You’re simply buying a thing from a list of things that only serves the purpose of allowing you to buy even more things.
It’s a mechanic that never evolves, it only gets more tedious. Each building adds more revenue to purchase, yet more buildings and upgrades simply add a percentage increase to that revenue.
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Once you purchased a building, you can upgrade it from a list of thirteen bonuses you’ll discover through story missions.
Unfortunately, this is the most prominent part of the game.Įvery few in-game minutes you’ll be granted daily revenue from your properties which immediately gets dumped into more properties. Opening the game’s map will show the many purchasable buildings which you’ll have to acquire, upgrade and perform the titular shakedowns in. With the world being blown up to four times the size of the original, VBlank has made sure there’s something other than mindless-albeit-fun violence to do within it. There are some chuckle-worthy scenes but, for the most part, it gets stale quickly and the dialogue is never as witty or clever as it was in Rampage. Instead, you’re stuck with that one joke throughout most of the story. That is the point the character you’re playing as is hilariously out of touch, but Shakedown: Hawaii never evolves. Large day one patches and console UI advertisements deserve to be heavily scrutinized, so too do egregious store-specific credit cards, but most of the jokes here are simply of the “old man yelling at a cloud” variety. Humour may be subjective, but Shakedown: Hawaii doesn’t supply its comedy as cannily as its predecessor did while Rampage drew its humour from parody and outlandish situations, this time the laughs purely stem from the player character’s inability to keep up with modern conveniences.Ī lot of the jabs here are fair game. The plot here isn’t complex at all, but that’s because any meaningful story beats are cast away in favour of pure comedic moments.
Set thirty years after Rampage, the player character has evolved into the disgruntled CEO of the failing Feeble Corporation.Īs you’re struggling to keep your company afloat, you’ll resort to a life of crime and unethical business practices to rise from the ashes and take out your competitor, Featherbottom. While the original game was an amazing tongue-in-cheek jab at every pop culture reference in the past thirty years, Shakedown: Hawaii drops that entirely.
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VBlank’s series has seen a growth spurt, not just in its visuals but also its story. That tiny shop? You’re going to burn it down to the ground. That lovely-looking brick wall? You’re going to drive right through it. Most of the game’s gorgeous objects also have numerous states as you’ll inevitably destroy them at some point during your playthrough. There’s no denying the attention to detail here. Civilians stroll around taking selfies, streets are filled with varied NPCs, trees sway and puddles cut as you drive through them. While a pixel-art world will never be as immersive as the fully 3-D landscapes of Red Dead or GTA, Hawaii’s compact world is so detail-rich that you could imagine being there.įine details are plentiful: every corner of 16-bit Hawaii has something to gawp at, even if you’re just flattening pedestrians on your way to a mission. While Rampage’s 8-bit visuals were appropriately amiable, Hawaii instead opts for a gorgeously detailed 16-bit aesthetic.
Unfortunately, it never hits the gold standard that was set before it.įrom a purely presentational standpoint, Shakedown: Hawaii is vastly superior to its predecessor. After years of delays and an even longer development, you’d hope that Rampage’s successor Shakedown: Hawaii would be a grand return for VBlank. It was smart, funny, gorgeous… in short, pretty much everything you’d want in a video game. Featuring everything from high-octane action to time-travelling shenanigans, it was a game that got everything right. VBlank Entertainment’s Retro City Rampage was a remarkable indie jab at video game giant Grand Theft Auto.
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