RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business Review

It’s been a year and a half since RoboCop’s last outing, so now he’s back with RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business for some more first-person policing. Remember those mercenaries who helped The New Guy In Town six months ago? Well, they’re still in Detroit and up to no good. So, Robo heads out to OmniTower, the living complex where they’ve set up shop, to root them out.

The fact that the game takes place almost exclusively in OmniTower had me a little concerned when it was first announced. I figured that the location would be repetitive, or you would just spend the whole game clearing floor after floor of mercenaries. I was happy to be proven wrong, as it’s part apartment block, part town. One of the floors has a movie theatre, another is full of laboratories and scientists… it's a lot more diverse than I figured it would be.

Unfinished Business is a shorter adventure, weighing at about half as long as Rogue City, but it’s just as fun for the most part. In a surprising change, there are multiple sections where you don’t actually play as RoboCop, but I won’t spoil the surprise (I’ll let the store pages do that for me). It’s quite different to be running around without all of Robo’s upgrades, I’ll say that much.

Another change comes in the form of the new takedowns, which you can do when an enemy is near certain objects. While these are fun, they’re a bit obvious? Like, you see the objects in a room and you know that enemies are probably going to run over to those so that you can utilise them. Sure, that’s better than having to grab people and walk over to them, but have you ever played a cover shooter and just know there’s a big fight about to occur because you’re surrounded by places to hide? Same thing.

There is one holdover from Rogue City, which doesn’t make sense, in the form of receiving a letter grade at the end of each level. These don’t make narrative sense, as RoboCop had a chip inserted into his head to monitor his actions, but that was also removed. They don’t actually play into the narrative, to be fair, but it was a little strange to see them reappear.

The most fun I had was with the new weapon, a Cryo Cannon. It fires a blast of liquid nitrogen which deals splash damage, and by “splash damage” I mean “it freezes everything in the vicinity”. The visual effect is awesome, with jagged ice crystals forming on everything, with enemies frozen in motion.

Unfortunately, that leads me into Unfinished Business’s issues, since it was while firing the Cryo Cannon, and being shot at by two enemies wielding them, that the game crashed. Sure, there might be another underlying issue at fault, but there was a lot of ice forming…

I also encountered several softlocks, which meant that I had to go back a few autosaves. You can’t save the game manually, so I imagine if there’s an issue with all of the autosaves, you’d be stuck and have to restart the entire level.

The next most serious issue was enemies appearing literally out of nowhere. I mean dead ones, at that, just straight up falling to the ground nearby. Other dead enemies would suddenly “burst”? I’d be walking down a hallway towards a bunch of corpses and a splurt of blood would shoot out of one of them.

Some issues that carry over to this game are the shoddy lip syncing, textures popping in, and the volumes being a bit all over the place. The radios hidden around the areawhich play a short segment, are back, but I had to turn up the volume to make out one of them. The others were fine, and I’ve no idea why or how that would be.

Finally, there are spelling errors in subtitles, which is a rookie mistake from a seasoned developer. Luckily, the voice actor recording scripts don’t appear to have had the same mistakes.

I enjoyed the voice acting in Unfinished Business more than in Rogue City, because the quality of acting was basically all resting on Peter Weller’s shoulders. This time, the cast of new characters and extras are decent accompaniments to the veteran actor, who reprises his role once again.

The music is basically just a bunch of remixes of the RoboCop theme tune, but there is a Streamer Mode in case you want to play without licensed music for well, streaming.

As far as graphics go, this doesn't really improve anything over Rogue City. The environments are still great, but the characters are a little generic. Though I was exploring before going to an objective marker and knew which people I would need to speak to, because they didn’t look the same as everyone else.

I will say that you should probably play Rogue City first, because this game starts you off fully upgraded, and it doesn’t explain what your abilities are. And, of course, it continues the mercenary plot that wasn’t fully resolved. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to play it.

I’d also like to mention some of the things I’ve really enjoyed, such as the dystopian worldbuilding, using shields and radiators as anti-personnel bludgeons, and RoboCop’s dialogue. With more polish, this would have scored much higher, because I genuinely enjoyed my time with the game despite its flaws.

RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business is a lot of fun. I honestly did want more RoboCop, and that’s exactly what I got. Sure, you don’t get to ticket cars this time, but you do get to resolve disputes between neighbours and tell punks to make your day! I just wish that it didn’t have so many major issues…