Based on the 90s crime movies, explore the unlawful underworld and become the Kingpin in Crime Boss: Rockay City. Starring some of Hollywood’s all-stars.
How often do you play a video game that’s heavily stacked with Hollywood’s most iconic superstars? Probably not too often, right? Well, here’s Crime Boss: Rockay City, which will certainly give you that. As well as the highs and lows of the criminal underworld in the cooperative first-person shooter.
It was initially released on March 28, 2023, on PC, and you could only purchase the game from the Epic Game Store. After some speculation of when it’ll become available on next-gen consoles, it was unsurprising to see it arrive right now, as of June 15, 2023, but only as a digital copy. Although, if you want to purchase it physically, you’ll have to wait until September 5, 2023.
Crime Boss: Rockay City was developed by Ingame Studios and published by 505 Games – who are known to publish major titles like Sniper Elite III, Control, Dead by Daylight, and the PC version of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Crime Boss: Rockay City has three main game modes: Baker’s Battle, Crime Time, and Urban Legends – all of which consist of single and multiplayer action.
Crime Boss: Rockay City’s immersive gameplay is focused on players accepting countless missions with up to four criminals. You would have to pick one of four characters, and the rest are AI controlled. You can switch between characters with down directional during missions if there are certain jobs other characters can do. Everyone is in charge, so the character you’re in control of, you can still press the down directional and give orders to your crew members to follow or stand by you.
Just like in real-life heists, Crime Boss: Rockay City encourages you to assemble fine crews of established criminals and strategise your approaches to some of the most dangerous heists the game has to offer. The game has many characters for you to choose from, and each of them has detailed information and stats; therefore, if you want the greatest chances of success in your missions, you must hire the best in the business.
While doing the objectives and collecting assets, you’re obviously going to stumble across some obstacles. One of them you should focus a lot on is the suspicion strikes. Suspicion strikes are three exclamation marked icons that are located at the top right of your HUD. And if you’re doing something suspicious, you’ll get a strike.
If you get a second strike, the authorities will be more cautious. But if you get all three strikes, your cover is blown, the authorities will be alerted, and you’ll have to prepare for a serious gunfight. The likes of stealth and disabling all of the cameras from the control room help to avoid these strikes.
And speaking of assets in Crime Boss: Rockay City, you need to hold the square button to gather sufficient amounts and place them in your bags. By the way, if the assets are in a cash register, boxes and so on, you can hold R3 to get you through the barriers, or sometimes just shooting them works. But the assets you’ve collected must go somewhere, right?
This is where your getaway van comes in, and all you have to do is hold L1 to throw the bags in the vehicle. After doing so, as long as you’ve completed all the objectives, simply hold square at either the driver or passenger seat of the vehicle, and the mission is complete.
Baker’s Battle is the game’s intriguing 1990s crime movie resembling story mode with rogue-like elements, where you’re taking on the role of Travis Baker – starring veteran actor Michael Madsen, who aims to become Rockay City’s new Kingpin after the last guy died in tragic circumstances.
This is no easy feat because, in order to take control of the city, you have to hire and manage crew members, win turf wars, and make key decisions that ultimately impact the story’s outcome. And at the same time, having to constantly watch over your shoulder as you’re having to deal with gang bosses such as Dollar Dragon (Danny Trejo), Heilo (Vanilla Ice), and on top of that, the city’s Sheriff (Chuck Norris), who’s constantly eyeballing your every move.
It’s pretty rewarding as you level up in Crime Boss: Rockay City, earn money and unlock unique characters and higher profile heists. Furthermore, if Travis reaches his demise, the campaign is over, and you have to start over. This similarly goes for your crew members – if a member dies, they’re gone forever. That sounds like one heck of a ride.
Crime Time is the quick-play multiplayer mode where you’re invited to undergo a catalogue of crime jobs and you have a certain time to accept them before they disappear. But not to worry, other jobs emerge from other areas of the city. Whether it’s to rob an armoured truck, steal from gangsters or rob a jewellery store – you and your crew will always endure a rush of adrenaline.
In Crime Boss: Rockay City, you either go solo, with a friend and/or with the AI. Each mission is rated between low and high risk, and it’s up to you where you want to take your ball and run. You could play safe and take on the low risk, but you must understand that the higher the risk, the higher the reward. There are catches involved, such as how much revives you are allowed in the mission. Also, there are contracts of big heists you can either purchase or unlock by completing other objectives, but after completing them, you’ll receive bigger rewards.
