RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business Review: RoboCop Goes Full Dredd/The Raid
RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business Review: RoboCop Goes Full Dredd/The Raid originally appeared on GameDaily .
RoboCop: Rogue City turned heads when it launched in late 2023. While not a revolution for the well-worn FPS genre, it captured the essence of RoboCop in a way that felt genuine in a way that is so rare in licensed games. Rogue City refined the gunplay and exploration from developer Tayon's earlier title, Terminator Resistance, and brought in the sensibilities of the RoboCop franchise to create a brand new experience that felt like a natural extension of the classic films on which it's based (and RoboCop 3, too).
A year and a half later, RoboCop is back with Unfinished Business, a DLC expansion-turned-standalone sequel to Rogue City. While its roots as a DLC are still evident, and it doesn't do enough to emerge from the shadow of its big brother base game, Unfinished Business is still a blast to play and has enough meat on its bones to feel like a proper entry in the RoboCop canon.
The story is tangentially connected to Rogue City, but it's not essential to have played that first (but you should, because Rogue City rocks!). Following an attack on the police station that leaves multiple cops and civilians dead, RoboCop is sent, alone, to OmniTower, a massive urban apartment complex, to take down the perpetrators responsible, who also have a secret goal and connection to RoboCop's past as Officer Alex Murphy.
Like Rogue City before it, Unfinished Business gets a lot of mileage out of Peter Weller, the original RoboCop actor, reprising his role as Murphy. RoboCop's closest allies on the Detroit police force, Lewis and Reed, are relegated to little more than cameos, which could be disappointing for fans of those characters, but it serves the narrative to focus squarely on RoboCop and his adventure through OmniTower, which clearly draws inspiration from movies like Dredd and The Raid, which are also blood-soaked stories that see their ultra-violent heroes ascending through a building, taking down anyone standing in their way.
Unfinished Business is cut from the same cloth as its predecessor, with little new in its core mechanics to distinguish it from Rogue City. There's a single new weapon (which I wasn't able to use thanks to a glitch, but we'll get to that later), but the main new additions come in the form of new playable characters. There's a level where RoboCop flashes back to his days as Alex Murphy, fighting crime with his fellow Detroit PD officers.
This level makes Murphy more agile but less durable, and his night vision is replaced with a flashlight. Another level puts players in the mechanical shoes of an ED-209 robot, righteously cutting down dozens of foes with 20mm machineguns and rockets. The two other playable characters are featured in non-action levels that build out the world and show the action from a perspective that's less heavily armed and nigh-invincible than that of RoboCop.
My final playtime in Unfinished Business was 10 hours, a bit shy of the 14 hours it took for me to run through the original game. However, there's also a lot less fat on its bones, with fewer superfluous side quests than in Rogue City. These were hit-and-miss in Rogue City and would often see RoboCop take on superfluous tasks that felt more like filler to pad out the runtime than stories that fleshed out the character and his world. Not every side mission in Unfinished Business is a winner, but they're generally quicker and more immediate, and serve as a nice break from the action.
And speaking of the action, gunplay was a highlight of Rogue City and remains stronger than ever in Unfinished Business, which ratchets up the enemy count, cranks up the difficulty, and adds a new melee-based foe that will look familiar to fans of RoboCop 3 (there are dozens of you, I'm sure).
Unfortunately, the gunplay is hindered by a glitch that developer Tayon has promised to fix, but which still impacted my experience with the game. At a certain point, I was unable to switch to my secondary weapon. Normally, that's not really a problem, since RoboCop's iconic Auto 9 hand cannon is tremendously versatile, powerful, and downright awesome to use, but it meant I wasn't able to experiment with the game's one new weapon, an ice cannon that allows users to channel their inner Mister Freeze.
There's also a late-game level where Robo loses access to his Auto 9 sidearm and is forced to rely on weapons taken off of enemy corpses. If it wasn't for the fact that I had upgraded my Combat skill tree to the point where the flashbang shockwave had fatal effects, I would have been unable to progress through to the end of the story. For players who prioritized other skill trees, they're just going to have to wait for a patch in order to finish the game.
RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business isn't the most polished experience on the market. Despite leveraging the power of the Unreal Engine 5, there are some technical issues that betray the game's less-than-AAA budget. While RoboCop can get away with having stiff and stilted animations (ya know, being a cyborg and all), the human characters don't have that same excuse. Likewise, facial animations are lacking, with unnatural lip movements and dead-eyed stares aplenty. The camera angles during these dialogue sequences don't help much, with the same plain "shot-reverse shot" angles we've been seeing since the original Mass Effect (or, if you'd prefer, Deus Ex).
On the other hand, when the bullets start flying, RoboCop is gorgeous, with every shot having an impact on the environment, blasting hunks of concrete into particles that litter the battlefield. Enemies get ripped to gory shreds and go flying in glorious displays of exaggerated ragdoll physics, and Robo's new melee takedown animations are a fun new addition to the combat of Unfinished Business, even if they're a bit less bone-crunchingly violent than one might expect.
RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business doesn't rewrite the playbook from Rogue City, but it doesn't need to. That 2023 game set a strong foundation, and Unfinished Business builds on it, pushing the existing combat mechanics to their limits while telling a novel story that fleshes out RoboCop's mythology with new lore and character moments. Its visibly limited budget holds the game back a bit, but never enough to keep me from playing. Like RoboCop himself, the game is a bit mechanical and a bit rusty, but there's still a human soul within.
Final Score: 7/10
GameDaily was not provided a copy for review, and played the game on PlayStation 5 Pro.
This story was originally reported by GameDaily on Jul 29, 2025, where it first appeared.
