Unfinished Business is a Great RoboCop (and Judge Dredd) Game

Calling RoboCop: Rogue City: Unfinished Business (come on guys, ease it with the colons) a Judge Dredd game is both an obnoxious simplification and absolutely valid. It’s a RoboCop story, true to that character and world, but I’ve always struggled to see RoboCop as more than a single eighties film rather than a legitimate franchise. Whereas Judge Dredd is decades of stories, from the random comic I had as a kid for some reason to the Karl Urban film I’ll never stop asking for a sequel to.

The two franchises share an awful lot of DNA: violent, helmeted cops patrolling a future teetering on the edge of dystopia, both satires of fascism and consumerism and a dozen other thematic and subtextual ideas. RoboCop: Rogue City was a Detroit-wide adventure, an expanding of RoboCop lore, drawing from all 3 original films. Unfinished Business narrows the ideas and story and wears its influences on its chunky metal sleeve. The developers at Teyon say ‘fuck it’ and instead of hiding from the similarities between RoboCop and Judge Dredd, make the game an outright ode to the 2012 film Dredd.

Sure, it may not be the most original story idea. The developers could say they were actually influenced by The Raid. Yeah right. RoboCop having to storm a building taken over by a criminal militia, fighting on each floor until he reaches the villain at the top, is pure Dredd. And it works wonderfully. Dredd was a great throwback to simple action films of old, 90 minutes of a cop with a gun and a building full of baddies, and likewise the best thing about Unfinished Business is how refreshingly simple it is. Perhaps more so than Rogue City, it feels like a FPS shooter from 15 years ago. It even has the bad guys spawn in little featureless rooms just off the main track, and I can’t remember the last time I saw that in a game.

Omni Tower in Unfinished Business is very similar to Peach Trees in Dredd, and works just as well in a video game. I’ve always loved games like this, contained to a single location but one that has variety within. Arkham Asylum or the ship from Dead Space. It’s the best of both worlds: claustrophobic yet expansive enough to show different areas, how people live their whole lives in such a place, from apartments to offices to labs to recreation rooms and even vacation zones. It doesn’t get boring. And the commentary on society isn’t lost, the tower being a microcosm of Detroit. Delta City never gets built so here we can finally see what life is like when created and contained entirely by OCP. 

The tight hallways and maze of corridors also give the action a different flavour to the previous game. I remember unlocking the ricochet ability late into Rogue City and barely using it; in Unfinished Business it’s massively helpful, firing around corners and down stairwells. The game improves the already strong feeling of being like a tank from Rogue City, and I rarely used anything other than the maxed-out Auto-9 pistol to take down the legions of enemies. Seriously, I think you kill double the amount of people in Unfinished Business compared to Rogue City despite it being a much shorter experience.

If anything there might be too much action. It becomes exhausting at points, painting the tower with blood and brain matter. It makes you long for the sections where RoboCop puts his gun away and you have to investigate a murder or tell an old man his wife is dead. Lovely stuff. These side quests are a real highlight. The writing is sharp and I love that Peter Weller has returned to the role. He may be sounding a little old but he’s still got it. And as a diabetic I loved the quest of helping an NPC get some insulin. RoboCop saying “keep your blood sugar at an optimum level” needs to be the warning tone on my blood sugar monitor.

Considering RoboCop’s narrative arc is complete at the end of the first film, it’s hard to justify sequels, as the meandering RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3 attest to. As with Rogue City, there’s enough of a personal story in Unfinished Business for it to work. Less so when it tries to get into his backstory, characters having previously unknown impact on his past as both Murphy and RoboCop, but more the thematic idea of how far RoboCop is willing to be pushed in his quest to uphold the law. Will he stick with the Sisyphean effort of endless arrests or break and go full Judge Judy and executioner. The simple answer at the end may not live up to the complex questions, and killing thousands of people in a single building might not be the best example of law enforcement, but it’s solid enough. And, of course, it further links RoboCop to his fascist family member Judge Dredd.

If Unfinished Business does have a major flaw it’s that it’s overstretched. Essentially it’s DLC for Rogue City that has been released as a standalone game, and to justify that decision they’ve made it a longer experience than it needed to be. I know it’s controversial to bemoan a game for offering too much content but the entire point is that it’s a stripped back, simple shooter featuring RoboCop fighting through a single building from basement to penthouse. Any extended distraction from that kind of ruins the point of it.

The fifth mission has RoboCop running (or slowly stomping) through a cool location but nothing is achieved narratively. The level where you play as Miranda is interesting for context, and depowering the player so one lowly gang member is a threat is neat, but I don’t need to act out her morning routine of making coffee and sorting the laundry. And then the level where you play as a turncoat mercenary is just bizarre. Who is Douglas Cole and why should I care about him? I still don’t know. Such a strange inclusion to pad out the game.

However I did really like the flashback where you play as Murphy, pre-encounter with Clarence Boddicker. I don’t know if anyone told Weller he was playing Murphy when recording those lines because he still sounds like RoboCop but I liked being depowered, how different and dangerous it felt when compared to playing as RoboCop. I had to change the way I played after realising I wasn’t a walking tank now, dying quite a few times across that level, and I love that melee doesn’t kill when you’re Murphy, it just lamely pushes an enemy back. Although RoboCop being so powerful made the section where you play as ED-209 a little disappointing because there’s little difference. RoboCop plays like a tank anyway.

Teyon’s future with RoboCop is uncertain. I get the sense there won’t be another game, that Unfinished Business was them throwing everything they wanted to do into one last experience. There are loads of new enemy types, like jetpack soldiers and Otomo samurai robot prototypes, connecting to RoboCop 3, which is set just after this game. It pushes RoboCop to the extreme places his character can go, making him maybe too much of a superhero for my taste. He even gets a Steve Rogers moment of grabbing a helicopter to stop it taking off. It’s a bit much, but the music, as it is throughout the game, is great.

I know people want Teyon to combine their franchises: that their next game should be RoboCop vs Terminator. But I want to see them move to another IP that Unfinished Business has proved they’re perfect for: Judge Dredd.