It’s been a long and bumpy road for Crime Boss: Rockay City. Having first released for consoles and the Epic Games Store last year, it received quite a few middle-of-the-road reviews. Players enjoyed the heist-based gameplay and the surprisingly star-studded cast, but they were put off by quite a few bugs as well as some questionable level designs and mechanics. Now, a full year later, the title is making another big splash with its release on the Steam platform.
On Steam, Crime Boss is being offered for just $20, which makes sense for a year-old title. Two single player campaign DLCs as well as two very powerful weapon packs are included for free. All of that makes for a tempting offer which has earned it a lot of new players. But the question is whether or not the core gameplay has actually improved enough to justify players picking their guns back up and giving Crime Boss another round, or if first time players should now chance a visit to the mythical Florida city of Rockay.
Right from the start, the discounted price offers a lot of value, especially for those who enjoy single player experiences. Not only do you get the core single player campaign called Baker’s Battle where you try to take over all of Rockay City, but also two more full campaigns, Cagnali’s Order, which is a sci-fi type of adventure where you battle powerful security and police robots, and the campaign Dragon’s Gold Cup that features Michael Madsen and Danny Trejo as rival gangsters who work together on a heist. You also get two very deadly equipment packs, the Tactical Weapon Pack and the Heavy Hitters Pack. The Heavy Hitters Pack is especially overpowered, although I personally enjoyed some of the accurate rifles from the tactical offering a bit more, especially at first when my starting character was relatively weak.
As it was before when Crime Boss released for other platforms, there are several ways to play it. There is the aforementioned single-player adventure where you lead a squad of three other characters driven by AI on a series of heists and battles throughout the city. Baker’s Battle, which features Michael Madsen as the gangster Travis Baker, has you taking over the city sector by sector, just like you did at the end of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas many years ago. The other new single player campaigns change that gameplay up a bit without losing the core focus. There is also a quick play feature for dropping into multiplayer heists and a multiplayer mini-campaign option called Urban Legends. All of those can be played with real people, either random ones you meet in the lobby or friends if you can get up to four people together for some intense shooting and stealing.
The presentation for Crime Boss: Rockay City is really spectacular. It was like that before when it originally released, and thankfully remains the same now. Everything looks amazing and the shooting is fluid and dynamic despite the many details found in the world. Shooters, especially on the PC, really have to balance aesthetics with not having the environment drag down system performance, and Crime Boss does that really well.
Also, in addition to everything looking great, it was a real treat to see all of the celebrities whose likenesses and voices are in Crime Boss now. Most of the time, these are not cameo appearances either, but actual main characters who get a lot of screen time. Besides those previously mentioned in the Dragon’s Gold Cup and Baker’s Battle campaigns, Crime Boss also stars Kim Basinger, Michael Rooker, Vanilla Ice, Danny Glover and Chuck Norris. Even the less famous actors all do a great job to set the mood.
In terms of performance, it seems like the year that developer INGAME Studios spent fixing things and issuing patches following the less-than-stellar-launch for Crime Boss has really paid off. Having played all three single player campaigns and a couple dozen multiplayer missions, I did not experience any game or mission-breaking bugs at all. I did notice a few little things like guns sometimes spawning a second or two before the person carrying them shows up at spawn points when being rushed by enemy forces, but things were so chaotic at that point that you would hardly notice unless you were really looking.
The AI, which earned a fair share of criticism from players at launch, seems to have been greatly improved. In the single-player campaign, when dealing with three AI teammates, I really did not have to worry about them too much. They seemed quite effective at eliminating resistance for me while I ran around completing objectives in Crime Boss like flipping switches, grabbing keys, speeding up power drills, planting explosives, disabling cameras and all of the many objectives thrown at players during missions. I occasionally ordered the AI teammates to complete an objective too, mostly to gather loot for me, and they accomplished those tasks quickly and without fail.
In fact, I found that I could rely on my AI teammates to know how to best attack even advanced enemies, like riot police with bullet-proof shields. I helped out when I could, but for the most part let my AI team handle the heavy combat, only occasionally having to bail them out of tough spots. When I first started playing, those AI teammates would get killed sometimes, but that is mostly because I didn’t know the maps and took a very long time to locate objectives, which left the team exposed to many enemy waves while I wandered around wishing I had been able to study a map or glance at a blueprint before going into a heist with guns blazing.
In fact, my only complaint about Crime Boss has nothing to do with performance but more with the core gameplay. For a heist game, I was kind of expecting a bit more planning for big missions like we got with Grand Theft Auto V. In the single player campaigns for Crime Boss, you even have to pay a few thousand dollars to plan some heists. And yet, once you get there, you really don’t know anything about the layout of the building you are hitting or even where your key equipment is hidden.
Many of those aforementioned objectives you need to complete involve randomly searching places like air vents for your hidden gear or figuring out which room houses the building’s security monitors. These are all things that an elite heist squad, or even a smart bunch of amateurs, should already know. How do they not know where their repelling ropes are stashed? I guess that is part of the core gameplay here. And because there are a limited number of mission types, you will get to know most of that stuff over time as you keep replaying missions.
Questions about the core gameplay aside, Crime Boss: Rockay City is vastly improved since its launch. Players who just use Steam may have had to wait to get the title, but that kind of plays in their favor because it’s a much better experience now that is being offered for a discount price with lots of DLCs tossed in for good measure. And the Steam lobbies for Crime Boss were always full when I was looking, so it seems like gamers responded well to the changes and the new platform launch.
If you are looking for a fun shooter to play as a single player campaign or with friends and others in multiplayer missions, then Crime Boss: Rockay City really measures up now. Forget about the problems that Crime Boss had in the past because it seems like almost all of them have been fixed. Had it originally released in the shape it is now, then the title would have a much different legacy. But at least Crime Boss: Rockay City has been repaired and made ready for a new crop of heist-hungry shooters aiming to have a fun time with crime.
Developers: INGAME Studios
Platforms: Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X