Crime Boss: Rockay City is a game that simply shouldn’t exist, for a litany of reasons. Morally, the ‘elevator boarding’ quality of performances by his cast of stuntmen of old losers has a seedy air of elder abuse. Technically, it’s a disaster. Visually, it’s a sterile, overly bright migraine of cheap assets and muddy textures. Aurally, it’s like being stuck in a Superdrug queue next to a tiny radio blaring Absolute Radio 90s. Spiritually, it feels like a canceled Xbox 360 launch game, an awkward artifact from a time when video games were embarrassingly desperate to be taken seriously as adult entertainment.

Crime City Boss Man is a roguelike first-person shooter management sim with separate co-op campaigns because no one involved could decide what this game should actually look like, assuming it wasn’t intended as an elaborate tax deduction. You’re Michael Madsen in a cowboy hat, a character you probably vaguely remember appearing in a number of middling crime movies released in the last forty years. You’re here to take control of Rockay City, a crime-ridden, metropolis not so much inspired by Miami as it is inspired by oft-removed Miami inspirations seen in other video games and movies desperate to capture the sheer sleaze and edge of the media of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

His route to domination is a series of bite-sized heist missions and more in-your-face gunfights, interspersed with some tedious book balancing and micromanaging, usually via a forced scene with his secretary, a tragically oblivious-sounding Kim Basinger. like he was only here under a court order. The heist missions play out like an early alpha version of Payday 2, where telegraphed stealth takedowns aren’t guaranteed to not just go through a guard harmlessly. Before heading to a stock warehouse or shopping mall, you can hire and equip up to four thugs, each with their own quirks, which can be swapped out on the fly or left to the intelligence of a repair bot.

All of these options when it comes to planning and team building don’t really mean much in the game itself – within an hour I quickly realized that the absolutely optimal way to play this game is to do absolutely everything yourself. The members of the AI ​​team have a habit of going unnoticed by cameras and guards. Playing it as a solo stealth game reveals just how limited vision cones are, and with extensive visual feedback alerting you whenever someone looks your way, nine times out of ten you can pull off a successful heist by finding an easy route. to the loot (usually no more complicated than going a little to the left or a little to the right) and duck back and forth towards the getaway van.

Outside of these treats, most of the time you’ll be doing much easier turf grab missions, which involve watching your guys get taken down by a bullet sponge enemy that you throw grenades at until a good chunk of the city map is gone. it turns blue. You will experience everything that Crime Man Boss City has to offer in its opening hours. But really, this is all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how viscerally disgusting the whole thing is.

Bizarre, aging puppets of decrepit actors babble dialogue that sounds like it was generated by an AI forced to watch Reservoir Dogs 3,000 times. The men who should spend their retirement on the golf course weave their way through tortured metaphors and scattered oaths with all the conviction of someone reading a menu. Lazy misogyny drips from every pore. The coughing and stuttering shots are left completely untouched, even subtitled, as if not even the sound director could ask these poor people to undergo the added indignity of reading this crap a second time. They all sound like they were recorded 1000 miles away in various “home studios” (this is Hollywood slang for “linen closets”). The idea of ​​any of them understanding the broader strokes of their characters or their plot is impossible given how poorly defined and meaningless every aspect of the game’s narrative is.

The cast is a downright weird array of ’80s and ’90s pop culture icons. Chuck Norris is probably here because of the early 2000s memes instead of Walker, Texas Ranger. Vanilla Ice is here for reasons that simply cannot be fathomed. Danny Trejo already has a precedent for starring in soulless nostalgic handjobs made by hackers who don’t understand the period they’re talking about after those two Machete movies. The completely screwed-up nature of the plot is probably just a result of these being the people who called back.

You can’t help but wonder how many inquiry emails from Ingame Studios went unanswered. How many forgotten movie star agents have one sitting forever somewhere in their junk folder. The cast is too impromptu to have been 100% deliberate, consisting solely of the people who had absolutely nothing else to do that weekend. How many conversations were exhausted, how many dialogues came to nothing? Has anyone tried to explain what a roguelike is to Eric Roberts? Cheech Marin’s agent sat him down and tried to convince him that Xbox Game Pass is the best deal on gaming? DJ Jazzy Jeff sent you a PowerPoint on ray tracing?

The entire effort is such a hopeless, disparate mess of badly aged cool-kid aesthetics and inspirations. It feels like something that should have NFT integration. It’s all so embarrassing. I’d rather be caught playing an absolutely depraved hentai visual novel than this utterly crude humor board for fifty-year-old parents with laserdisc players. And you should too. Video games can be so much better than this. They can be funnier, smarter, sexier, and sleazier than this. This has all the edge of a Will Smith track and none of the impact of a Will Smith slap.