannot change your character skins in-game. You have to do that from the Main Menu. The shotgun? Almost totally useless, outside of the first one or two levels.

This game is a One-And-Done kind of a game. Great for reliving the nostalgia of the 1987 RoboCop movie, and its sequals, but not good for replay value.

[Lardo]

Originally posted by ksanoldman:

I'm not confused. I understand it's a trope. But it is also an undeniable fact that RoboCop, in the movies, would never have just let her go. He would have arrested her.

That's probably true, but the whole point of the movie is that Robocop was still a person capable of changing, not just a bunch of directives. That's the direction the game took, you can disapprove if you like, but I think this was pretty well argued throughout the game that Robocop doesn't have to be OCP's tool. He still can be, though, and you still can make him a ticket dispensing, intruder arresting machine, if you want.

[AnOldMan]

Originally posted by recursor:

First off, don't take any of this as saying that a New Game+ and difficulty above Extreme wouldn't be welcome.

Originally posted by ksanoldman:

By the mission you described, I had my Vitality maxed, and all but psychology were AT LEAST at lvl 3. Yes, I collected items. Yes I did side quests. The problem is, if you pay attention, how many side objectives pay out XP. You get more for public trust selections, than you do from upholding the law selections. This forces you to choose to do things such as let criminals go, hack OCP data illegally, and buy-in to the "OCP is Evil" propaganda in your dialog options, unless you're OK getting lesser amounts of XP.

I think you may have missed some things, as you have some of that exactly backwards. For the most part you do gain public trust for issuing warnings. But you actually get a direct XP bonus for upholding the law. Keep an eye on the XP display on the upper right and watch for the +25.

Public trust is mainly for influencing the election, but it ends up being unnecessary. You can still decide the fate of the election by going for every single ticket, then publicly supporting the candidate that you want to lose at the Expo.

The area where there's a choice is the bank, as you won't get the favorable ending for Samantha if you turn her in there and can't recover from that without an investment in Psychology. Letting her go does lose out on the 400 XP bank intruder objective. Hers is the only ending where you need to make that sort of choice.

As to whether letting her go would be in character for Robocop, there probably is a reason that the preceding secret that you can find is documentation that the bank has seized Alex Murphy's property. If you view yourself as human, this is evidence that OCP and their bank are committing injustices that the police can't hold them accountable for.

If you're looking to maximize XP, you should pay attention to the fact that every kill that Anne Lewis or OCP steals from Robocop is 5/6 XP lost. Then aim for getting all of the kills in the news station/slaughterhouse and scores of ~30 and ~80 on the efficiency challenges. That and nabbing deduction early makes much more of a difference.

I was curious about some of this myself, and was able to test it out and max out the 7 combat-impacting skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxEI0MdJ3BI

As an experiment, I played a round where I catered to Samantha. I gave in to her every demand. She was supposedly much happier and more trusting of me. The endings for her are totally backwards.

When you uphold the law strictly, and basically treat her like the enemy, she ends up leaving the news station to take up a job as a talk-show hostess.

But when you cater to her, she dies as part of some terrorist organization.

So basically, you aren't looking to cultivate a favorable opinion with her throughout the game, which I'm OK with, but it's a bit weird, seeing as every other character gets the standard Good Rep = Good End setup.

[recursor]

Originally posted by ksanoldman:

When you uphold the law strictly, and basically treat her like the enemy, she ends up leaving the news station to take up a job as a talk-show hostess.

But when you cater to her, she dies as part of some terrorist organization.

I'm not going to blame anyone for memory holing Robocop 3, but one of her endings is a reference to that. They specifically mention "Bertha", which is CCH Pounder's character. So Samantha either gives up any hunt for the truth and becomes a puff piece journalist, or disappears to go underground with the resistance seen in Robocop 3. The news station describes them as terrorists, which is in line with how they color things in that later film, but that's not an accurate description for the group.

While I wouldn't say that it's a 'bad' ending for the character, I can see having all roads lead to Robocop 3 rubbing some the wrong way.

[Lardo]

Originally posted by ksanoldman:

When you uphold the law strictly, and basically treat her like the enemy, she ends up leaving the news station to take up a job as a talk-show hostess.

But when you cater to her, she dies as part of some terrorist organization.

The bad ending is bad because Samantha becoming a talk-show hostess symbolizes selling out, giving up and becoming a talking head for the propaganda machine. As for the good ending, I didn't see her die, I saw her hack into a news broadcast, which means she continues fighting against the propaganda.

[NuclearSnail]

Sounds like you didn't serve the public trust. There's a balance between upholding the law, and serving the public trust. It's trickier than you clearly thought, and so rather than learning how to do it better, you just got offended and gave it a low review.