Urban Legends are six mini campaigns that can be played as long as you wish. But it’s not like you can freely choose which of the six to play first. Each mini campaign consists of cutscenes and three missions that must be completed in order to move on to the next one. You’ll be rated based on your performance for each mission. However, if you’re unsatisfied with your score, you can replay a mission to right your wrongs. Again, you can go solo, with friends or with the AI.
Crime Boss: Rockay City gives you the experience of an outlaw and some of its mechanics accurately represent some of the duties while on jobs, and here are a few examples of this. The first one, and it’s what I like particularly, is asserting your dominance on civilians and security guards by drawing out your weapon and intimidating them with the crowd control function by pressing the left directional button.
Followed by the square button to zip-tie them so that they won’t have anywhere else to go. Albeit, if you don’t guard your hostages, they’ll try to escape. Plus, you can keep a hostage as leverage by holding the square button to command them to follow you. Be careful not to cause casualties to your hostages, let alone any civilian, because it affects your rating. Secondly, the lock picking mechanic where you have to play a straightforward mini-game to pass through entrances or safes with the square button, then you rotate the right analog and press the R2 trigger to bind them.
And thirdly – installing buzzsaws on armoured trucks or drills to vaults to be able to break through them to get the assets. You’ll have to hold square to place the buzzsaw or drill on the back or side of an armoured truck. And because this process occasionally comes with threats trying to stop you and your crew, it’s usually best to increase the speed of both tools.
To do that, you’ll have to make sure to hold square and release when you manage to land the marker in the green zone. But if the marker lands in the red zone, the buzzsaw or drill will overheat, switches off, and you’ll have to switch it back on by repeating the first step.
Crime Boss: Rockay City’s mechanics seemed far too familiar as they strongly resemble Payday 2. You probably can’t pinpoint many gameplay differences between the two, and it’s understandable why many would call it a “clone” or something else on the lines. You can somewhat get away with heavily borrowing mechanics from other titles, as long as there are ounces of originality to at least attain some of its own identity. Unfortunately, this game couldn’t pull that off.
The weaponry is decent in Crime Boss: Rockay City, and the game has some pretty attractive weapon designs. But you’re given very limited resources, and this is quite problematic – especially in bigger and longer jobs. Sometimes, you have to tough it out against threats with much tougher arsenals. And it’s not like you can obtain their weapons after finishing them off; you can only take their ammo to restock the ones you already have.
Which felt like a chore, but the situations were easier to handle after collecting enough money to purchase the more powerful and advanced firearms – which you’d inevitably have much more excitement shooting with. Plus, you can use melee weapons to take out cameras or eliminate threats.
The AI needs more work. There are no problems when it comes to tasks such as completing objectives and stealing loot. Plus, they obey every one of your commands – but it’s all fun and games until the relentless gangs or SWAT team storms in.
Sometimes, you have to babysit your crew members, especially with the lesser skilled crew members, because they don’t seem to know how to handle this kind of situation at times. You can spend a little money to promote your members to improve their health, abilities, equipment and so on, but the difference isn’t major.
This is just one of the crystal-clear shortcomings the AI has. Moreover, sometimes Crime Boss: Rockay City is a little buggy. Character selection in the lobby is occasionally stressful and a few times, I couldn’t end the day until I went to the main menu and went back to the story.
The gameplay isn’t spectacular, and it’s undeniably in need of changes and improvements, but this is one of those games that deserves a little time to grow on some of you to appreciate and actually enjoy it. Plus, you’re much better off playing with humans. This makes sense, seeing as this is a cooperative based game, and solely relying on the flawed AI will only take you so far. Some of the missions are a little repetitive – but if you’re not the pedantic type, you can easily let this slide.
You can’t deny Ingame Studios’ ambition of assembling a mouthwatering dream team lineup. When you hear the likes of Chuck Norris, Danny Trejo and Danny Glover, and you realise they’re all in a project, it’s not uncommon to bank on nothing but greatness. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with Crime Boss: Rockay City and the execution could’ve been better to match their vision – however, it’s very far from something I would try telling other people to avoid.
Despite the PC’s almost unanimously panned version, I still wanted to give Crime Boss: Rockay City a chance, and I’m glad that I did. At first, I was a little worried that my opinions would mirror the array of negative reviews – some of which you can’t really argue with because the game still needs more work done.
Notwithstanding some of the glaring weaknesses, Crime Boss: Rockay City has praiseworthy content, thoroughly had a good time playing, and it was better than anticipated. Lastly, Crime Boss: Rockay City will have more to come with DLCs throughout the year. And with Payday 3 arriving in September – one would hope that the updates bring a lot more to the table with different sets of missions, weapons, characters, improvements and more to keep their audience.
