New Game Review - RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business (2025)

Following on from their superb shooter RoboCop: Rogue City in 2023, developers Teyon released a stand-alone expansion RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business in 2025. The premise of this is quite similar to Dredd, the 2012 Judge Dredd movie in so far as RoboCop enters the the ground floor of Omni-Tower, an OCP high rise apartment block and has to shoot his way up to the villain (who of course is on the top floor).

This is simplistic, nostalgic and most of all fun! The same attention to detail which impressed me on RoboCop: Rogue City is as evident here. The sights and sounds lifted from the original RoboCop movies return you to feeling like the man/machine himself as Peter Weller delivers his lines with the character's trademark monotone albeit sounding a little older. The UE5 engine has been mostly tamed with a shader compilation on startup that eliminates the level of stuttering that seems to plague other games with the engine. It's not non-existent and there were a number of crashes too but this is all excusable for an AA at €30.

RoboCop doesn't need much more by way of toys than we've already seen but Teyon provide a few new bits and bobs that can be fun if not exactly canon. As before you can pick up discarded bad guy weaponry but this really amounts to a curiosity as you have your trusty Auto-9 with an array of enhancements that you pick up and install along the way. There is a sequence where you're stripped of the Auto-9 and have to use a few other weapons to kill everyone between you and your real weapon.

This is a far more streamlined and less varied game in scope to the parent title; while it does restrict you to to one building, there are a number of sequences in the game where you don't play as Robo as a way of providing narrative context (and a way of preventing you from any burnout from the game's singular Omni-Tower setting). These are mostly flashbacks and include a sequence where you play as Murphy before he's transferred to Metro Central. The best of these is one where an incapacitated Robo takes remote control of an ED-209 unit and has it slowly walk through a level obliterating everything and everyone in a sea of dust, debris and mostly blood!  

While Teyon have produced a bucketload or PC and console games since 2006, it's clear from the success of their Terminator: Resistance game as well as RoboCop: Rogue City that this polish AA studio has found a niche of adapting older movie franchises upon which AAA studios have largely ignored or dropped the ball on. They described RoboCop as their most successful game and with a peak of almost 5000 concurrent Steam users it stands to reason that they don't need mega numbers to be successful and considering that gamers who would have legally seen the original RoboCop in the cinema are at least 57 years old now, that's not too shabby a number. I'm satisfied with what's been put out for RoboCop now, so I'm eager to find out what franchise will get Teyon's treatment next.

Final Verdict: This is essentially a boomer-shooter but with modern graphical fidelity and bells and whistles. It's a shot of both adrenalin and nostalgia and is fun from start to finish. I'll play more RoboCop if they make more but I'd like them to resurrect something else next for variety's sake.

Technicals: 13.6 hours through Steam on Windows 11 with an RTX5080 @ 3440x1440 175Hz. Average  FPS: 120 on max settings

Bugs: 5 crashes in total, usually in cinematics.

Purchase Options: Available on Steam for €29.99. Review copy purchased from Fanatical for €16.24 in Jan 2026.

Series: 

• RoboCop: Rogue City [2023]
• - RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business [2025] 

First Play Review - RoboCop: Rogue City [2023]

 

I've made no secret of the fact that Paul Verhoven's RoboCop is my all time favourite movie. A violent sci-fi drama from 1987 fuelled with hilarious satire in a dark yet deeply prophetic vision of future Detroit. It's the story of Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) who is brutally killed in the line of duty and a nefarious corporation who turns him into a cyborg to prevent crime, and protect their investments. Throuhout the years I felt it would have made an interesting videogame but the franchise was only ever realised by the original Ocean side-scrollers of the 90's and something that only earned 22% in reviews from PC Gamer like Titus Interactive's RoboCop in 2003.

I was delighted in 2021 when I heard RoboCop was getting a real modern video game treatment from developers Tayon, who from all accounts nailed a Terminator game a few years back. Considering the state of a lot of AAA titles are released now, I was glad that a smaller AA studio would handle this as it can often be a labour of love and not something which demanded millions in sales for greedy shareholders. I followed the announcements and developments over the months and as soon as was announced, I signed up to be a beta tester for Robocop: Rogue City in the Summer of 2023.

We were given a three hour demo to evaluate, which was basically the first levels of the game. Using the power of Unreal Engine 5, it became quickly apparent that the interactive RoboCop simulator I wished for had become a reality!  The look and feel of Verhoven's vision had been captured beautifully, so 80's with the sights and sounds, satire and violence from not only the original RoboCop but also its 'adequate' but not as beloved sequel RoboCop 2; the game does thankfully not reference the abysmal RoboCop 3 except for foreshadowing at endgame, but only lore from RoboCop and 2 is included here and it plays like what a real RoboCop 3 should have been. I yelled audibly when an enemies head exploded in a shower of gore and cackled when I punched a perp through a glass window thirty storeys up! It was so impressive that I practically forgot I was meant to be evaluating it and recording bugs.

