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RoboCop Rogue City Unfinished Business opening doesn’t do it any favours. A radio news bulletin grizzles as a beanie floats down a dark alley. The camera pans to a floating, disembodied head, its body presumably suffering the same fate as the beanie’s, lost to some unforeseen programming oversight. The beanie and head have some sort of exchange before they scatter as a cop car squeals past. Are we dealing with spectres here? Is RoboCop moonlighting as a metal-plated ghost hunter?
No. You could call it AA jank or simply a glitch. Either way, it’s as exciting as Unfinished Business gets. After getting through Unfinished Business’ roughly 12 hours of playtime, my lasting impression is of a repetitive slog coasting on the goodwill of a venerated licensed IP to mask a deadening mix of mediocre shooting, repetitive levels, jank, and a bland story.
You play as the titular RoboCop. A Detroit precinct has been attacked, and you’re there to pick up the pieces. The band of mercenaries resonsible have taken over the OmniTower housing complex. It’s your job to spew one-liners from that plump kisser and lay down the law. This is achieved partly through what is very loosely considered gumshoe work – scan this, scan that, by golly, you’ve cracked the case, you lumbering titanium Poirot – but mainly by gunning down a battalion-sized procession of peevish goons.
As you’d expect from a cyborg with the gait of a toddler with a sagging nappy, controlling RoboCop is all slow, plodding movements. There’s an argument that’s appropriate and mimics his silver-screen portrayal. But beyond the initial ‘I’m bloody RoboCop, bzzt, bzzt, stomp, stomp’ rush, it doesn’t translate to moment-to-moment action that’s all that fun. It’s especially tedious when the game drags you from one end of a level to the other searching for clues or to loop back to chat with a quest-giving NPC.
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Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Shooting is suitably competent, and there’s a pulpy crunch to RoboCop’s Auto-9. Enemies also drop a decent variety of guns, including a few oddities, such as a dry ice-spewing cannon, and interactable gas canisters, monitors, bins, and what not litter levels to introduce a degree of creativity. The issue for me is that these encounters all follow the same stunted blueprint. Breach through a door or wall, pick off a couple of mercenaries in slow-mo, then trudge through a network of drab corridors and into an open area for a larger skirmish. Enemies rotate in predictable patterns and almost line up to be slaughtered, giving the game a shooting gallery quality that feels outdated. By the end of the second mission, there’s not much novelty left to discover, and this repeating format sheds much of the initially engaging fizz.
Unfinished Business is unapologetically a AA project, and the limitations of a small budget are on full display. There’s jank everywhere: ragdolling bodies ping unnaturally into the air, interactive prompts don’t work forcing reloads, frame rates regularly have meltdowns, and the lip-syncing feels like a shoddy overdub at the best of times. Then there are the graphical glitches mentioned earlier, peaking in a cut scene where RoboCop drives off reclined on a cop car chassis, hands clutching an imaginary steering wheel.
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
The emotionless RoboCop often expresses more emotion than most of the human characters you’ll meet, despite earnest but fumbled attempts at satire and exploring ambiguous morality. Blame the dreadful voice acting, just about passable animation work, and a poor facsimile of the faux-gritty, flippant nonchalance of 80s action movies. The story is fine, monotonously so, with your bog-standard cop-gone-bad story to carry you to an ending likely to leave you unsatisfied.Â
The saving grace in all this is that Unfinished Business never takes itself too seriously. This isn’t an ambitious indie team trying to push the envelope a la Expedition 33. You get all the quips and nods to the films you’d expect, and there’s no cerebral strain involved in matching the connective threads of its narrative beats to what’s happening at any given moment. It does what it says on the tin. It just feels like that tin’s looking battered and long past its best-by date. Some business is maybe best left unfinished.
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