RoboCop: Unfinished Business Review: Mindless Fun

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is a newly released standalone expansion to 2023’s surprisingly excellent and charming RoboCop: Rogue City. And while this new RoboCop game is built on the foundation of Rogue City, it lacks a lot of what made the first game so compelling. Still, it is fun to walk into a room and shoot 20 random thugs with a big pistol. So that’s something.

Unfinished Business opens in a really depressing way. Set after the events of the last game, it kicks off with an attack on the police station—which served as one of your central hubs in Rogue City—that leaves many of the NPCs from that game dead. A few of the main characters from the movies, like Officer Lewis, survive, point RoboCop in the direction of a big tower filled with mercenaries who were likely responsible, and then don’t show up again for hours and hours. It’s like Unfinished Business wants to remind players of the more varied world and characters of the last game before it dumps you into the boring corridors of OmniTower.

Once in OmniTower, Unfinished Business tasks you with reaching the upper levels of the massive structure. But between RoboCop and his goal are hundreds of bots and mercs ready to kill the shiny hero. While Rogue City featured plenty of first-person combat, Unfinished Business features loads more. This is mostly an action game, whereas the last one could be charitably described as a low-budget spin on a Bethesda game.

Thankfully, gunning down creeps and saving hostages is still a blast in Unfinished Business. And a few new weapons, along with the ability to use the environment to take down baddies—like shoving someone down a garbage chute—help spice things up. But I really hope you liked the shooty-shooty bits from Rogue City because Unfinished Business is mostly that.

In Rogue City, I fell in love with a little slice of Old Detroit as I patrolled it, completed side missions, met various characters, and helped protect them. That’s all gone in Unfinished Business. There are still side quests and characters to meet, but most of them are left behind between levels as you keep moving up. Instead of a small slice of urban decay that you can grow to love, Unfinished Business gives you oh so many grey corridors and rooms. Thanks?

All the RPG systems from Rogue City are back in Unfinished Business, which does help add more to this game and keep it from being just a straight-up linear shooter, but compared to what came before, it’s disappointing. A few moments where you get to play as a pre-RoboCop Alex Murphy are neat, but don’t add much to the experience.

Hopefully, the devs behind Unfinished Business and Rogue City have a proper sequel in the works that brings back the open-world RPG formula that made that last game so charming and memorable.

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