RoboCop: Rogue City was one of the surprise hits of 2023, delivering a fantastic first-person shooter campaign that seemed like a perfect love letter to the legendary 80s action franchise. It wasn’t the most polished or deep experience, but its meticulously faithful recreation of the films’ Old Detroit setting, the return of RoboCop actor Peter Weller, and an unwavering commitment to delivering a brutal power fantasy made it a must-play for fans of the series.
This year, developer Teyon is back to finish what it started with RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business. It’s not a full-on sequel, nor some throwaway piece of downloadable content (DLC), but rather a shorter standalone experience intended to round off the events of the main game. Its roughly 8-10 hour long campaign sees you once again taking control of the shiny chrome cyborg and gunning down legions of goons in a one-robot war against the criminal underworld, albeit now in a new, more condensed setting.
I had the chance to go hands-on with the game for an hour and a half at an event organized by publisher Nacon and, while the experience certainly didn’t subvert my expectations by any means, it left me confident that Unfinished Business is going to be a worthy follow-up to its popular predecessor.
Tight spaces
To kick things off, I experienced the first two levels of the game in addition to its brief prologue segment. The action begins with a patrolling RoboCop responding to a call about a police station under siege.
He arrives to find scores of murdered cops, including a few that have been frozen solid by some kind of ice blast. This foreshadows one of the new weapons introduced in this expansion: the Cryo Cannon. Initially wielded by enemy criminals, this freezing launcher is eventually added to Robocop’s arsenal, though it sadly wasn’t something that I was able to try in my hands-on.
After some brief investigative work, namely scanning a handful of corpses, it becomes apparent that the RoboChair – RoboCop’s shiny throne stroke repair station – has been hijacked, with the attackers gaining access to the OCP system and potentially giving them control of all the law enforcement robots in the city. In RoboCop: Rogue City, I often found the need to scan your surroundings like this to progress a little frustrating, as it slowed the pace to a crawl at times when I would much rather just be shooting.
In what I played of Unfinished Business, however, the requirement to do this seems to have been drastically reduced outside of this brief segment, which is definitely a positive improvement. From here, the action moves at a breakneck pace to the OCP OmniTower – a huge housing development unit and the main setting of the game. Controlled by heavily armed mercenaries, it’s less apartment building and more makeshift fortress with a huge density of well-equipped foes. Naturally, the shooting starts almost the second you step through the door.
Popping heads with the ridiculously powerful Auto 9 pistol is as cathartic as ever, but some subtle changes to how combat flows here help make fights even more satisfying. The focus on smaller interior environments ups the ante significantly, with claustrophobic encounters where groups of enemies stick to cover and pepper you with bullets from all sides.
One of the most significant early upgrades in Rogue City let you ricochet bullets off certain wall panels, a feature that returns with a vengeance and is enabled from the get go. Ricochet panels are practically everywhere now, highlighted automatically as you aim your weapon.
A glowing line shows you the projected path of your bullets when you point at one, and it snaps on to the nearest foe like some kind of homing weapon. The damage from ricochet attacks seems massively boosted too, at least in my experience, and had me taking down even tanky, heavily armoured enemies in one or two hits. Is it a bit ridiculous? Certainly, but feels incredibly cool and helps even the playing field when you’re faced with tight corridors with an abundance of enemy cover.
And yes, you can still shoot enemies in the crotch for a critical hit. Would it really be RoboCop: Rogue City without it?
Absolute cinema
Towards the end of the first level you encounter a mysterious woman, who speaks to you via a radio call. Although initially sceptical, she soon becomes something of a companion for the rest of the game, guiding you through objectives and helping out by remotely hacking obstacles like security doors.
Aside from one hilarious moment in the opening where RoboCop looks directly at the camera and says “this is my unfinished business”, I didn’t find the narrative all too engaging – though in an action-focused game like this I’d argue this isn’t a major complaint.
Peter Weller is still providing voice work for RoboCop and sounds pitch-perfect, but the voice actors for more minor characters often deliver lines in an awkward, stilted fashion. Nothing too immersion breaking, though it is clear that Teyon has focused its limited resources on making the combat tick.
On that note, Unfinished Business features a handful of missions where you step into the shoes of other characters – including flashbacks where you’re a pre-RoboCop Alex Murphy. I wasn’t able to try any of these specific levels sadly, but the developers assured me that playing as Murphy would offer its own uniquely challenging spin on combat thanks to his more fragile, fleshy body.
I did at least get to try one level later on where you hack into a fan-favorite ED-209 robot and rampage through a few floors of the OmniTower with it. At first, I wasn’t too impressed with its plodding speed and almost indestructible durability as I effortlessly clicked on the heads of fleeing goons, but it all came together in a climatic final fight against another ED-209 in a room-size model of Old Detroit.
Smashing through plastic skyscrapers like a machine-gun touting Godzilla, it would be impossible for even the most cynical player not to sit back and think ‘hell yeah’.
It’s bombastic set-piece moments like these that made the original RoboCop: Rogue City punch so much more than its weight and I’m glad to see that the sense of spectacle hasn’t been lost despite this expansion’s more modest $29.99 / £24.99 price tag.
I walked away eager to see what else RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business has in store when it arrives for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S on July 17, 2025.
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
