Crime Boss: Rockay City Review – The City That Sleeps

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. But the game itself is a mess. Unfortunately, the gameplay is disbalanced, unbalanced, boring, buggy and repetitive. While the cast of celebrities is captivating at first glance it’s dull and uninteresting. The crude, boring writing impedes the well-phoned performances by Vanilla Ice and Michael Rooker. The single-player roguelite campaign lacks any of the genre’s typical hooks, and bugs can prevent progress at critical points in a run. Multiplayer works, but the two cooperative modes offer up the same mindlessly dull rotation of missions you’ll play dozens of times throughout the campaign. All this adds up and creates a dull package which isn’t worth the effort. There are better experiences in other games.    

Crime Boss is, in all honesty, the star of the show. Kim Basinger, Danny Glover, Chuck Norris, and more lend their likeness and voice to these characters, but instead of feeling like the great 1980s or ‘90s action B-movies the game is clearly aiming to invoke, where the corniness and cheese are played intentionally, the performances feel hollow. Simply put, the writing in this game is terrible. Rooker’s Captain Touchdown and Madsen’s Travis Baker are the worst offenders, constantly barking lines like, “Who’s the losers? It’s true! Who’s the winners? We is,” and calling rival gang members “fruitcakes.” Other barks, like characters referring to the Khan criminal organization as just the “Asian gang” or calling that same gang “savages” and “commies” feels lazy, at times offensive, and very much like a ‘90s action movie in the worst way. 

These celebrity performances attempt to enhance an otherwise predictable and drab 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’ll hear them in cutscenes often before and after missions, all the more excruciating to play through. You will be attempting to control more territory in Rockay City by attacking and protecting your own turf. Also, you’ll need to complete robbery mission to acquire money, drugs, or jewelry. It’s impossible because of bugs and repetitive gameplay. 

Once you have selected a group of gang members (some of whom are similar models in color-swapped outfits), you can begin a mission. Your objective might be to rob a bank, a warehouse, an armed vehicle, or a shopping center – you’re always taking goods or money from someone. You might think that Crime Boss is a sim game that requires stealthy and action. However, the systems do not support this. Sometimes I’m able to just walk into an area, grab my belongings, and then get out of there in a flash. Other times, I’m nudged to engage with the game’s rudimentary stealth systems but then I’m immediately scolded by the man-in-my-ear, Nasara, for doing so. Most missions end in a short and unjustifiable firefight or an easy escape. Crime Boss’ Grand Theft Auto-style heat system brings in swarms of cops, SWAT members, and more to take me down and sometimes, it felt like they were made of cardboard – other times, steel. Even when I did fail, I didn’t feel like I was doing anything better to increase my chance of survival. It felt almost like I was losing the game. 

 

When I wasn’t robbing banks and armored vehicles, I attacked or defended turf from rival gangs. Here, the worst offending bug appeared nearly every time, but not before the game’s “soldier” system made an already buggy task feel impossible. In order to attack and defend turfs you will need funds and soldiers. This allows the risk to be reduced from being high to low or moderate to low. Each new day in the campaign, which brings more money to my organization, I’d be attacked by more gangs in different turf areas than I had soldiers and money to defend, and I always lost turf by default as a result. Even though I was able to afford the troops and funds necessary for my defense, this bug kept me from completing my missions. You must destroy a certain number of enemy soldiers, and occasionally their captains to defend your turf. However, the enemy soldiers would not be visible to me each time I entered one of these missions. Their weapons were all I could see floating through the air. These were turf wars that I nearly lost almost every time. 

If you lose enough turf, you won’t make the money you need to complete missions, and as a result of that one constant bug, the entire run is ruined, like a row of dominos predetermined to fall. A cheesy scene with Sheriff Norris plays at the end. He breaks down the fourth wall, and then asks what I have done wrong. Although I can see how this could be a fun meta-addition, it is particularly cruel to hear Norris asking me such harsh questions when my failures rarely feel like my fault. 

Additional bugs added to the frustration. You must pay an amount for certain tasks. This is usually $40,000, but you may only have $150,000. Once I paid, the game would prompt me again to pay. My refusal resulted in me being kicked from the cutscene discussion and sent back to square 1. Sometimes pausing a clip would stop the cinematics and not the audio. It could cause sync issues for the entire duration. I had to leave the main menu because my menus would freeze. The captions sometimes were incorrect. After doing one multiplayer mission, almost every time I’ve booted up the game since, the game asks me if I want to join my previous session, except I can’t because that session was hours ago, or even the day before. 

Even when bugs didn’t plague my experience, I was still left to play through repetitive, agonizingly boring missions with unremarkable gunplay, uninspired stealth, and lackluster action. Strange interstitial missions attempt to break up this monotony, like one where I lived through one of my gang member’s Vietnam War nightmares, but they flounder just as much as the main missions. The game attempts to shake things up in a few other ways, but every time it tries to veer from the path is a reminder that the core of Crime Boss – its systems, gameplay, and characters –  don’t work. Everything else falls apart as a consequence. 

Crime Boss: Rockay City is proof that star power isn’t everything. In fact, it’s a reminder that a celebrity cast does nothing for a game when it’s void of anything interesting or fun to support it. When run-ending bugs appear, Crime Boss is miserable, but even when I’m running a mission bug-free, I lay witness to a painfully dull take on organized crime. At its best, Crime Boss functions – I can shoot weapons 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 a meaningful or memorable way. I am pushed further away by it, and have no desire to return to Rockay City.  

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