RoboCop will be climbing an apartment tower full of slimebags in a standalone follow-up to his trudging but faithful 2023 shooter. Robocop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is so over-named it looks like DLC, but is actually an independent sequel from the same developers, and directly follows the events of the recent criminal justice ’em up. It’ll see metal man Murphy going floor to floor as he and other Detroit city policefolk ascend a residential tower after “a group of highly trained mercenaries armed with cutting-edge weapons takes control of the building and turns it into their deadly fortress.” Wait… doesn’t this sound like another cyberpunk dystopia?
“Prepare to take on a new breed of enemies: OmniTower is packed with high-tech threats,” says the game’s blurb on Steam. “From flying drones to exploding bots and anti-personnel turrets, every floor is riddled with deadly traps, and heavily armed elite troops. Expect to face minigun-toting armoured squads, special forces equipped with jet packs or even katana-wielding foes who look more machine than man.”
If you have seen 2012’s Dredd starring Karl Urban, you may have raised an eyebrow (if you have seen The Raid, you have raised both). Yes, this sounds like the same premise. But maybe that’s no big deal. Developers Teyon seem to be doing their due diligence by adding all the requisite RoboCop-flavoured elements. You will play through FPS flashbacks with Murphy as a pre-cyberized meatcop, for example, and get some new abilities and weapons, such as a freezey cryo cannon and “devastating finishing moves” where you can slam crime-doer faces into nearby walls and vending machines.
The additional hands-on bone-crunching checks out. One of the more enjoyable parts of Robo’s recent wreckabout was being able to lift any perp and yeet them ragdollifically across the city streets and prison corridors that you stomped through. Other than that I wasn’t too fond of the shooter in my RoboCop: Rogue City review but I did acknowledge that it would likely be pleasing to long time fans of Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent satire.
The sequel-follow-up-not-DLC-we-promise is due out sometime in “Q3 2025” which is business speak for “I dunno, autumn, I guess”.