Crime Boss: Rockay City

Enjoyed it more than I didn't, but even with the weird roguelite on top of the kinda crappy FPS, Crime Boss is riddled with problems big and small, some of which I can't even tell if are new to the game through patches or still outstanding from launch. Broadly, the game's campy action movie style is skin deep, with brief cameos from Vanilla Ice and Danny Trejo masquerading as major roles, and universally terrible vocal performances, also exposing how COVID has really harmed audio engineering when everyone has to record their dialogue in separate studios with separate microphones. And in this game's case, probably no hands-on audio direction. The story is bare bones and the dialogue is bizarre and disjointed and has very, very little in the way of real humour, reminding me most of Saints Row 1. Combined with static cutscenes where everyone stands in the same poses and there's no direction or cinematography to speak of, and all the creative spark that could have fueled a fun B-movie romp through a Miami Vice pastiche just dies in the presentation. This is the one Series X game I played in Quality mode over Performance because the aliasing is god awful otherwise.

Gameplay fares a little better, putting the ever-popular roguelite aesthetic into a Payday-adjacent FPS. Missions are mostly heists that range in scale but all feed into the meta-goal of funding your gang's turf wars to take over the map. While there is some initial thrill in deciding when and where to spend money in order to make it back in the long run, nevermind the risk/reward of resource management and certainly of our main character's perpetual threat of permadeath, it gives way to logistical errors far too quickly, and when it doesn't, it is reliant on RNG to a degree that makes Darkest Dungeon look like Into The Breach. Many reviewers pointed out how they felt progress was artificially gated until you simply got enough upgrades to get over the late-game spikes, so perhaps this was balanced post-launch. My experience in finding out the winning strategy was to play fast and furious in the turf wars: always assault, never defend if you can get away with it, send in the least amount of men and just play those turf war missions well. It's cool to have one of these games with a nice balance of mechanical skill and tactical risk where nothing is guaranteed, but the problem is just that the tactical metagame feels shallow and easy to unpack. I beat the game only barely realising I had actually beaten the game, which sadly meant I skipped all of the game's best moments, which are the big heists. A couple of other modes feel totally superfluous but at least allow you to more or less quickplay these setpieces, and diet Payday though they may be, they still scratch the itch that Payday does...and arguably has better single player integration.

While the individual mini-heists that make up the bulk of the actual gameplay are alright, they are repetitive even by roguelike standards; there just aren't enough variables or gameplay entities to keep Crime Boss interesting even with the overarching XCOM-meets-Payday-meets-Mount & Blade design having stronger hooks than other titles of this genre. But there are very few maps, not enough mix-ups with camera and guard locations, there are some random events but only a few feel tangible and impactful, and you'll see the same map events and recruitable NPCs over and over again in just a couple of runs. I dreaded to do so many common missions. After a while, the only way to squeeze the fun out of Crime Boss without simply finishing the game is to play riskier, so you have more money for fun upgrades and missions, but the enemy scaling becomes harsh very quickly. The balance just isn't quite there because the overall goal feels almost entirely mismatched with the flow of the strategy game, and tactically the game is just really undercooked with a very counter-intuitive economy. With all this harshness, it still worked as light, brainless roguelite fun, and what unique charm and ingenuity it does have carried me through it even if both the style and strategy scream missed potential.