It's been a long and bumpy road for Crime Boss: Rockay City. After its initial release for consoles and the Epic Games Store last year, it received some mediocre reviews. Players liked the heist-based gameplay and surprisingly star-studded cast, but were put off by a few bugs as well as some questionable level designs and mechanics. Now, a full year later, the title is making a splash again with its release on the Steam platform.
On Steam, Crime Boss is on offer for just $20, which makes sense for a year-old title. Two single-player campaign DLCs are included for free, as well as two very powerful weapon packs. All of this makes the game a tempting proposition that has attracted many new players. The question, however, is whether the core gameplay has actually improved enough to make players want to pick up their guns again and give Crime Boss another round, or whether first-time players should now venture a visit to the mythical Florida town of Rockay.
The reduced price offers a lot of value right from the start, especially for those who like single-player experiences. Not only do you get the main single-player campaign called Baker's Battle, where you try to take over all of Rockay City, but you also get two other full campaigns, Cagnali's Order, a sci-fi adventure where you fight powerful security and police robots, and the Dragon's Gold Cup campaign, which stars Michael Madsen and Danny Trejo as rival gangsters who work together on a heist. You also get two very deadly gear packs, the Tactical Weapon Pack and the Heavy Hitters Pack. The Heavy Hitters Pack is particularly overpowered, although I personally liked some of the accurate rifles from the tactical offering a little better, especially early on when my starting character was relatively weak.
As was the case when Crime Boss was released for other platforms, there are multiple ways to play it. There's the aforementioned single-player adventure, where you lead a party of three other characters controlled by AI on a series of heists and battles across the city. Baker's Battle, where Michael Madsen plays gangster Travis Baker, sees you take on 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 up the gameplay a bit without losing the core focus. There's also a quick play feature for multiplayer heists, and a multiplayer mini-campaign option called Urban Legends. All of these can be played with real people, either random people you meet in the lobby, or with friends, when you can round up to four people for some intense shooting and stealing.
The presentation of Crime Boss: Rockay City is truly spectacular. It was that way when it was first released and thankfully it remains that way today. Everything looks fantastic and the shooting is fluid and dynamic despite the amount of detail in the world. Shooters, especially on PC, really need to balance aesthetics without the environment affecting system performance and Crime Boss does that really well.
Plus, not only did everything look great, it was a real treat to see all the celebrities whose faces and voices are now featured in Crime Boss. Most of the time, these aren't just cameos, but actual main characters who get a lot of screen time. In addition to the actors already mentioned in the Dragon's Gold Cup and Baker's Battle campaigns, Crime Boss also features Kim Basinger, Michael Rooker, Vanilla Ice, Danny Glover and Chuck Norris. Even the lesser-known actors all do a great job of setting the mood.
Performance-wise, the year that developer INGAME Studios spent fixing things and issuing patches after Crime Boss's less-than-stellar launch really seems to have paid off. Having played all three single-player campaigns and a few dozen multiplayer missions, I haven't noticed any gameplay- or mission-breaking bugs at all. I did notice a few minor things, like weapons sometimes appearing a second or two before the spawn point when being attacked by enemy forces, but by that point everything was so chaotic that you hardly notice unless you're looking closely.
The AI, which received a lot of criticism from players at launch, seems to have been greatly improved. In the single-player campaign, I didn't have to worry too much about them when dealing with three AI team members. They seemed pretty effective at eliminating the resistance while I ran around Crime Boss completing tasks like flipping switches, grabbing keys, accelerating drills, placing explosives, disabling cameras, and all the many tasks given to players during missions. Occasionally, I would command the AI team members to complete a task as well, usually to collect loot for me, and they completed these tasks quickly and without error.
In fact, I found that I could rely on my AI teammates to know how best to attack even advanced enemies like riot cops with bulletproof shields. I helped when I could, but mostly let my AI team do the heavy fighting, and only occasionally had to rescue them from sticky situations. When I first started playing, these AI teammates would sometimes get killed, but that was mostly due to not knowing the maps and taking a very long time to find objectives, leaving the team exposed to many waves of enemies while I wandered around wishing I could have studied a map or glanced at a blueprint before starting a heist with guns drawn.
In fact, my only complaint about Crime Boss has nothing to do with performance, but more with the basic gameplay. For a heist game, I expected a bit more planning for large missions like we had in Grand Theft Auto V. In fact, Crime Boss's single-player campaigns require you to pay a few thousand dollars to plan some heists. And yet, once you're there, you really know nothing about the layout of the building you're robbing, or even where key equipment is hidden.
Many of the above objectives you need to complete involve randomly searching places like ventilation shafts for your hidden gear or figuring out which room the building's security monitors are in. These are all things an elite heist unit or even a smart bunch of amateurs should already know. How can they not know where their rappel ropes are hidden? I guess that's part of the core gameplay here. And since there are only a limited number of mission types, you'll learn most of these things over time as you play missions over and over again.
Questions about core gameplay aside, Crime Boss: Rockay City has been significantly improved since its release. Steam-only players may have had to wait to get the title, but that works to their benefit as it's now a much better experience, offered at a reduced price and with plenty of DLC for good measure. And the Steam lobbies for Crime Boss have always been full when I've checked, so it seems like players have responded well to the changes and the introduction of the new platform.
If you're looking for a fun shooter that you can play as a single player campaign or with friends and others in multiplayer missions, Crime Boss: Rockay City is for you right now. Forget the problems Crime Boss had in the past, because it seems like almost all of them have been fixed. Had it originally been released in the form it is in now, the title would have left a very different legacy. But at least Crime Boss: Rockay City has been fixed and made ready for a new generation of predatory shooters looking to have fun with crime.
