Co-op shooter Crime Boss: Rockay City asks the bold question: What if the straight-to-streaming movies your parents watch got adapted into a video game?
Featuring a surprisingly star-studded cast, Crime Boss: Rockay City is a boomer-coded version of Payday where players are put in the shoes of crime boss Travis Baker (played by Michael Madsen) as he commands his wacky gang of criminals and drug dealers in an attempt to take over Rockay City.
The amount of star power behind this game cannot be understated, as it features Vanilla Ice, Danny Trejo, Chuck Norris, Danny Glover, and Kim Basinger. It’s a big shame that this game has come out after Bruce Willis’ retirement, as he would also have been a fantastic addition to the cast.
Crime Boss: Rockay City
Developer: INGAME STUDIOS
Publisher: 505 Games
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: March 28, 2023
Players: 1-4
Price: $19.99
Crime Boss: Rockay City has become sort of an indirect response to Payday 3‘s disastrous launch, thanks to its delayed Steam release and its generous approach to DLC. The game officially came out as an Epic exclusive in March 2023, a full six months before Payday 3, but as it’s common with EGS exclusives, most people didn’t even know it existed.
The Steam release of the game back in June of 2024 gave it a little more gas and inadvertently drove in comparisons to Starbreeze Studios’ own heist simulator. Crime Boss is faring a little better than Payday 3 in the eyes of the public, mostly because it’s giving away its DLC packs for free on purchase, but both games are unimpressive in different ways.
While Payday 3 is a buggy mess with performance issues and a metric ton of paid DLC, Crime Boss: Rockay City is a stiff mess with performance issues and free DLC, so both games have a lot more in common than their genre and gameplay styles. It just so happens that Crime Boss lacks corporate greed.
The first thing players will notice when booting up Crime Boss: Rockay City is how everything looks like it has been dipped in oil. There’s something incredibly weird about how the game renders and makes it feel like your eyes are greasy, which is certainly a new feeling to behold.
The game doesn’t even necessarily look bad as far as its models and textures go; it’s just the way that it seems to render. This is par for the course when it comes to Unreal Engine 5, as it doesn’t feel like any developers have managed to tame that beast yet, and it’s gotten to the point where users have modded the game to remove some of the blurry effects.
Crime Boss also suffers from some heavy performance issues, dipping below 50 FPS even when put in its lowest settings. This becomes even worse during multiplayer, which should be the game’s strong point but ends up becoming its most disappointing feature.
When it comes to multiplayer, it’s difficult to find sessions with good ping. On my first few attempts, the only sessions available were orange and above, which not only had terrible lag but also ran terribly.
The game’s performance borders on “alright” for most of the time when playing solo, but during multiplayer it often dips into slideshow territory, especially on missions where Cagnali’s troops are present, as their effects seem to be a little too much for the game to handle.
Crime Boss: Rockay City is not exactly a dead game, averaging around two thousand players on Steam, but finding a session that isn’t currently being hosted on the Moon is difficult. The lack of dedicated servers has killed quite a few multiplayer games before, and not all of them have made miraculous recoveries like For Honor.
Crime Boss features an unconventional single-player mode, opting for a roguelite system where players attempt to conquer Rockay City, fail at some point, and start over with extra bonuses to get closer to their goal. Runs in this mode are quite long, and while beating it does feel doable even without a lot of unlocks, there isn’t a lot of fun to be had.
Most missions in this mode are the same repeated maps with a few droplets of plot weaved in between them, and the gang wars are pretty annoying to sit through. The player can hire a certain number of gang members to take over territories or defend them, but clearing those missions feels like a chore, mostly because the game’s guns don’t feel satisfactory to use.
The combination of mostly braindead AI alongside bullet sponge team captains makes for a miserable experience, and having to do three or four of these missions in a row as you expand your territories gets old very fast.
Crime Boss gives you the illusion of stealth, along with stealth mission requirements, but it feels incomplete in some ways. Most stealth perks feel useless, and the game’s detection systems are lacking. Destroying cameras and killing guards arouses suspicion, so the player has to resort to intimidating guards and tying them up.
Sometimes guards can look straight through walls and blow your cover by finding bodies or tied-up officers, and killing one of them immediately awards a strike regardless of anyone seeing it. The lack of distraction tools also means you’ll be crouched behind some waist-high cover, chucking bricks for five minutes to isolate the guards from each other.
Unlocking weapons and tools is a random process done by leveling up, so weapons or tools that fit a stealth build may show up eventually being carried by a character, but not having the option to just outright unlock and equip them is pretty annoying if you want to stick to a specific playstyle.
It also happens that the perks you unlock for your customized character aren’t exactly game changers, with most of them being increases in damage, movement speed, or resistances, which won’t really make you play the game in any different way.
As far as the free DLCs go, the two weapon packs are pretty alright and the two story expansions are fun additions to the game, but having the DLCs enabled means that Cagnali’s robot army can now show up in the game’s roguelite mode, which significantly ramps up the difficulty, as their areas of the map are incredibly annoying to capture and have the most performance issues.
Cagnali’s faction clashes tonally with Crime Boss, as this cyberpunk-esque megacorp doesn’t feel like it belongs to the game. The story content for both DLCs isn’t exactly bad, but it’s up to players to decide if they want to make the roguelite mode even more difficult just by virtue of having them enabled.
Star Power can carry straight-to-DVD movies, but it cannot carry what is essentially a flawed game. Crime Boss: Rockay City doesn’t really play well and suffers from boring mission design and repetitive gameplay, as well as performance issues.
The game simply doesn’t feel like a worthy replacement for the golden standard in heisting simulation that Payday 2 set, but it is a worthy competitor to Payday 3, which may not be that much of a compliment.
There is a good amount of content to be found in its story DLCs, and if you are lucky enough to find matches with good ping, then there is some fun to be had here and there, but maybe it wasn’t the best idea to spend your budget on actors instead of tightening up the game.
Crime Boss: Rockay City was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by 505 Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Crime Boss: Rockay City is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).
