What drew me to pick Crime Boss: Rockay City – First Month Edition for this month’s Blaugust Reviews Humble Choice was the silly name. At first glance, it sounds like the name of a poorly translated JRPG. Even taking off First Month Edition, which refers to the extra DLCs included, it’s generic sounding enough to be anything from a browser game that wants you to annoy your friends with invites, to a mobile game, or a low budget indie game – probably made by one guy. So you can imagine my surprise when I actually clicked on the game and saw (from the trailers at least) what looked like a well polished Rouge-like FPS. And who’s that in the back of the splash screen…is that, Chuck Norris? It Is! In fact, the game features the voice talent and likeness of a whole slew of people you may recognize: Danny Trejo, Chuck Norris, Danny Glover, Vanilla Ice…

Now also imagine my surprise when I went to install it and saw a 90 GB download in my future. If something’s going to take up that much space it better be good or it’s not sticking around long!

I installed Crime Boss at the beginning of the month and played through the tutorial. My initial impressions were: it’s a heist game mixed a hero shooter and a dash of rouge-like. The tutorial was kind of fun, there was a good mix of stealth and gun fights but I had this nagging feeling that it would be better with friends. I started the first mission after the tutorial, spent 15 minutes wandering around looking for the objective, while my AI companions alerted all of the guards and got us all killed…I shelved the game with the thought I’d come back to it after a few days.

But days turned in to weeks and I was staring at the end of the month. Nothing quite motivates like a deadline right?

Jumping back in, I powered through the first mission and figure out how to control my companions so they didn’t wander into the sight line of the guards. I also found the objective, repelling gear to scale the building, fairly quickly. I’m not sure if I ran into a bug my first go round, I thought I thoroughly searched everywhere all while my handler was shouting “Find the bag!” and “They’re sending in reinforcements!” every few seconds over the comms.

That led to breaking in to a bank to steal some very large, very expensive statues, while having a shoot out with the police who kept crawling out of the vents. At one point, I needed to open some bank vaults with a drill and defend the area as it drilled through. Again, I feel like the whole thing would be a lot of fun with friends. To their credit though, the AI companions aim well and stay behind cover more than I do…

I did have one of them die on me. I was close to the extraction point when they went down. I thought it would be too much of a hassle to back track and get them up so I extracted without them. Only then was I informed that if they die, they don’t come back….this is a rouge-like after all!

With the first heist done, there’s actually a bit more of the tutorial to go. This one focusing on the obligatory 2D map that seems to be in every rouge-like – Turf War! See, you’re a Crime Boss and there are other Crime Bosses out there andeveryone wants to be the biggest, baddest, Crime Boss in Rockay City. To do that, you hire soldiers to either attack an opponents territory or defend your own territories. You pick how many soldiers to take with you and then enter a team death match style game mode and see who loses all their soldiers first. I found that sneaking around and flanking the enemy forces was a pretty good tactic and lead to some one man army situations. Once you take a territory, it generates income every day.

The Turf War map also has randomly placed missions for your team to go on. Your team is made up of four bosses (Wait, I thought I was the crime boss here. Maybe they’re lesser bosses.) which have their own unique set of weapons, perks, and equipment. Like I said, if they die during the missions they’re gone for good, so you can hire more. Each team member can go on one mission a day before needing to rest so I ended up with two teams. The more missions you do, the more Heat you generate which makes the police peruse you more aggressively.

The missions seem to range from busting up boxes in warehouses to steal loot, which takes a few minutes, to multi-step heist missions that take considerably longer. There are also some missions that move the story along. I’ve liked every mission type I’ve encountered so far except the pure stealth missions. I’m all for sneaking around, but I don’t like having one random bank employee look at me the wrong way and needing to start over.

At the end of each day, you gain your income from your territories, your Heat decreases, and Sheriff Norris gets a little closer to completing his investigation. There doesn’t seem to be a way to decrease the investigation level or I missed that information some where. When it reaches 100% there’s a final clash with the law as you try to escape the city. I did not escape, and ended up getting killed fairly quickly. So I’m not sure if the story goes on from here or not if you manage to flee.

My entire run lasted 10 in game days, just over 3 hours of play time. At the end of the run you get some stats showing how well you did and some permanent passive buffs. There seems to be enough variety in the missions that another run wouldn’t be too repetitive.

I’ve enjoyed my time with Crime Boss enough to complete a run. Even if that run ended in my death. It’s not a game I would have picked up outside of Humble Choice but it’s different enough from other games I’ve played to make the experience novel. It’s completely over the top, serious to the point of absurdaty, and reminds me of the types of games that I played on the PSP. It’s verified for the Steam Deck so I might just give it a whirl sometime to reminisce.

As a final note, according to the Steam reviews, if you like PayDay 2 you’ll like Crime Boss.