Peter Weller reprises his role as RoboCop/Alex Murphy.
During a side mission, one of RoboCop's informants asks him for help with finding a tape in a video rental outlet. He is very vague about the details of the film he is looking for, prompting a search of the whole store. One video the player can find is the film Kind Shepherd. The informant proceeds to describe how the director threw the script for Kind Shepherd in the garbage, and his wife proceeded to take it out of the garbage, read it herself, and convince said director to make it. This is more or less exactly how Paul Verhoeven describes the way he was convinced to direct RoboCop.
Plot arcs and implied locations are taken from the film. During the glitch that is caught on camera by a journalist in the first mission, RoboCop sees Alex Murphy's wife in place of the hostage pleading for her life. An "access denied" message comes to RoboCop's sensors when he scans a one-armed chalk outline in an abandoned factory where one gang is hiding out, implying that this was where Alex Murphy was killed.
The game takes place between movies RoboCop 2 (1990) and RoboCop 3 (1993).
Numerous Trophies are named after lines in the film. In one case, one such Trophy is earned by killing an enemy with a shot to the groin, similar to a scene in the film (the recipient of the groin shot lives in the film).