Crime Boss: Rockay City Review

Welcome to my review of Crime Boss: Rockay City! This game was developed by INGAME STUDIOS and published by 505 Games (Miasma Chronicles, Death Stranding: Directors Cut).

If I were to tell you there is a game that is a First-Person Shooter and also a roguelike, you probably wouldn’t believe me. Well, you might do. The game was originally released on PC in March 2023 but was available exclusively on the Epic Games Store. Later in the year, the game launched onto consoles and is now on Steam.

Let’s get stuck into my review of the Steam version!

The Game

So, yeah. An FPS Roguelike. I genuinely questioned this mix of genre when I first heard about it, but it works.

This game has a star-studded lineup and we can expect to see the likes of Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Kim Basinger (Batman), Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead), Danny Trejo (Con Air), and more. However, for me, even with this brilliant lineup, the game got quite stale fairly quickly.

I’m not shitting on this game one bit. It is a good game. I just found I got bored of doing very similar missions over and over again. Even though they’re labelled as different tasks, I felt like I was doing the same thing.

Anyway, that’s the negative part out of the way. Now on to some good notes.

There are some really good features in this game. For example, you can choose your “soldier” before you go on a mission. For example, if you want to take Baker (Madsen) you can take him along or even play as him. If you do, and he survives, you get some major bonuses. If you wish to use some lower-tiered soldiers, you can. You can even play as one. Of course, you don’t get as good a bonus for mission completion.

More of the same…

There is a good selection of different missions, but as I mentioned above, even though these were labelled differently they felt the same. As some examples, there are assassinations, robberies, turf wars, and more to take part in.

The gunplay in the game is very good. Each weapon feels different and has different attributes such as stopping power and fire rate. Naturally, if you pick a pistol, this may have better accuracy than an assault rifle. But, it will inflict less damage.

However, I will add that during my time in Rockay City, I found that pistols will typically stop an enemy in their tracks with one shot to the head. Except for the enemy “captain” who essentially is a tougher troop from the enemy gang.

There is a wide variety of weapons to purchase and use, and you can also customise your and your soldier’s loadouts that you take on missions. However, during a turf war (defence or attack) you cannot choose a loadout at all, you are given a set “hero” and you can choose several soldiers to go with you. For example, you could only need 15 soldiers but can take 20 to ensure you win. Just choose wisely as later on you may need those soldiers and not have cash to buy more.

The graphics of the game are pretty decent and I found that it runs pretty well on my Steam Deck OLED too. Of course, it looks amazing on my PC (Core i7-14700K, RTX 4070 Super) and runs superbly at 3440×1440 ultrawide. The game supports 21:9 out of the box too, no tweaks or mods are needed.

The sound effects and music of the game are also of a good level of quality. The guns give a nice punch of bass, the voice acting is pretty decent, and they are not shy to chuck in some curse words. I cracked up when playing as Touchdown (Rooker) and whilst trying to defend some turf all I heard was “More of these cunts?!”. Incredible.

Conclusions

Whilst Crime Boss: Rockay City starts pretty fun, I felt that for myself, the novelty wore off fairly quickly. It’s pretty awesome seeing a good bunch of celebrities starring in this game like something out of a Tarantino movie.

Typically I play games single-player, so it is good to see there is a single-player campaign in this game.

To learn more about the game or even purchase it, you can go to the official Steam Store page.

I give Crime Boss: Rockay City a score of 7/10.