‘RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business’ Mini Review
Developer: Teyon | Platform: PS5 | Playtime and Platinum: 10:15
In a surprising move, 2023’s really quite good RoboCop: Rogue City has received a standalone expansion/mini sequel in the form of Unfinished Business. While I do appreciate the chance for an extra Platinum trophy with it being standaone, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone who hadn’t played the original. If you have then great, it’s more good stuff. If not, then this package doesn’t offer the same highs as the original and may put you off.
The story takes place after(?) the events of the original game. A nameless mercenary group have taken over an OCP tower block and stolen equipment from the Detroit Police Department. RoboCop’s there to restore peace and get the equipment back. The story never really advances from there, not that it necessarily has to. The villain is standard affair, quotes ancient philosophers for some reason and does enough villainous stuff to keep the plot going.
Unfinished Business takes place entirely within the OCP tower and as such doesn’t quite have the same freedom to explore as the locations in the base Rogue City. In fact, a good amount of your playtime will involve shooting goons in corridors. It’s still fun but it’s also a good 80% of what happens in the game, interspersed ever so slightly with mild NPC interactions which constitute side quests.
This lack of openness compared to the original is part of the reason why I believe this isn’t a good jumping in point, the other is that the game throws you right in the deep end. While I only died around three times over 10 hours on normal, the game kicks off with it’s difficult enemies near enough straight out of the gate - armoured enemies and snipers for example are there from the get go rather than like five hours in.
The upgrade and gun modification systems return but neither of them are as much use as in the original. You’ll not get anywhere close to fully upgrading RoboCop but that’s fine since you can ignore 75% of the skill categories in favour of improving Vitality, Armour and Damage. I genuinely don’t see a scenario in which the others are useful in this different experience. As for weapon modification, your default weapon - the Auto 9, has different upgrade boards that can be slotted in, with chips that help connect and activate the improvements. I only ever used the basic board for fear of a repeat of the base game - by halfway I had a one shotting infinite ammo weapon. Trivialised the game. Maybe that;s fixed here but I didn’t want to try.
As an epilogue piece to Rogue City, Unfinished Business does a fine enough job carrying on the same fun moment to moment gameplay. If you’re new to these games and want somewhere to start, I’d highly recommend Rogue City and coming back to this one later. Unfinished Business is good, but it’s no competition to what came before.
