"Have you seen this lineup? This game is blessed with an incredible cast. Kim Basinger, who I did The Getaway with, Michael Rooker and Danny Trejo, and Danny Glover. These are great, great actors, and this is a great cast—I don't think many games can claim this kind of cast. Chuck Norris, Kim Basinger, Danny Trejo, Danny Glover, my gosh, Vanilla Ice—just say those names, we all know them, and they all brought so much to their characters. I don't want to ruin the story, but it was a lot of fun! There are a lot of big characters there, and they have a great range of emotion to bring to a game."

Coming from Michael Madsen—frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator, Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, Budd in Kill Bill, Joe Gage in The Hateful Eight—that's quite a compliment.

But even if you pull back the slick wrapper of Crime Boss: Rockay City's iconic cast, you're still left with a game that works to merge the tactical twitch play of Counter-Strike with an immersive organized crime simulation. And players don't just run through coop-powered heists; they can also choose to dive into a deep single-player experience that has them fighting to methodically take over a fictional '90s Florida city, one neighborhood at a time. It's in this single-player mode that you'll have to manage money, fence goods, build out a crew, defend territory, take out rival bosses, and—yes—pull the occasional massive heist.
 

Defenders of the Crown

The metamorphosis of Crime Boss: Rockay City from a simple heist game to an organized crime title was fueled by a desire to evolve the genre and inspired by an unlikely '80s classic, said Jarek Kolář, CEO of developer INGAME STUDIOS.

"One of my favorite games is Defender of the Crown," Kolář said. "At the time, it was really considered a cinematic experience where you can live the life of a lord of medieval England.

"I loved to sit down and try to conquer the whole map. There were these different events, different things that could happen. The game lasted a few hours, and it was fun. You'd play it once, and then you'd play it again and again and again."

What stuck with Kolář about that '80s game was how easy it was to drop in and play and that while it was a strategic game, it wasn't overly complex. Something the team also worked to bring to Crime Boss.

"Although we have this component of strategy, we are really trying to be mindful of the audience of the first-person shooter who doesn't want to micromanage resources. Our game is really about shooting. Although there's this element of some strategic thinking, the main reason for it to be there is to give context to your actions."
 

Crime Boss

In Crime Boss' single-player mode, you're tasked with taking over the city's neighborhoods, eventually removing the rival bosses, and becoming the titular criminal leader of the town and the game.

Gameplay is broken down into two main elements: The strategizing of your bid to expand the empire and the action of the first-person shooter missions. Play is also broken down into days. Eventually, you'll run out of things to do or people to do them with and have to choose to end your day and advance the calendar.

While the game's action happens in the many locations of the city, during your missions, much of the strategic approach to the game happens in your offices. 

It's here where you can sketch out long-term plans for events that will eventually turn into playable missions. You can hire individual members for your crew and outfit them, build out the thugs that make up the bulk of your army, fence stolen goods, and—most importantly—strategize over a map.

The map, which is color-coded to show which bosses own which territories, present you with options for trying to seize control of neighborhoods, rob, burgle, heist, and recruit. Nearly all of the options on the map turn into missions that you have to plan out by selecting the team and arming them.

Once things kick off, you're in the mission, working to accomplish your goals to ultimately extend the power and size of the criminal empire. Importantly, you don't need to send leader Travis Baker (voiced by Madsen) on all of those missions. In fact, despite being a loaded-up character, the game cautions you against using him. If he dies, the game ends. So, like much of the game, your options can influence the risk you face in a mission.

The same is true for how you arm your team and how many people you choose to bring. Leave some back so you can run more heists in a given day, and your chance of failure is higher. Fill out the team, and you may not have anyone to do that smash-and-grab you've been eyeing.

You also select where and how you expand through the map or at least try to. And the bigger you get, the better you do, the more attention you start to attract.
 

Play and Play Again

Building that strategy into the game allowed the team to make the game feel more open-ended, giving players the ability to choose the sort of missions they take on and in what order. That also adds to the replayability of the game.

"There's the idea that every time you play it, the set-up is different," Kolář said. "Like your position in the city is a little bit different, the turfs of your enemies are a little bit different, and also, the missions that are popping up are different."
To fill out this approach, the studio crafted a number of plot lines that appear randomly based on what is going on in your particular run. 

