HomeReviewsCrime Boss: Rockay City
Crime Boss: Rockay City review: a baffling and incoherent PaydaylikePlease, let’s end 90s nostalgia now
Please, let’s end 90s nostalgia now
A few hours later, after numerous short cutscenes in which Michael Rooker has to shout nonsensical American Football metaphors every so often, to justify the fact that his character is called Touchdown, and Michael Madsen growls about “candy” in a hard-living 65-year-old’s voice coming out of an uncanny-vallyy 35-year-old’s face, I text him an update: “It’s also like that tweet that goes ‘Bames Nond’s having a stronk, call a bondulance’.”
Watch on YouTube
I mean, also what it’s like is a worsePayday- and consideringPayday 2is ten years old this year, that’s sort of an achievement in itself. Given that gap, you can see why a Payday replacement sounds like a mighty idea: co-op PvE is having a big comeback, and Payday has clear goals (steal stuff) but emergent shenanigans (where am the stuff to steal? Oh no, the cops! etc.) in a compact map. It makes for a good time! And this would theoretically be the case with Crime Boss too. If you’ve played any Payday, or even watched a let’s play, you’ll recognise a lot of what goes on here.
What you mostly do in the game is crime, delivered in standalone, instanced nuggets. Rob a bank, rob an armoured truck, rob a jewellery store, rob a warehouse full of drugs, do a burglary (that’s when you rob something at night!). You do this in squads of four, with each character having different skills, and the aim is to get away with as much loot as possible - with a bare minimum being set for you to win the level. In the course of this you’ll have the opportunity to be stealthy, ziptie civillians, crack safes with a drill that takes fucking ages, and have extended shoot outs with escalatingly tough squads of police (regular guys will stand still while you walk up to and shoot them; SWAT teams will abruptly dodge roll like members of the Cats ensemble).
These crimes are delivered in three different contexts. First is Crime Time, which is your quickplay mode for when you want to jump in and do some heisting. There’s a map of Rockay City where burglaries and robberies pop up every few seconds, but you can also take on a contract, which cost money to do but have greater returns. Some of the more complex of these have to be unlocked in Baker’s Battle, and if you want squad mates beyond rubbish generic ones then these are unlocked in Urban Legends.
Baker’s Battle is the single player mode where you play as Baker (a distressingly throaty Madsen) trying to take over the titular Floridian party town. This involves looking at a map of the city divided into territories, and taking daily actions to earn money - which will be one of yer heist levels - or take territory from a rival gang leader - which will be an instanced shoot out that may or may not culminate in a bullet-sponge boss. In between these you will be treated to short cutscenes where the much-trailed actors rattle off a melange of crime words like “pussies” and “fuck yeah”, before going back to your map and planning more actions. There are seeds of good ideas here. For example, you end up with different things in a stash, which you can sell when the market for them is up to get a cash injection. You can also die, at which point you have to start the campaign again, but with buffs you’ve earned like extra starting cash, more hired goons, higher personal health, and so on.
The main advantage to playing in co-op is that at least you won’t lose specifically because of the AI. Taking hostages doesn’t seem to actually do anything in the event the cops show up, and I even found the impact of different crim’s skills to be pretty negligible, but if you’re playing with bots then it’s odds on that the fuckers won’t even pick up any of the loot, and you have to throw bags at them like you’re loading up a pack donkey. Even then there’s a chance that one will, e.g., run across to the starting spawn area of the level rather than the escape van, or just, sort, of stand in front of a machine gun going “ow”. There are radio barks from your fixer Nasara during missions, but they are all either too late, too early, or just have no relation to what is happening in the game. Also, a lot of the time the NPCs don’t actually load in for about 5 seconds, so it looks like a load of ghosts are shooting at each other. That’s not an AI thing, but it is pretty funny.
And of course they are! This isn’t their wheelhouse! All you need for a game like this is someone who can do a decently gruff “I’m a big bad wrong ‘un, I am” voice, and then you’d save money and get more done on the actual game bit of your game. It’s a no brainer, surely? I’m not going to begrudge the Dannys, bothGloverand Trejo, a pension. I just cannot fathom the decisions that went into making Crime Boss: Rockay City.Payday 3is slated to be out later this year.
