The way this game’s concept, structure, premise, and story is unrolled feels disjointed, confused, and slapdash in a way that makes understanding the bigger picture much harder than it should be. Onboarding is Crime Boss’ first major hurdle. Then get killed by the worst iteration of the “Chuck Norris Joke” I’ve ever seen, which is weird considering literal, by-God Chuck Norris is involved in this one. As Baker your job is to spew awkward one-liners at underlings, choose goals and tasks each day, and make piles of cash by any means necessary. And Baker is the hero of that waking nightmare. Everything about this game is like what happens if a Boondock Saints poster and the cover of a PlayStation 2 GTA do the Fusion Dance and miss the finger touch at the end. The campaign stars Travis Baker, a de-aged, cowboy hat-wearing, smarmy Michael Madsen clone grown in a vat at a video game protagonist factory run by an AI chatbot. Smells like a 2009 dorm room in hereĬrime Boss: Rockay City is a head-scratching blend of “turf wars,” first-person shooting-slash-stealth heist action, bizarre stunt casting and… it’s also a roguelike? It’s almost like a mixture of WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!, and Grand Theft Auto with an unending stream of small snippets of gameplay strung together by cutscenes featuring grown-ass adults yelling to each other about doing crimes like a group of teenagers who just watched Scarface together for the first time. This game is a fascinating blend of vibes, genre, and sound mixing that feels out of time and place with such profound confidence I almost felt like it was my fault for being confused. The first thoughts being, “what in tarnation have I brought upon myself” and “wait, is that Body Count?” Developed by INGAME Studios and published by 505 Games, Crime Boss: Rockay City is the strangest game I’ve played so far in 2023.

But it was the third thing I thought of after playing Crime Boss: Rockay City. Until today I hadn’t thought about Drug Wars for years. The novelty of these crude renditions of Super Mario Bros., DOOM, and Phoenix was powerful, but only one game captured long-term interest: Drug Wars. These gimmicks lost their luster soon enough but in that moment, news these things could play games spread all hush-hush-like from the one guy in class with a personal calculator and a USB cable. We got to use graphing calculators, hulking slabs of plastic with Game Boy-sized screens and a million buttons most kids would never press. Years and years ago, there was a brief moment in time when math class was exciting.

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