Robocop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business shows that some tasks can safely be left undone.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a game with the odd reputation of being one of the best mediocre games of the 2020s. Its promoters, and there are many, all acknowledge that it’s a flawed game with a mid-sized budget and won’t blow your mind or land at the top of your all-time favorites list, unless you really love the license, but it satisfies that desire for a 15 hour straightforward campaign like we used to get in the early 2010s. If you set your expectations reasonably and engage with the game on its own terms it can be a fun time, even featuring voice acting from some of the talent from the old movies including Peter Weller alongside the straightforward bloody shooting action.

For my own part I played the game last year and liked it well enough to get the platinum (not that that was a hard task.) I wouldn’t say I love it like some people do, but I enjoyed most of my time with it. It has some fun set pieces and plays differently than most shooters because of how slow and heavy RoboCop is. You’re meant to tank a lot of damage and destroy threats before they wear you down and that’s very different from the modern focus on speed, agility, and fragile but regenerating health rather than longer term attrition.

I also enjoyed the story and atmosphere of the game, which really captured the feeling of a good RoboCop spinoff property, with plenty of open-ended segments and side missions, as well as a lot of low stakes “street level hero” stuff more about aiding the community than fighting waves of bad guys.

When it was announced that a stand-alone expansion game, with the unwieldy name of RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business was going to be coming out I was cautiously optimistic, though the $30 price tag seemed high and I really hadn’t felt like there was a lot of unfinished business after the first game. I would have preferred the team move on to another property (they’ve already done Terminator) or retool for a full sequel with new mechanics and ideas than revisit Rogue City, but I did enjoy the first game and I was willing to give the new, smaller, project a shot. I loved inFamous: First Light and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy so the smaller scope follow-up game has a good track record for me.

Reviews for Unfinished Business were somewhat mixed but the people who’d pushed the first game seemed to mostly like the follow up and with a %40 discount on PSN for Black Friday and me feeling like I hadn’t played any FPS games this year I took the plunge for $17. I’ve now finished the game (getting the even easier plat) and…I have mixed feelings about it. It’s far from the worst game I’ve ever played, and I can’t say that none of it was enjoyable, but it also feels completely unnecessary and lacks a lot of what made Rogue City good.

So what is the unfinished business in RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business? Well, it turns out that it doesn’t really belong to RoboCop. At the beginning of the game there’s a brief prologue where the characters from the last game are treated very poorly by the narrative, and RoboCop goes off to investigate those events in a giant tower OCP has built in Detroit, luring residents there with promises of a high-tech paradise. Of course the entrance to the tower is blocked by a bunch of armed goons, and it turns out the entire thing has been taken over by an army of mercenaries. RoboCop enters the tower and after a little bit of talking and a fait amount of shooting learns that this mercenary army is being controlled by someone with a particular interest in him, and in Alex Murphy, the human he was before he became a literal law enforcement machine. The unfinished business belongs to this guy, the shadowy big bad at the top of the tower, who needs RoboCop to complete his evil plan.

This set-up is reminiscent of the Karl Urban Judge Dredd movie and it’s not a bad idea for a video game. Shoot your way up from the grimy lower floors of a giant cyberpunk tower up towards the penthouse to confront the bad guy. It’s hardly original but done right it can be pretty entertaining, and a decent vector for some social commentary. Unfinished Business doesn’t do it right. The tower doesn’t feel like an escalating pyramid of wealth and privilege, instead it just feels like an endless maze of dilapidated concrete. You pass from one ugly area to the next, with a few bright spots along the way like a colorful makeshift town within the tower or a small entertainment complex with an arcade and movie theater, but it’s mostly just an endless string of utility hallways, security rooms, and nondescript offices. Even areas that seem like they should be different, like a combined dormitory/lab for a group of scientists, feel pretty much the same and don’t really make sense in universe. Why are these scientists living in this shitty rundown section of the tower not appreciably different from where the unemployed and destitute live? It’s made even more confusing because in a flashback that constitutes one of the game’s brief interludes outside the tower we see the apartment of a different scientist who has been unemployed for a few years and it’s small and in a not great neighborhood but it gets lots of natural light and it’s much cozier than anything in the tower. There needed to be more differentiation between the social strata.

