Chris InglisCrime Boss: Rockay City is an organised crime game combining first-person shooter action and turf wars, developed by Ingame Studios and published by 505 Games. Since it’s launch in March this year, this single player and co-op roguelite game launched with mixed reactions. I was attracted to the game first due to its stellar Hollywood cast with Michael Madsen playing the main protagonist Travis Baker, Chuck Norris as the Sheriff of Rockay City, Michael Rooker as Touchdown, and many others. Now the game’s first paid expansion is out in the form of Dragon’s Gold Cup and adds action movie legend Danny Trejo.
The character models, for the most part, replicate younger versions of the real-life actors they are portraying, and most of the facial animations are on-point. Danny Trejo is faithfully replicated in the game and matches his voice; however, Baker’s facial expressions fail to match Michael Maden’s voice at times, especially when there’s laughter or high excitement. All other characters are great, and I loved the dialogue, quips, and banter that I expect from these actors.
Baker leads a motley crew of thugs, hackers, and criminals to win the turf war in Rockay City. The introduction of Dollar Dragon gives Baker an opportunity to work with his once-rival to infiltrate a heavily guarded depot and steal the King’s gold. A new singleplayer storyline allows you to delve into this relationship as you play missions indicated by yellow icons on the game’s map. You will need to start a new campaign to be able to play this expansion content. Once started, you will see yellow mission icons pop up on the game’s territory map and these are tier III missions.
I thought these would be too difficult for me as I was only rated as tier II, and if Travis Baker dies then your entire run is over causing you to have to restart the whole campaign. I only had five soldiers at the time, but I also had just bought a new high powered light machine gun and thankfully that made short work of foes faced in the first Dollar Dragon mission. Mission objectives from here range from maintaining control of areas of turf, bribing cleaners or repair men and sneaking/snooping to gain intel, stealth missions to take photographs and learn about an area’s defenses, and more.
There are also specific missions to this story where you may need to purchase equipment to make heists more successful such as purchasing a helicopter to be able to perform an aerial assault on a building. Or if you manage to stealth in and hack some computers, you’ll gain intel on the enemy or find other ways to get into a building. However, if you fail these missions, those options will become unavailable to utilise. The planning board has photographs that connect together as you progress the campaign, with any failed missions show in red. The planning board gives more background into each situation, and you can switch to a mission by clicking its photo.
Outside of the Dragon’s Gold Cup missions, we still have the base game’s operations where rival gangs are trying to take back control of turf within Rockay City. You also need to earn money, so there’s always other heists and missions to complete. If you are getting low on money, you can head to the office to trade items you’ve stolen from previous missions or organise a loan that you’ll need to pay back in a number of days.
Despite being on the normal difficulty, I felt most missions were too easy. If you leave yourself in the open or push too far forward, you are going to get blasted and knocked down waiting for a revive. Most missions have a limited number of revives that can be used until you fail the mission, but for the most part the AI was a bit lacklustre making for easy kills. Still, this meant I could progress the campaign at a steady pace and once you complete the Dragon’s Gold Cup campaign, he will join your gang and you’ll unlock the Blue Dragon skin.
Overall, Crime Boss: Rockay City’s Dragon’s Gold Cup expansion adds a fun few hours of new story missions and gameplay, adding Danny Trejo to the already stellar cast. The story missions were varied and engaging enough to keep me invested in completing the campaign. The base game’s AI still needs some work to be more challenging, but it still was a fun few hours of heist-style gameplay. More themed expansions like this one are planned with a campaign focuses on Chuck Norris’ sheriff character coming early in 2024 and Baker’s 2IC Nasara in Q2 2024. You can see what’s ahead for Crime Boss: Rockay City on the game’s roadmap.
This review utilised a key provided by Diva Agency and Crime Boss: Rockay City’s Dragon’s Gold Cup is available on the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
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