Robocop: Rogue City's surprising success proves there's still room in the business for mid-tier games with good licenses
Nacon has announced that Robocop: Rogue City, the future of law enforcement shooters, is its "best ever launch," racking up more than 435,000 players and 2.7 million game sessions in its first two weeks of release.
"RoboCop: Rogue City has exceeded our expectations, and achieved a genuine feat as far as Nacon is concerned," CEO Alan Falc said. "We are really proud to have been able to work with the studio Teyon on this game created by and for RoboCop die-hards. We would also like to thank MGM for the trust they placed in us throughout this collaboration, as well as all the players who have contributed to making this release such a great success."
The PC version of Robocop: Rogue City holds a 75 aggregate score on Metacritic, which seems about right. We scored it 65% in our review, praising its "fantastic shootouts" but knocking it for "dull narrative and bloated pacing," which is an issue for a game spun out of a movie that's a lot smarter than it might first appear: "Ultimately Rogue City doesn't rise above its B-game status in the way that Robocop transcended its B-movie origins."
Still, it's nice to see that a mid-tier shooter like Robocop: Rogue City can find success, especially when it's trying to muscle into an already-crowded field just a week ahead of the launch of the genre-dominating Modern Warfare 3. Nacon isn't Activision and so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but I'm glad that there's still room for so-called "double-A" games, and that smaller publishers can do well with them. Developer Teyon actually had similar luck with its previous game, Terminator: Resistance, another mid-budget licensed game that holds a "very positive" rating across more than 10,500 user reviews on Steam.
The big question now is whether the success of Robocop: Rogue City opens the door to more, in the form of an expansion or full sequel, or even just a New Game+ mode that some fans have been asking for. At the very least, Nacon's happiness with the game's sales would seem to make that outcome a real possibility.
Robocop: Rogue City is not part of Steam's Autumn Sale (it just came out a couple weeks ago, after all) but if you're waiting for a deal you can pick it up at a 33% discount on the Epic Games Store, thanks to those reusable coupons in Epic's Black Friday sale.