So, spent some time over the past few days with Shakedown Hawaii, the sequel to Retro City Rampage, effectively serving as the Vice City to that game's GTA3.
Like RCR, it's a top down open world crime game, but the focus here is more on "late stage capitalism as both the cause of and solution to all of life's problems", rather than "hey remember the underwater stage from Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles for NES".
You (primarily) play as the CEO of a failing multinational corporation headquartered in Hawaii, with a mix of 80s to early 2020s technology; brick phones that still have touch screens and app stores available; tablets that appear to be running Windows 3.1. Your goal is to monopolize the entire island by shaking down small businesses, buying up property, and getting in trouble with various gangs.
An example mission chain:
- Take printer from electronics store to home
- Cutscene: find out how expensive printer ink is
- Drive to ink refill store
- Minigame: refill the ink cartridge
- Drive home
- Cutscene: find out that cartridges are DRM locked
- Buy printer company
- Swap to different character, drive to ink refill company, smash up all their inventory now that they're a competitor
- Now that they're cheap to acquire, buy the ink refill company too.
It's interesting conceptually, and the pixel art is lovely, but it does kind of overstay its welcome. The open world ends up feeling largely perfunctory during missions, a way to add time onto the clock, and the mission structure ends up being very repetitive by the end in a way I don't remember RCR doing (but granted, it has been more than a decade since I played RCR).
And because the answer to capitalism is violence, followed by more capitalism... it ends up feeling kind of toothless, in the end. It may as well cut to the Monopoly victory screen after credits roll; this is a game about cheap jokes rather than expensive solutions.
Still, I did laugh at a few of the cheap jokes, and had an alright time playing, so maybe look out for when it goes on sale?
(But also it does kind of make me want to play Vice City itself, again).