"So based on what you have done or how much money you've got or some decisions you've made, certain plot lines appear," Kolář said. "And, again, you are giving some choices. So there are some missions that you need to do, and based on the result of those missions, these plot lines progress."

For example, depending on who you have in your crew, they might talk to you about a specific opportunity. But to do that bigger mission, you'll need to complete some smaller missions, which could lead to a really difficult or big heist.

"But you may not even see it," Kolář said. "It's not that we need to give you this mission every time you play it. And if you do see it, you may not succeed. If you do, and you suddenly have, I don't know, $10 million, then suddenly the game starts to be different.That doesn't mean that you will win. There are still a lot of problems like the other crime bosses are after you or the sheriff is after you. So even with this money, you're not safe; it doesn't guarantee you complete the game. 

"The idea is really to give you these things over and over in different constellations. What we're trying to do is to cut the fluff that you may experience in some games. It's more like a multiplayer level, like in Counter-Strike, or maybe you can compare it to some small event in the open-world game where you play for a few minutes, resolve something, and then you're back in your base, making another decision."

While Kolář declined to talk about how many different types of missions and plotlines there are, he did say "several" big storylines end up with a big heist. A number of small heists also happen all over the city, lending a lot of variety to the set-ups for the missions and maps. 

The levels themselves, he added, are composed of elements like building blocks. So, while they're not entirely procedurally generated, they are randomized to some degree.
 

Permadeath

The multiplayer also adds a surprising level of permanence to your play: You can die, lose key characters, or simply lose the game. Kolář said that adds a sense of danger to the play.

"What I really don't like in contemporary shooter games or linear story games is that it's on rails," he said. "There are checkpoints. You know you can fail, and the game will just take you back a few minutes. So you aren't worried about anything."

That has players just baby-stepping their way through a level, increasing their caution until they can inch past the next checkpoint. But in a game like Counter-Strike, death is the end of the game. The inherent tension that comes with permadeath is one reason why battle royale games are so popular. 

"This tension is what we really tried to put into the single-player mode, where it's not really common in contemporary games," Kolář said. "And I think it works really nice because even if you happen to have a relatively easy mission, or like a small heist where you managed to do things fast, without any big shootout, and you managed to get everything, then you're happy that no one has died. But at the same time, when it's too difficult, it's like you probably sent the wrong guy. So not enough skilled people are there, or you may be reached out to something too difficult before you are able to do it. So maybe next time you will be more clever. But you have to deal with the consequences.

"So this is what is really fascinating for us; to deliver this kind of permanent cause and effect that will have you being worried about your guys and about everything."
 

From Shooter to Crime Sim

While much of what seems to separate Crime Boss: Rockay City from other heist-focused shooters is the organized crime simulation running in the single-player campaign, the initial concept for the game didn't include any of that, Kolář said.
"The concept was to have a game which is a shooter with a cooperative multiplayer component that would revolve around heisting and criminal activities and so on," Kolář said. 

But Kolář and a number of other people on the team worked on the Mafia franchise and loved the idea of trying to incorporate some of that into the game's early concept.

"We had this concept of organized crime and how to handle it very much in our veins, so to speak," he said. "And we really wanted to evolve it together with this multiplayer component that was completely different from what these mafia games were about. So this really started to make sense in a way that it's really like the building of an empire but not in a linear way, but something that would be different every time we played. Like some kind of simulator of the life of the criminal boss, where you can start living, and based on your decision, it either evolves in a bad way or a good way and gives you an outcome that is dependent on you as a player, not some designer making it."

So soon, the single-player mode of the game became the chief focus, and the multiplayer evolved into a sort of cooperative party game, where players can team up to go through missions together, but what they achieve doesn't impact the single-player mode.

At its heart, Crime Boss: Rockay City remains very much a shooter. But the game's use of tactics, specifically in the single-player mode, does allow players to make missions easier to accomplish, even for someone who isn't great at first-person shooters, Kolář said.

"There's a concept that you need to invest some resources in order to be able to play these missions," he said. "So, depending on how good you are, the more efficient you might be. If you're not so good at first-person shooters, you may need to send more people, which costs a little bit more money, and so your progression is not so fast. But these guys will help you. But if you are a very good player, you may do these missions alone or with just one character."

This allows players to essentially tune the difficulty of their missions, but with some cost and, of course, the risk that if you really screw up, the game could end.

