Crime Boss Rockay City Review

You gotta rob to get rich in the Clinton era.

It’s enormously frustrating when a game is mismarketed. It’s also enormously frustrating when you really can’t talk about a game on its own terms without talking about another.

Crime Boss Rockay City was first revealed at last year’s Game Awards with a trailer that really sold it as a 90s B-movie spin on the venerable four-player, first-person co-op heister Payday 2. The fact that actor Damion Poitier stars in both games, and was on stage for Crime Boss’s announcement, didn’t help with the muddled messaging at all.

I’ve put over 510 hours into the Steam version of Payday 2, so in many ways I was both the prime candidate to enjoy Crime Boss… but also the target mark for its misguided pitch. As it turns out, Crime Boss isn’t really quite trying to be Payday, and that is mostly a good thing.

Where Payday is all about first-person online co-op heisting, Crime Boss Rockay City is predominantly a single-player roguelike criminal empire management sim. You take the role of Travis Baker, played by Michael Madsen. He’s a career criminal aspiring to be the titular crime boss of Rockay City, a thinly veiled version of New Jersey’s Atlantic City. You can conduct heists, which are played out in first-person with customisable gear and weapon loadouts for your crew much as they are in Payday, but in a lot of ways they aren’t the actual key focus.

Instead, they’re just a means of acquiring more cash and loot to finance your turf battles, the complete dominance of which is the games actual objective on each run you take of the campaign. Failing a few heists consecutively doesn’t really matter so long as you still have the money and the soldiers to capture and defend territories, the taking of which happens to also bring you cash and sometimes loot, though much less than heists do.

You’ll begin a campaign at day one with control of around five of the total pool of thirty territories. You’ll also have a pile of cash and a small number of nameless soldiers that are pretty much solely used for turf assaults and defenses. Other territories are controlled by four rival gangs who begin entirely neutral towards you. Aggressively taking turf from them will invite pushback on subsequent days. Assaulting a location will put you in the shoes of a generic gang member with as many allies as you want to pay to invest in the operation, and your only job is to wipe the other gang out before they wipe yours out. Defending works exactly the same, except you get to control Baker’s underboss Touchdown, played by Michael Rooker, who carries a giant machine gun.

Taking every territory is the goal, but unless you want to try to play an extremely long and tedious game then you’ll want to earn more cash than territories can provide, and this is where heists come in.

In order to conduct heists, you’ll need to hire additional crew members, each of which can only be taken on one heist per day unless they happen to have a randomly assigned trait allowing otherwise. Travis himself can be taken on two heists a day, and though his death out in the field will instantly spell game over, using him will increase his ‘Boss’ ranking which unlocks significant perks that will carry over to your next run.

More expensive crew members come with better weapons, more traits both positive and negative, and often increased health, but each crew member also gains experience when used and can be promoted over time, unlocking new random traits as they do. Up to four crew members can be taken on a heist, which can be commanded around in the field with ‘follow me’ and ‘wait here’ orders. You can swap your personal control between each of them on the fly too, which is good because they are often frustratingly stupid.

The heists themselves are a good mix of stealthy burglaries and heavily armed assaults with elements such as security cameras, doors, guards, and loot placement being remixed each time you tackle them. Of course it’s often the case that a silent robbery will turn loud, and on several occasions my overconfidence and inability to adapt was my undoing.

Team members are lost forever along with any weapons and equipment they were carrying when killed, so balancing the risk/reward of bringing fewer, more lightly armed gangsters on a job is a significant consideration every time.

You can play these heists cooperatively online with up to four other people completely independently of the campaign too, but considering how much shorter and less complex they are than most of what Payday 2 has been offering for nearly a decade, it isn’t terribly exciting to do so.

Because this is a roguelike, special events can randomly occur on each mission too, which is something I found to be equally as exciting as I did frustrating depending on the circumstances. In one instance I took a pair of lightly armed crew members out to sneakily raid the warehouse of a rival gang. This was specifically labeled as a job perfect for a stealthy approach, and Crime Boss actually rewards you for keeping things silent and non-violent where you can by significantly delaying the deployment of heavy assault cops in missions which have to be done loudly.

When the map loaded, the dice roll decided that a police raid was occurring, and I spawned on the outskirts of an intense shootout with no hope of executing my mission stealthily. The idea of a randomized event system such as this sounds good on paper but at least in cases such as this where it completely breaks how the game directly tells you to approach a mission, it really should have been discarded.

Multi-day storylines centered around both bespoke crew members and unique mega-heists will arise during each campaign run, and they add a good variety to the gameplay loop the first couple of times you tackle them. Each tends to be wildly different in their design from one another, as well as from everything else Crime Boss has on offer, but they grow tedious astoundingly quickly largely due to each tending to feature lengthy unskippable scenes where the player has little to no interactive control.

Annoyingly they’re also required for keeping many of the best crew members onboard and for unlocking many of the most rewarding and compelling heists. Mercifully they do tend to be very short though.

Crime Boss’s celebrity cast was put front and center from the very beginning, but I’ve left talking about it ’til last because frankly it’s about the least interesting part of the whole thing. Performances are mostly fine but they all suffer from feeling as if they were recorded with each line of the script being done in only one take, which makes the rhythms of a lot of the conversations between these characters quite unnatural and strange. The bigger issue really is that every one of these actors is now in their 60s but are modeled as if they’re in their 30s and the dissonance is constantly distracting. The only actor who really gets away with it is Rooker and that’s largely because he’s looked and sounded pretty much exactly the same since Mallrats.

The writing and character design is often pretty problematic, and it feels like the non-celebrity voice actors were all told to perform as utterly in over-the-top stereotype as possible. I think the intent was for this to all be humorous, but it just feels gross and pretty dumb.

Crime Boss Rockay City has many flaws – but here’s the thing – I’ve had a blast playing it regardless. It’s clearly been made on a modest budget, and its celebrity cast feels largely like a pointless distraction, but the core design of its criminal empire simulation is really damn compelling. Every time I failed a run I wanted to immediately dive into a new one, which I think is a sign that it’s doing the roguelike thing very well on at least some lizard-brain level.

There’s a lot that I hope gets fixed and altered, and it’s crying out for a greater variety of maps and story beats to pull its campaign runs together from. The fundamentals of its design are genuinely great though, and it’ll be a tremendous shame if it just withers away and dies. There’s a shining diamond here, it’s just a bummer that it’s buried under so much muck. Crime Boss Rockay City is available now on Windows PC as an Epic Games store exclusive; Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X and PS5 versions will follow.

Crime Boss Rockay City was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.