RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business review: "Wonderfully indulgent"

It looks like it’ll conjure some deliciously '90s nostalgia, where games based on films were all the rage.

With beloved film franchises comes dedicated fan bases, and so one of two things is essential when adapting movies into games: it should either extract the DNA of what made the film great, or the game should make the player feel exactly like the character they’re portraying.

Few licensed games in recent years have managed to do both as authentically as Robocop: Rogue City did in 2023 (despite that game’s numerous flaws). It served as a sequel to the first two films, blending their violence and satire with the outrageous action of Frank Miller’s Robocop comic book series.

The bones of Rogue City’s gameplay are in Unfinished Business, a new standalone expansion that can be played without owning or having any prior knowledge of the previous game.

When we return to Detroit, we find Metro West police station in disarray. Fire engulfs its corridors. Ford Taurus patrol cars are riddled with bullets. The bloodied bodies of officers are strewn across the building. It’s eerily quiet, apart from the heavy thudding of Robocop’s metallic feet.

A band of mercenaries are responsible for the destruction. They’ve made off with Robocop’s data chair and have fled to OmniTower, a skyscraper designed by Omni Consumer Products (OCP, the corporate overlords from the films) to improve the lives of Old Detroit’s citizens.

Filled with vengeance and determined to finish his "unfinished business", Robo enters OmniTower and must work his way through its floors, wiping out thugs until he reaches their boss, the sinister Cassius Graves. It’s hard to ignore the similarity to films like Dredd and The Raid, both of which feature a law enforcer smashing their way to the top of a building.

Inside, OmniTower is a concrete hellhole. One bartender we meet along the way describes it as being like a "smelly corpse, rotting away day by day".

There’s a dank shopping mall and a slum where people are selling their lungs to survive. The rest of it is made up of industrial corridors - which leads to some snappy shootouts - and larger open areas that are filled with enemies either rushing towards you or firing away from vantage points above.

Rogue City’s meandering side quests and RPG-like dialogue trees have been pushed to one side in Unfinished Business (although a dollop remains) as action takes centre stage.

It has a roller coaster pace as you march from one gun fight to the next, breaching doors and walls and gunning down enemies with Robocop’s über powerful Auto 9 machine pistol (which is still the most satisfying weapon to use, despite the addition of the icy Cryo Cannon).

There’s a smattering of new baddies like heavily armoured soldiers, katana-wielding cyborgs (as seen in Robocop 3) and flying drones. They all provide a tougher challenge than your average crook, many of whom still wander aimlessly into Robocop’s line of fire.

The developer Teyon again recreates the essence of being Robocop with aplomb.

It’s in the frantic shootouts where Basil Poledouris’s film score blares out. It’s in the way Robo plonks around taking fierce amounts of damage like a walking tank. It’s in the cinematic finishing moves that have been added - hit R1 near an object highlighted in yellow and the cop will smash someone’s head through a TV screen or a fuse box.

We also get to play as Alex Murphy before he’s murdered and turned into a cyborg. It offers a welcome break from the oppressive atmosphere of OmniTower.

A mission takes place inside an abandoned warehouse where we also get some nuanced commentary on the police force and its role in society.

The real highlight is an explosively gory segment where we take control of ED-209, a giant machine armed with a rocket launcher and twin cannons.

Just like Rogue City, Unfinished Business is the gaming equivalent of stuffing your face with pizza and popcorn on a Saturday night. It’s not overly complex or flashy, but it’s wonderfully indulgent.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is now available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

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