Crime Boss: Rockay City (Update 16 and DLCs) – PS5 Review


Crime Boss: Rockay City originally came out in 2023 and was a co-op heist-based stealthy shooter and it was put together by a group of Czech coders known as Ingame Studios.  And when it came out we basically ignored it because of a few reasons.  It had a middling reception (it literally has a Metacritic score of 52), terrible cover art featuring the much-missed Michael Madsen along with Chuck Norris and Kim Basinger and the last heist shooter we played was Payday 2 which we absolutely hated.

Eventually Crime Boss found its way to PS Plus Extra which made it free and we love a bit of co-op here at PlayStation Country and so we decided to give it a go.  Albeit with about the same level of expectation as we’d have for a new U2 album.

The game, as the title suggests, is set in the fictional, crime-ridden Rockay City (which appears to be based on Florida) and you play as Travis Baker, the boss of an up-and-coming crime syndicate and you’re tasked with committing a whole lot of larceny in an effort to take over various territories and wipe out the competition.  There are a few ways to actually play the game with options to play individual missions, three-mission chains (called Urban Legends) – both of which can be played with any combination of bots and human players up to a total of four – or you can play the single-player ‘Roguelike’ mode.  And that’s probably the best place for us to start.

You begin with a few dollars, some territories and a small crew and then you’re thrown into a map screen where you can plan your next move.  There are a few things you can do.  You can take part in turf wars where you send your foot soldiers into another crew’s territory and you have to take out a number of gang members there to take it over.  That’ll earn you some passive income for as long as you keep hold of it and that money can be spent on new weapons and crew members.

There are also a selection of jobs that repeat now and again and these involve robbing jewellery stores, strip malls, warehouses, armoured trucks and banks.  These are always quite enjoyable and are a good way to make more cash but also level up your crew.

The main draw here though comes in the form of ‘big heist’ missions.  These are story-based affairs and see you running various missions that act as prep for a serious heist at the end.  These involve a bit more in the way of strategy with a lot to do, and usually stuff you need to do without being seen.  Get spotted by a camera, guard or gangster and you’ll have a problem.  Especially when the police turn up.

The good news is that the stealth really works well here.  You get a bit of warning when someone has spotted you and time enough to take them out or get out of their field of vision but it’s definitely challenging at times.  And if it does all go to hell the gunplay is genuinely enjoyable too with a great selection of guns to use, especially the shotguns which do a great job of taking people out in a hurry.  And we found the territory-grabbing metagame pretty enjoyable too.

Playing the heists in co-op is even more fun and have a bit more scope for clever strategies and decision-making on the fly because while the bots are okay in the game, a human player is always going to be able to execute instructions better.  But we enjoyed the game a lot regardless of which mode and human/AI configuration we used.  And while that cheesy cover art put us off at first, the performances from the actors are actually alright and give the game a lot of character.

And so that’s Crime Boss: Rockay City in a nutshell.  We liked it way more than we thought we would and despite the occasional janky bit of gameplay and double-A, rather than triple, visuals, this felt like a decently put together product (although we’d happily fight whoever it was who created Ranger’s final mission – fucking hell, what an awful, awful thing that was).   It was so much less faffy than Payday 2 and we were pretty much addicted to it for the 60-70 hours it took to get the Platinum.

Dragon’s Gold Cup DLC

This DLC focuses on Dollar Dragon’s (Danny Trejo) crew.   His previous boss, The King, has died and you need to liberate his hand in order to break into a huge gold reserve facility that has a state-of-the-art security system in place to stop the likes of you from pilfering the city’s gold reserves.  There are plenty of things you can do to make the mission go smoother, such as buying explosives, digging out a tunnel and getting hold of more saws to cut open any safes.

This chain of missions can be played in and out of Roguelike mode and gives you a really solid final heist that took some serious stealth and investigation to pull off.  It definitely added something to the overall game but it does also give you plenty of ways to mess it up (such as turning the sentry guns on which you might have thought would benefit you).  But yeah, this was a decent addition to the game and up there with any of the big heists in the game.

Cagnali’s Order DLC

If you fancy something a bit more futuristic, this DLC sees you taking on Cagnali Industries.  Think OCP from Robocop but now led by Dr. Lucia Cagnali, who is quite the prick.  The way this storyline is introduced is quite amusing, with Baker waking up from a nightmare about it that you have to play through.  But it then settles down into another series of prep missions before you can journey to Cagnali HQ, a large office complex with a mix of human and robot guards.   You need to get in there, blow up her operations and get out without a bunch of prototype T800s kicking your arse.

The robots here make for tougher combatants and so this mission is pretty difficult at the end.  In fact, getting to the point where it all kicks off isn’t too easy thanks to the heavily guarded facility not being particularly easy to stealth your way through.  But again, this is a large, satisfying heist and one that we really enjoyed playing through.

 

Update 16

The great thing about Crime Boss: Rockay City is how well-supported it is and we recently got the free update 16.  This adds a new mission set in an art gallery.  It’s okay but we got through it pretty easily and there are no prep missions for it.  It’s just a pretty basic heist albeit with a laser security system to figure out a way past.  Still, it’s nice to have.

There are also a lot of bot improvements apparently.  We say apparently but they still got a bit confused, standing around when they could have been dropping of bags of loot and sometimes being about as compliant as the average cat.  There’s also a ‘How to Heist’ guide in the pause menu for beginners to look at.

Crime Boss: Rockay City
8 Overall
Pros
+ Really enjoyable stealth gameplay
+ Lots of missions
+ The heist-based missions are fun to figure out
+ Gun-play is no slouch
Cons
- Can be a bit janky
- Some missions can be a struggle
- Some degree of repetition and grind
Summary
Crime Boss: Rockay City surprised us. As unheralded as it was, this is a great game that does stealth and action equally well. The setting, the missions and the vibe of it felt a bit like playing a really good Xbox 360 game. And that means something now that most games are open-world borefests.

 

 


About Richie

Rich is the editor of PlayStation Country. He likes his games lemony and low-budget with a lot of charm. This isn't his photo. That'll be Rik Mayall.

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