In practice, the system works really well. There's that initial choice of building up and arming your team. The characters you hire each have their own skills and issues. You can eventually unlock a black market, where you can purchase better weapons for them as well.

Once on the scene of a heist, for instance, you also have different ways to achieve the goal of grabbing the loot. You can go in guns blazing and simply do a brazen smash-and-grab. But know you'll soon be swarmed with waves of increasingly difficult cops. Or you can try to stealth your way through a mission, picking locks, avoiding cameras, and patrolling guards.

And, of course, when you lose team members, you lose them for good, along with their weapons. 
 

The Cast, the Decade

The first two things you'll likely notice about Crime Boss are that it's set in a fictional Florida city meant to be the "crown jewel" of the state in the mid-90s and that it has the sort of cast that seems plucked from the decade's best pop culture.

"The action movies from this era, from that time, were a little bit over the top," Kolář said. "You couldn't help but smile when you saw these action heroes do their things. And the technology wasn't that advanced. There were already some mobile phones, but they looked like big bricks. And there were computers, but they were more like big typewriters. 

"It was a fun time. And this is really reflected in the movies. So the cast really kind of reflects these characters, these movies, these stereotypes from that era."

If you look at the cast of the game, it becomes clear that Crime Boss had to be set in the '90s, when these stars reigned supreme in movies and television.

The cast includes Michael Rooker, Kim Basinger, Danny Glover, Danny Trejo, Vanilla Ice, and stars Michael Madsen as the would-be new crime boss of the game.

But casting didn't actually take place until quite a bit of the game had already been developed, Kolář said. Because of the open-ended approach the story takes, it ended up being relatively simple: The current crime boss of the city is killed, leaving a vacuum for someone to step into, which kicks off a sort of crime war for control.

"We were developing the gameplay and the missions, the activities that you do in the city, and then based on the possibilities of the actors, the story started to evolve," he said. "Actually, a lot of these cutscenes and dialogue evolve together with these actors. They knew their roles in and out, so we would tell them the situation for a scene and then let them improvise, let them like, play, let them act."

They also had to be a bit more open to how and where the voice recordings happened. For instance, the team traveled to Chuck Norris' farm and recorded his lines there.
With Madsen, Kolář asked the actor to tap into some of his previous iconic characters, specifically Mr. Blonde and Kill Bill's Budd.

"Being directed to tap into those characters was great advice—they're both iconic, people love them and know them, so tapping into their essence to bring Travis to life was great," Madsen said. "Both those guys had some dark, interesting layers to explore. They got the best out of me as an actor. It was nice going back and looking at them and making Travis Baker one of those iconic roles. Games and movies, man, they're the same thing these days. There's no reason a game character can't have as much of a legacy as anyone up there on the big screen."

Madsen said he found the process to be liberating, especially because it allowed him to tinker with the lines of his character.

"Voice capturing allowed me to do a bit of ad-libbing," he said. "I've been doing this for a long time, so throwing out a few of my own lines comes naturally to me; it was cool. It was a privilege to have that kind of opportunity in the game. Normally, these things are so scripted, but this is a character-lead game with real stories attached to them, so to bring that humanity to Travis was crucial in building out his character. I added as much as I could to it using my own experience in movies, so I had a lot to add!"
Not least of which, his iconic voice, which Madsen said helped him project emotion into his voice-only performance.

"If you are feeling what you are saying, I mean, really feeling what you're saying, and the script is sharp, you can feel the character come to life," he said. "Good direction and a great script—those are vital to any performance. You can always tell when you hear a voice-over from an actor if he is not really in the moment—it always bugs me when I hear that kind of thing. There are a lot of voice actors/voice-overs out there for a lot of products that could have been done much better. I can only do what I do, but thankfully Crime Boss is like a movie, so that helps."

Madsen added that working on a game allows him to focus more on his acting than all of the other things that can, at times, get in the way of his performance in a movie.

"It's not the same as working on a movie at all," he said. "I don't have to shave, and there aren't hours sat in make-up and costume—so that makes it all about the performance. It's pure performance. No crutches, no props or prosthetics, just pure performance. It's a nice way of spending the day, and you can have fun with it too. I'd always look forward to getting in front of the mic and interpreting what the team scripted for us. Crime Boss is the best game I think I've ever done. The best voice I've ever given."
​​​​​​​
Crime Boss: Rockay City hits Epic Games Store on March 28. It's on sale at 20 percent off until noon on launch day.