This outdoors area of a crime scene looks really nice:
I took a bad screenshot here, but Lewis does not look as good as RoboCop. She is true to what Nancy Allen looked like in the movie, but her character model here has this ... I don't know, low-res schmear to her. I can't recall a game where the main character looks so much more detailed than anyone else.
RoboCop is a tough one to turn into a video game. He's meant to be an invincible hulking monster, and they portray that fairly well. He regains health automatically up to a certain point, there's up to 3 health packs you can carry. It seems like he has his standard pistol and then can pick up one of the guns that the bad guys leave when they die.
The first main antagonist we see is simply written as an unfunny Joker, as in The Joker from Batman. I think the guy takes over a television station to beg for a job from some other bad guy that moved into town? It's so stock and it's sad. Clarence Boddicker is one of the great antagonists in action films. Boddicker looked, sounded and acted different from any movie villain I can think of at the time. Boddicker and Hans Gruber are the 1980s GOATs in that respect. In this game, the writing - at least at the beginning - for our bad guy is so stock and so bad and so uninteresting.
Is it fun to shoot the crooks in the game? Shooting them in the different limbs is fun. Blowing their heads off and seeing gibs is nice. But tactics at the start aren't otherwise great. They have grenades and you have no defense for them, so I did a lot of "shoot, oh - a grenade, better run - ok it exploded, come back and shoot" loops. So I don't know. They did have Peter Weller voice RoboCop. There is at least one scene in the beginning where RoboCop is looking into a reflective surface and sees himself as Murphy, something that I don't think Verhoeven resolved in the first film. I have no memory of it being addressed at all in the second or third film.
(An aside: I could be totally wrong. I have not seen RoboCop 2 or 3 in forever. My memory is that the first one hints that Murphy's family is still out there and he has flashbacks about the guy he was, and you wonder what is wife is thinking about the horrible way her husband "died" and does she know that they resurrected his corpse for this project? Again - someone tell me if I am wrong - but I don't think any of that was ever picked up by the later films.)
I keep saying I don't know, but it's true, I don't know what to think about the game. I don't trust the story building here because of how unimaginatively poor the mohawked punk bad guy is. If a guy is famous for having one weapon - RoboCop, Luke Skywalker, Tron, Marvin Heemeyer - it comes off as awkward to me to then force multiple weapons upon them. But you kind of have to have more weapons because it is a video game. It is also a little odd that this is a first person shooter, with RoboCop depicted in cut scenes.
I really do not know what to make of this game. It's not bad but it's not great. They care enough in some parts and were able to let things skate in others.
The creators do have an opportunity to convince me to buy some DLC if and only if they price it at a dollar.