Crime is everywhere, including smokey backrooms of sleazy game arcades

The main bugs I did find in the beta related to some broken dialogue choices and an issue with some cutscenes and camera work on 21:9 Ultrawide resolutions but these were all fixed by the time a demo was released for the game in early October. This demo served two purposes: so people to evaluate if it would work on their PCs and I think it was also a calculated marketing move. It's relatively unheard of today to have a game demo and the way companies like EA release unfinished games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor prove it's because they don't have confidence in their product. RoboCop: Rogue City publishers Nacon certainly had confidence and despite some early frame-rate issues (as with most UE5 games to be fair) these were fixed and the games eventual release in November 2023 was a massive success.

The full game is a work of incredible commitment on behalf of Teyon who clearly scoured over the movies, recording features and details at an extraordinary level in order to recreate the movie's style in the game. This is most evident in Metro West, Robo's police station. Many details are lifted from the movies and much is fabricated in the same style so that it feels just like the location on screen. Other locations seen are the disused steel mill where Murphy was killed and the industrial waste area where Bodikker and Robo had their showdown. While the game's story events are different, it's still in Old-Detroit and criminals invariably seem to gather in the same places, so seeing these familiar areas again was nostalgic.

RoboCop is not a chatterbox, but every line is delivered by Peter Weller himself

The game's audio isn't the highest quality. It was pointed out during the beta a few times that RoboCop's weapon the Auto 9 did not have the 'oomph' to the sound it had in the movies. The fact 100 testers agreed and it wasn't addressed has led to a belief that it was a permissions issue from MGM and Teyon/Nacon did not have free reign to use every exact sound lifted from the movies. One of the game's selling points had to be that Peter Weller was on board to voice RoboCop's synthesized dialogue. Despite his voice obviously being 35 years older, it didn't distract from his excellent performance. The talent for the other voice actors were somewhat mixed, VAs for Reed and Lewis were well imitated but others like Casey Wong and 'The Old Man' while well acted, sadly did not fit the characters well and it was a little jarring to the immersion. The game also benefits from many of RoboCop's original themes reused from the late Basil Poledouris' score but it was perhaps a little too subdued in places for where new music was created.

The game's gameplay will not be for everyone - but it should really be expected for anyone vaguely familiar with the character of RoboCop. This is an FPS and you are in the RoboCop suit so you're a slow moving tank making your way though pretty linear levels shooting everything that moves. No innovative gameplay here - but it's not needed as it would then not be true to the movies. The targetting and readouts of Robo's HUD are reminiscent of the movies but artistic licence was taken here as more game information needed to be displayed permanently than would have been necessary in the movies such as health, direction and combat info etc. It's not all mindless shooting however, there are some small open-world sequences allowing Robo to wander from one objective to another continuing the main investigation or side quests to follow his prime directives of serving the public trust, upholding the law and protecting the innocent by performing tasks like rescuing kittens from burning buildings or slapping parking tickets on illegally parked cars. There are many sequences which evoke the satire of the movies to varying degree, some of them are true gems.

While firmly an FPS there are some RPG-lite mechanics in so far as you have a 'quest list' of various objectives that help the main investigation and other associated police work. Level exploration reveals secret OCP ammo dumps to retrieve health batteries and upgrades for Robo's Auto 9 pistol (you do get the ability to pick up enemy weapons and used them like AK47s, Uzi sub-machine pistols or the Cobra Assault Cannon but 99% of the time you're shooting your upgraded Auto 9 because you rarely feel you need another weapon unless the game prompts you to use one at a specific time. You can also avail of a skill tree that allows RoboCop to become more defensive, offensive, better at deduction or technical tasks or reveal new dialogue options to gain more XP which in turn get you more points to spend.

Yes you are of course immune to fire

The story fits in nicely after RoboCop 2. The 'Nuke' drug is still the bane of the city, Mayor Kuzak is up for election and the arrival of a new criminal mastermind investing in the city's gangs have emboldened them to become more brazen and aggressive. Robo himself is still haunted by memories of his wife and son which caused him to glitch at a key moment so OCP put a chip in him to evaluate his performance as well as get him a psychiatrist to sort out his humanity and it becomes a theme throughout the game where you can make choices for Robo to either embrace his humanity as Alex Murphy or reject it to become a perfect product.

Final Verdict: RoboCop may not have the polish associated with AAA releases but it benefits from not having the bloat required by such higher profile games need to be successful. It also has what seems to be lacking ion AAA development of late: a team of developers at Teyon who unequivocally prove they adore the RoboCop franchise and concentrated on delivering an movie-quality experience without the injection of modern social politics. This is better than my expectations and if there's more to come, I'm there.

Technicals: 30 hours approx through Steam on Windows 11 with an RTX4070Ti @ 3440x1440 175Hz. Average  FPS: 160 with DLSS3

Bugs: Some crashes, about 5 usually after 3-4 hours of continuous play.

Purchase Options: Available on Steam for €49.99. Review copy purchased from GamersGate for €37.49 in Nov 2023.

I bought this for a dollar!

