Crime Boss: Rockay City

Crime Boss: Rockay City is focused around missions undertaken by teams of four criminals. The player controls one of the criminals and cooperates with either other players or AI-controlled teammates to pull off heists in a first-person perspective. The gameplay has frequently been compared to the Payday series of games. The players need to collect enough loot from the target (banks, trucks, jewelry stores, etc.), but the longer they take, the greater the likelihood of police reinforcements arriving. There are several ways that the missions are set up. The simplest option is as quick play one-offs. There are also six mini-campaigns of three missions chained in a row with a loose connecting story for each called "Urban Legends". There is a single-player campaign with roguelike elements where the player attempts to expand their territory across Rockay City after the previous leader of the underground dies. The player allocates gang members to fight turf wars, buys new weapons, and goes on missions to attempt to take new territory—but if the player character dies in a mission, their quest to become Crime Boss is over. In the same way, hired crew members who die or are arrested on missions are also lost forever. The feel of the game is consciously imitative of 1990s crime movies such as Heat. Rockay City itself is set in a Florida reminiscent of Miami Vice. ==Development and release==

Crime Boss is the first game produced by Ingame Studios, a new developer of around 70 employees based in Brno, Czech Republic. The game released in late March 2023 exclusively to the Epic Games Store for PC. The game was released on Steam on 18 June 2024, alongside the "Cagnali's Order" DLC that features a corporation's robot cops helping the police. ==Reception==

}} }} Crime Boss: Rockay City received "mixed or average" reviews from critics for the PC and Xbox Series X/S versions, while the PS5 version received "generally unfavorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. In Japan, four critics from Famitsu gave the game a total score of 30 out of 40. Wesley LeBlanc of Game Informer was harsh, saying the gameplay was buggy and boring, and that the plot and characters were poorly written. He gave the game a mere 3/10 overall score. Cory Wells of Hardcore Gamer gave the game a cautiously positive review, warning that the game was neither exactly like Payday nor an open-world freeform game in the vein of the Grand Theft Auto series that many expected, but that gamers who didn't mind repetition would find a solid basic gameplay experience in the heists. Luke Plunkett of Kotaku was derisive, writing that Crime Boss "gets absolutely everything it sets out to do wrong". Writing a month after the PC release in April 2023, he said that the game had attracted little comment and notice on the Internet, even negative, and noted the lack of a Steam release as a potential reason why. == References ==