It’s no secret that I love Payday. I wrote all about it when I reviewed Payday 3. Still, it’s something that needs repeating.
I, Arielle, really, really love living my best criminal fantasies out in a virtual world where my chance of jail time, and if my skill level is any indication, death, is kept safely in a digital space.
So when Crime Boss: Rockay City ended up in front of me to review, I went into it with all the excitement of any good criminal who has discovered that the keys to the safe are unattended.
On the surface, Crime Boss takes Payday’s tried and tested formula, throws in a bunch of recognisable faces and tacks on an early 90s theme, but instead of being a heist-filled joyride, the biggest and most unforgivable crime is the game itself.
Crime Boss should be good. It has three different play methods, a dedicated single-player campaign, and two co-op modes.
It also has a good soundtrack, filled with recognisable faces and voices that should have been able to carry a game set up for success… if only that were the case.
Crime Boss: Rockay City is, at its very core, a disgrace of a game and a waste of all the talent, money and time that went into creating it.
The game looks terrible, feels awful, performs atrociously, and every single performance it features feels embarrassing – and that’s ignoring all the bugs, issues and boring missions.
I’m at a loss for words when pinpointing which part of the game I disliked more. So, let’s focus on the one piece of any shooter that should be solid: the shooting.
For starters, forget about melee. I mean, it’s there, sure, but you’re better off just pretending it wasn’t. Because as weak in the arms and uncoordinated as I am, I know for an absolute fact that I could pull off a better melee attack than any character in the game without so much as breaking a sweat.
This means your only tangible form of attack is through shooting, which wouldn’t be a problem if any of the characters you can play could actually shoot.
Shooting in Crime Boss: Rockay City is both imprecise and ineffective. And that’s putting it mildly. It doesn’t matter how much you focus or practice your aim; it always feels like you’re facing off against the Hulk, and you’re armed with a water pistol.
And if you’re reading this and thinking stealth must be the way. No. You’re wrong. Now, I’m open about the fact that stealth and I don’t go well together at the best of times, but Crime Boss is not the best of times, far from it. The stealth mechanics are incredibly rough and unpolished.
And even if you do somehow manage to find a virgin to sacrifice to the gods, chances are your getaway vehicle will have a seizure that prevents you from escaping, your game will freeze in a critical moment, or various characters won’t load in. Instead, you’ll just be faced with random guns floating in the air, while their owners are off, probably playing something else… like Payday…
Then, if you thought it couldn’t get worse. It does, because not only is the game an insult to the eyes but to the ears, thanks to some of the worst voice performances I’ve had the displeasure of listening to.
Most performances sound like they were recorded on the actor’s phones and thrown into the game with little care for audio quality or performance value.
The two worst offenders were Chuck Norris and Vanilla Ice. How do you take two such recognisable names and voices and then squander their performances and destroy them?
Vanilla Ice stars as a drug lord who can’t finish a monologue without beatboxing. However, it’s so poor that I find it hard to believe that it was him rapping and not just someone else he found on the side of the road to do it for him.
And Chuck Norris sounds like someone learning to put sentences together for the first time. I don’t have the words to express how unnatural and jarring everything he says sounds to the ear.
But I suppose these vocal performances, if you can even call them that, are apt for a game as disappointing and criminally terrible as Crime Boss: Rockay City.