The RoboCop statue which I have personally partially crowdfunded through Kickstarter has reached a milestone in it's completion. Since the statue to be erected in Detroit achieved it's funding in March 2011, Fred Barton sculpted the cyborg which was 3D scanned and enlarged. Then it was physically fabricated and has now been assembled in foam, wax, clay and steel, standing 10-feet-tall.

Next it will be cast in bronze from this for it's final form. See more photos here.

Sadly the near-dystopian future Paul Verhoeven envisioned for Detroit in 1987 is almost a reality with the city itself insolvent due to decline in the car industry it was famous for, as well as mismanagement and corruption. Forbes named it the most miserable city in the US with 18% unemployment, a third of residents living in poverty and staggeringly high crime rates.

A damning report was published on Monday by bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr, appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to handle the ailing city's finances.

There is only one RoboCop

Yes I've seen the photo. If you haven't seen it, then you will have to look elsewhere for it because I will not be throwing any kind of support behind this new "RoboCop".

Paul Starship Troopers Verhoeven crafted a outstandingly violent tale of a man who became a robotic Judge Dredd melded with Dirty Harry and armed only with a simple set of 3 rules and a machine pistol redefined justice for cinema goers in 1987 and it cannot be remade.

To think that a violent science-fiction movie is all RoboCop is however then you've either not seen it enough or it's been to long since you've seen it [the third option - that you've not seen it is literally a crime around here]. You see - RoboCop is set in Detroit for a reason - the same reason that the city is not thought of in glamorous terms even today, a place of little prosperity, high unemployment and urban crime. The movie explores the gamut of humanity; emotion, immortality, greed but most importantly - identity.

RoboCop was also a satirical look at some elements of Reaganomics but especially the rise of media that can all too easily be used to sway or even change public opinion. A brewing World War III is mentioned briefly by a newscaster on a channel that later uses 60 seconds of airtime to advertise a family oriented nuclear destruction themed board game.

RoboCop is my favourite movie of all time. I've helped fund the statue they're erecting in Detroit and I own three different DVD copies [above] containing different cuts, different qualities and presentations in different aspect ratios just to experience everything in different ways and analyse it even more than I have done so with my religion - Star Wars. The reason for this is because I know that each time I look upon something so undeniably perfect in every way I find answers to many of my own questions.

While I enjoyed the Brazilian move Tropa De Elite which he directed, I do not believe that José Padilha has the talent to make little more than a shadow of the the original RoboCop as even The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner himself could not make even a passingly good sequel to the original in 1990. It is because of this that I will not see this 'remake', so I care nothing about the Dark Knight-esque, G.I.Joe 'accelerator suit' inspired new RoboCop design, nor do I care to be informed about the latest Robo-rumours from your favourite websites.

I choose not to comment further on RoboCop [2013] because for me it will be as if it doesn't exist.

Links from IGN

If Philly has a Rocky statue; why not a RoboCop one in Detroit ?

That was gist of an argument tweeted recently to Dave Bing, Mayor of Detroit, Michigan. Sadly Mr. Bing did not appear to think a statue of a fictional police cyborg created from the remains of a murdered cop by a fascist monopoly who then went on to brutally dispense justice in a future-Detroit by violently killing or maiming lawbreakers before finally breaking his programming and continuing to violently kill or maim lawbreakers by his own accord, was appropriate to have immortalised in stone [or any other material for that matter]. It's probably unsurprising for you to learn Bing is a Democrat.

Right: The bronze statue of Rocky outside a Philadelphia museum

Detroit itself however had other ideas and the people of probably the worst hit city in the United States by the economic downturn became galvanised. One local non-profit group "Imagination Station" was quick to organise a Facebook campaign to fund and construct a $50,000 two-metre high-plus sculpture of RoboCop on privately owned land near the Michigan Central Depot in downtown Detroit, unless the Mayor relents under pressure to have the statue erected in a public location. "It would draw tourists, just as the Fonzie statue known as "Bronze Fonz" does in Milwaukee. Plus, it's just a cool idea," Brandon Walley one of the organisers said.

Amazingly in less than 10 days of the appeal starting, the group had raised more than $25,000 from donations through the Internet. The effort was then considerably helped out by a single $25,000 donation from San Francisco businessman Pete Hottelet, owner of Omni Consumer Products, who produce products based on TV and movie products like the True Blood drink from the show True Blood and Stay-Puft marshmallows from Ghostbusters. The real-life company is named after the fictional oppressive megacorporation that created RoboCop in Paul Verhoven's 1987 movie, well known as my favourite movie of all time.

Peter Weller, who first played Alex Murphy/RoboCop said that the homage to the fictional crimefighter would be good for Detroit. "I think it's a great thing." Jerry Paffendorf one of the RoboCop campaign leaders said he hopes the RoboCop campaign inspires residents and leads to other projects. "If people can raise money for something like RoboCop, then they can do it for their neighborhoods or their schools," he said. "Sometimes it takes a RoboCop to open up the consciousness of these things."

http://detroitneedsrobocop.com/

Sources: Detroit Free Press / detnews.com / SkyNews