HomeFeaturesCrime Boss: Rockay City
Crime Boss: Rockay City’s least important mode has some aggressively okay co-op heistingDoes it rock, is it rocky, or is it plain rockay?
Does it rock, is it rocky, or is it plain rockay?
The game has three modes: Baker’s Battle, Crime Time, and Urban Legends. I played roughly two hours of Urban Legends – the least important of the bunch, it turns out. Baker’s Battle is the bulk of the game and singleplayer only, while Crime Time is either a singleplayer or co-op blast through missions that’ll earn you money to spend in Baker’s Battle, I think? Bear with me here, as I am working from snippets of B-Roll, some printed out slides, and an eight-minute video presentation.
CRIME BOSS: ROCKAY CITY | ANNOUNCE TRAILER | DO IT FOR THE CREWWatch on YouTube
CRIME BOSS: ROCKAY CITY | ANNOUNCE TRAILER | DO IT FOR THE CREW
In Baker’s Battle, you can pick and choose the territories you want to fight over. I couldn’t do that in the mode I played. Yes, I am bitter about it.
When you party up with mates, you get to select a character first. They have excellent names that all sound like they belong to Jason Statham characters, like Bricks and Yakult and Shelf (okay, I made up Yakult and Shelf, but you get it)". Most look like they’ve modeled themselves on the 3rd Street Saints. They all have a set number of lives, so if they die multiple times they’ll be out of action for a while, and each comes equipped with a primary and secondary weapon, as well as a slot for a grenade or a brick or a flashbang to prevent death from happening. I opted for the brick, because it emanated strong immersive sim energy.
Crime Boss isn’t an immersive sim. The game, or the game mode I played, seemed more akin to, say, Payday’s routine heisting. Crime here isn’t so much a puzzle to be solved through elaborate means, but more of a multi-step process pulled from a bucket of activities, which are then popped together in different combinations; a Kray Twins Lego set, if you will. For instance, a standout mission involved getting onto a cruise ship, then stuffing cocaine dotted around the ship into bags, and making off with the booty unscathed. Others were simplified variants. Get into a warehouse, stuff jewels into bags, then get back to the van. One saw us kill a gang leader, then run back to the van. The van is a staple: crime doesn’t happen if you don’t chuck bags into a van.
Most missions started off with a stealthy option, letting you infiltrate the area unseen. Just don’t expect there to be a plethora of routes and options. For the most part, there’s only ever one or two ways of reaching your objective and it’s packed with guards. Go even slightly off track and a grey screen will tell you to turn back.
AGrand Theft Auto-style star rating is symbolic of the game’s obsession with chaos, as it fills when you fell police officers, and fills even more when you fell entire SWAT teams. There’s a thrill to be had in chopping down waves of enemies in a sort of frenzied plate spin as you wait for a safe to crack, or urge your co-op pals to hurry up with their drug swiping. But as the mini-campaigns motor on, janky stealth and near constant chaos begins to meld into “meh”.
And it’s not like Crime Boss nails the fundamentals, either. Shooting is aggressively fine, with AI that’s about as intelligent as a swarm of krill. If you go down, chances are you’ve been outnumbered, not outsmarted. It may be different in the other modes, but playable characters aren’t all that different either, really. Some just have more powerful guns than others or more lives to expend, which gives your old Bricks and Yakult about as much personality as the guns they wield.
Chucking bags of cash into the back of a van never got old, though.
Progression also isn’t central to the mode I played, so I couldn’t get a sense of whether the cash we made off with could be spent on anything. I think I could’ve bought some new guns? Maybe some new characters with more lives and stronger guns?