In general the whole thing feels like it broke scope containment but didn’t end up as a full sequel, stuck in a weird tweener place. It’s 8 hours long on a normal playthrough (I took over 10 because I did almost everything, a bad habit in my gaming), so quite substantial for a linear shooter and 2/3ds the length of the main Rogue City, but it has a lot less variety than that game. There are side quests and areas that kind of play like an adventure game, but these are of a much lower quality than in the first game, with the repetitive corridor shooting clearly being Unfinished Business’s actual focus. But the combat suffers from both too much repetition (there aren’t even really bosses and you only get to take on an ED-209 in a gimmick sequence) and not enough differentiation from the first game. Rogue City’s ponderous gameplay wore out its welcome for me before that game ended, so doing it again a couple years later (just 1 for me personally) without many new wrinkles gave it an even shorter shelf life the second time around. There is at least one new weapon and there are some new enemies so it’s not like they didn’t add anything at all, but the skill tree is disappointingly not updated (especially since some of the skills are worthless in the new game, including one that lets you unlock safes without the combination even though the game only has 2 safes and they are both incredibly easy to find the codes for and have nothing of value in them) and the weapon upgrades for your main gun all feel the same as they did last time.

I will also admit to being disappointed in the enemy AI, which is terrible, at least on normal difficulty. Sometimes enemies literally march towards their assigned positions while under heavy fire, dying in groups before firing a shot. It’s kind of funny but also immersion breaking, and not challenging. There’s constant chatter on the comms that you’ve hacked about how RoboCop is just mowing through everyone, but even though a running plotline is that the mercs haven’t been paid they all still bravely group up to attack the walking death tank and promptly get their brains splattered against the wall in this very gory game. One guy screams out that his arm got blown off and his buddy runs at you with a dinky little pistol, apparently wanting to be next. I would have liked it if there had been a mechanic like in Ghost of Tsushima where enemies could freak out and flee the battlefield, but this game’s AI is nowhere near advanced enough for that. Even some voice acting of people abandoning their post and you coming to an area where everyone has fled would have been more interesting than endless meatwaves of people more than willing to sacrifice their lives for…no real reason. I will admit the jetpack troopers are particularly funny in that they are so incredibly fragile that if a bullet gets near them they end up careening off into a wall, but sweeping aside cannon fodder gets dull after a while.

The game attempts to mix things up a bit with a few sequences where you play as someone other than RoboCop (including the flesh cop version of Alex Murphy in a flashback) and some sequences where you can’t use your trusty automatic pistol and are forced to rely on other weapons (good, and made me kind of wish the Auto-9 was absent for more of the game or a little less overpowered) or your fists (very bad and annoying.) but really it just should have been a leaner 4 to 5 hour campaign that didn’t have so much filler. The new enemies and weapon would have been enough to make that work, and a faster pace with more of a relentless climb up the tower would have given the game stakes that are undercut when RoboCop pauses to pet a cat or tell a child his drawing sucks.

Unfinished Business would have been a decent rental game in 2011, and to be fair for under $20 in 2025 it’s hard to say I didn’t get my money’s worth even if I deleted it as soon as the credits finished, but it’s nowhere as good as the original Rogue City or something like Evil West or even Immortals of Aveum. Granted those games all cost more on launch, even though they didn’t take long to come down in price, but the point is that the linear AA action game genre isn’t as empty as it once was, and unless you’re desperately craving a game like that I’d say it’s not something you need to play. There’s just nothing here that’s not better in Rogue City, and in addition to everything else I’ve said it’s kind of glitchy, with weird frame stutters at various points and serious frame rate issues in the final area, as well as a few cut scenes that glitched out on me. There’s also some weird stuff with the performances, which are mostly not great, including some of the line reads from the flesh Alex Murphy section that sound like Peter Weller didn’t know he was playing the human version and was still using his RoboCop delivery. Towards the end one minigunner guy became invincible and I had to just walk past him with him blasting away at me because he wasn’t reacting to my bullets. The game feels both padded and rushed.

I should note that despite my not loving the game it has a completion rate of over 50% according to trophies, which is substantial for a game that’s nearly 10 hours long. Probably helped by the fact that by the end you have enough upgrades that you can just walk through everything with regenerating health and a fully automatic gun that never needs to be reloaded spraying exploding bullets everywhere. It’s halfway between power fantasy and walking simulator. The opening hours are a little more challenging, but

I didn’t hate my time with Unfinished Business but it’s a thoroughly inessential product. There are a ton of great indie games more worthy of your money and attention. Some tasks are so unimportant it’s okay to leave them undone. Preferable, even.