Robocop: Rogue City is getting a ‘standalone expansion’ that sounds an awful lot like The Raid

Look, I’ll be the first to admit it: I didn’t think Robocop: Rogue City looked very good when I first laid eyes on it in 2023. And I apologize for nothing, because I still don’t. But in a classic case of what do I know, it was a pretty big hit, drawing a “very positive” rating across more than 11,000 user reviews on Steam, and now a standalone expansion is set to arrive this summer.

In Robocop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business, Omni Consumer Products is once again doing what it does: It’s built a massive complex called OmniTower to house the residents of Old Detroit, who are presumably being expelled from their homes for gentrification or whatever—it doesn’t really matter.

But for some reason, which also doesn’t really matter, the tower has been overrun by “elite mercenaries,” and as a sworn officer of the law it’s your job to turn them into chunky smears on every wall you see. It’s the Detroit Way, apparently.

My first thought here is that if mercenaries have taken over an OCP tower, that’s an OCP problem, and not something Robocop would be all that likely to lose sleep over. But OCP also owns Robocop (it owns all the cops in Detroit, as far as that goes) and so I suppose there’s not much choice in the matter: If the Corporate Vice President of Getting These Guys The Hell Out of the Building says jump, well, jumping will be done.

There is the possibility of some proper Robo-satire in that setup, but at a guess I’d say it’s more likely just an opportunity to shoot a whole bunch of dudes. Locking cops into a huge building filled with endless heavily-armed bad guys is a familiar scenario, after all, not dissimilar to, say, the sadly overlooked 2012 action flick Dredd:

Which is itself highly reminiscent of the 2011 action thriller The Raid:

And that’s fine, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with setting aside intellectualism and just cleaning house now and then: We respect Robocop because it’s smart, but we cheer for Robocop when he shoots that one guy in the nuts.

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business will feature new weapons, finishing moves, and “special missions” taking players through “intense flashbacks” that enable them to play as Alex Murphy in his pre-Robocop days, when he was still, y’know, alive. It’s set to come out sometime this summer.