RoboCop (2014) Review

For a game based on a film based on another film about rampant commercialism gone wrong, you have to admire RoboCop’s commitment to its source material. After all, no game that shares a name with Paul Verhoeven’s classic could really ask players to pay well over £100 in real money for a digital gun, right? It’s all big joke, right?

Wrong. Yes, that particular gun is, in terms of price, an outlier. But other upgrades to your arsenal, their abilities, or your suit aren’t exactly cheap, either. The F2P nature also negatively affects what little gameplay is there, too. It reduces the stages into a constant grind to earn more in-game cash so you don’t have the shell out in the real world.

Not that things get more exciting when you do get your hands on superior hardware. Levels mostly consist of alternating between bits of cover, then shooting bad guys as they arrive in waves. A degree of strategy is introduced by being able to call in drones, scan enemies for weak spots (critical hits give you more points, more points equals more cash) or marking and executing goons.

But it’s all so boring. The game itself looks fairly nice, but the shooting itself feels lifeless and there’s no discernible sense of threat from your enemies. Either you die, or they do, and either outcome feels the same.

Throw in an upgrade system that deliberately stifles play until you get your credit card out, and there’s very little to recommend here. RoboCop is a free-to-play title, which means that it’s got to make its money somewhere. In and of itself, that isn’t automatically bad. But by attempting to generate its cash by making progression a slow grind, by repeating the same boring levels over and over again until you a) delete the whole thing, b) use real money, or c) die, Glu Games has made sure you’ll likely choose the former and latter before you open your wallet.

Version Tested: iOS (iPhone 4S). Played for 3 hours.