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How RoboCop: Rogue City fulfilled my dream of having enhanced sight
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Stephen Wilds
One of the more notable visual aesthetics in the RoboCop movies when the audience sees through Alex Murphy’s eyes. These bionic orbs help him analyze situations out in the field with robotic precision. The vibrant green overlay and its accompanying text highlight targets, point out items, and scrutinize important clues for his investigations; in addition, Murphy can also zoom in on almost anything, which is amazing. I've been legally blind since birth due to my albinism, so I’ve always struggled with seeing, and my disability makes many games harder to play.
When developer Teyon first showed off Rogue City, I thought it looked fun, but I assumed that the scanning would be more situational. When I played the game for myself, I was incredibly surprised to see how the game managed to weave this feature into its mechanics. We often say that for many accessibility features to be truly useful, the developers need to plan for them early in development or tie them to the core gameplay—Rogue City is an excellent example of that approach done right. Thankfully, the developers wanted to honor the films and made sure that the green active interface was present. It's activated with a single button press, and the interface's range can be upgraded throughout the game; you can even buy the ability to auto-mark several key items. There’s also a button to activate night vision for low-light situations.
RoboCop is a tank, but he’s also an effective death-dealer. When he walks into a room full of punks, the bullets fly freely and he makes the shots count, taking out criminals quickly. The scanning ability highlights each of the enemies within my radius in an easy-to-detect color and locks onto them, which helps make me a better marksman and allows me to live up to RoboCop's heroic reputation. Thanks to the interface, I missed fewer shots, spotted extra ammo, and avoided incoming grenades throughout each of the game's missions. The scanner also clued me in to key items that I needed, which saved me from wandering around too much.
Having this experience helped me connect to the game more. There are other solid qualities there, but Rogue City giving me the cybernetic vision that I've always wanted from the movies was fantastic. I know it can’t work for every game, but I’m begging for more baked-in accessibility features like this, whether it completely fits the source material or not. I want to be more than human—or just as good, if possible.
Robocop: Rogue City is available on the Epic Games Store.