![]() ![]() This game makes zero effort to hide its influences.ĭespite the fact that the game takes place in Hawaii it feels a lot more like Florida. If this looks like a screenshot from a PS1 era GTA game that's not a coincidence. You can run around, shoot in any direction with the second analog stick, jump, steal vehicles, pick up and throw objects, and interact with certain specific objects. Along the way you interact with a bunch of NPCs within your company, ranging from what appears to be the COO to low level employees at various businesses to a mercenary you sometimes control to your feckless wannabe DJ son, who you also sometimes control. You then take that income and invest it in various properties throughout the city (there are over 400 for sale on the relatively small map) to build your empire. The gameplay loop involves going on various missions that generally consist of taking over a business or sabotaging the competition or something else similar, and being rewarded with a boost to your daily income. This mostly involves shooting or running over a bunch of hapless 16-bit NPCs in a lush pixel-art environment. You play an aging CEO who finds his company circling the drain and determines that he will get back on top through any means necessary. Retro City Rampage had a faux 8-bit style, and this game looks faux 16-bit, like an HD version of what a Super-Nintendo game might look like if there was unlimited space for art and animation. Like Retro City Rampage before it this is an homage to 2D Grand Theft Auto with a bunch of other stuff thrown into the mix. I think that the mostly one-man development team of VBlank just likes having his games out on every non-Xbox console he can, and I can respect that kind of quirky determination, even if I’m not rushing out to get a copy of this game for the Wii. In the same vein there is also a native PS5 port, which is what I played, which is supposed to have Dualsense integration, though I did not notice it. To my knowledge it is, in fact, the final physical release on the Wii U, coming out in August of 2020, and I respect the commitment to the bit in releasing both the Wii U and Wii ports, even though the Wii port would have served both purposes. What is surprising, given that it never got an Xbox release, is that it came to the PS3, the Wii U, and even the original Wii. It skipped the Xbox, which isn’t shocking, and was released instead on the Vita and the 3DS, which isn’t shocking despite those being dying platforms since this is a 2D indie game and a sequel to a game that was popular on those platforms. Given that you’d expect it to hit the typical 8 th generation platforms of the Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox. This is a spiritual sequel to the original 2D Grand Theft Auto spiritual sequel Retro City Rampage and it was released in 2019. The most interesting thing about Shakedown Hawaii might be the platforms it has been released on. Shakedown Hawaii is a 2D GTA clone follow up to Retro City Rampage with great aesthetics but a half-baked game structure
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