Robocop: Rogue City was easily one of my favourite games of 2023. It was a perfectly presented love letter to the Robocop franchise. One that paid particular homage to the dick shooting, squib-tastic, satire strewn Paul Verhoeven original in all of its excessively gory, 80’s action movie glory.
As a Robocop fan, I loved the way the development team recreated iconic locations like the Metro West station, or brought classic characters like Officer Lewis and The Old Man back to life. But as a fan of turn-your-brain-off video games, I also enjoyed the fact that you could make both props and people explode in a variety of incredibly cool ways. Oh, and of course the utterly hilarious, crotch holding, knee buckling, high pitched wail of a death animation that triggered whenever you shot a man in the dick. That never got boring.
And, I’m happy to tell you that it’s still not boring because all that gratuitous penis punishment is back (along with all the other stuff that made Rogue City great, of course) in Robocop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business. This is a standalone spin-off with a budget price that is absolutely, definitely not DLC (developer Teyon was very firm about that) and therefore does not need you to own the original game in order for it to be playable. Even though you absolutely should own it based on everything I just told you in the first two paragraphs. Including the dick shooting. Obvs.
Unfinished Business, however, is a loving tribute not only to the Robocop movies of old, but also to a pair of modern action films, the incredibly excellent Dredd and The Raid. These movies are so excellent in fact that, if you were to tell me you’d never seen them, I would do a very loud tut and slag you off to all my mates behind your back. Just like in Dredd and The Raid, in Unfinished Business, Robocop must make his way (using extreme violence) to the top of a ramshackle residential complex known as the OmniTower, which was once home to Old Detroit’s civilians but has now been seized by an army of mercenaries.
It’s a great setting for a video game, especially seeing as both Dredd and the Raid felt like movie versions of video games themselves. While I’ve only been able to put a couple of hours into clearing out the OmniTower so far, every floor that I’ve visited feels unique. Which, considering a large chunk of the game takes place in the same stark grey, crumbly concrete clad building, means that the constant shooting (of dicks) doesn’t feel repetitive in the slightest. From the open plan lobby full of market stalls displaying bottles of pop that fly off like drunken rockets when you shoot them, and paint cans that burst into clouds of scenery-staining colour, through to a level set in a trash compactor where you have to make your way through a maze of bin bags while new airborne enemies attack you in swarms, there always seems to be a nice little twist to the proceedings that pops up just as the last level was getting tiresome.
In case you were wondering, it isn’t all shooting and exploding all the time either. Civilian supporting side missions are back, and they are just as tongue-in-cheek funny as they were in the main game, providing the occasional break from all the ultra-violence. There’s some ‘Geralt-lite’ detective missions that you can undertake, which utilise Robocop’s Robo Vision, and a bunch of hostages who you rescue from mercenaries, including one who will quiz you on events from the old Robocop movies. Oh and there’s a chap in a wheelchair whose heart I purposefully broke, but I think I’d like to move on from that one please.
Despite the variety of the level design, the return of Peter Weller as Robocop/Alex Murphy and the fact that you can shoot a red barrel and blow someone’s head and limbs off and watch their chunky bits go flying into the distance, Unfinished Business does also have its faults. Playing on PS5 I encountered a fair few glitches and performance issues that definitely make Unfinished Business feel a little…unfinished. I can forgive a few frame rate dips here and there, especially when multiple explosions are going off and people’s legs are flying past my face but, as you’ll see if you watch my stream of the first two hours (above), there was one early cutscene that decided it didn’t want to render any visuals, and another moment during one of the game’s new scenery takedown animations where my unlucky opponent blinked out of existence.
Did any of those things ruin my time with the game so far though? No. No they did not. I’m loving Unfinished Business so far, and I’m excited to see what else this standalone adventure has in store for me. I know there’s a section coming up where you get to control an ED209, which I’m really looking forward to, plus a nod to some classic characters from the decidedly dodgy Robocop 3, but I’m equally happy to just stomp around the levels in Robocop’s big old metal boots, hurting perps in as many ways as possible. Yes it’s basically the same game as Rogue City, but in a tower, so people tired of that game may just glaze over this one, but for people like me who loved the original and just want to make more things do a bang? Well, in the slightly misquoted words of the mighty Bixby Snyder, “I’d buy that for [£24.99]!”
