Review : Retro City Rampage

Platform : PS3 / PS Vita (Cross Buy) and PC/Steam
             *Soon Available on : WiiWare and XBLA
Developer : VBlank Entertainment
Price :14,99$
Type : Top Down Shooter
Time played : 6 hours / Not finished yet

At first glance, this could look like another game made in 8-bit graphics for simplicity.  That couldn't be further from the truth. It's a jewel of reference and satire to the 80-90's era from the beginning to the end.  The game has not even started that you can enjoy those references. Retro City Rampage, or RCR is a reference to River City Ransom, a great NES game. The art on the cover makes reference to Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future Series. The game itself is a complex stew of so much reference that it requires a lot of skills to be able to make it into such a cohesive game, but this strength might also be a weakness.

If you have not a clue of what all those references means in there, you will definitely not enjoy this game as much as someone who does.  It's always enjoyable to stumble upon a quote such as "It's Letter Time"  taken from Video and Arcade Top 10 Canadian TV show and understand that reference. If not, you just wonder why it's there, at that place. While the game is surely enjoyable, the 15$ price tag is kind of high for this type of game... Here is some example of just a few of the references you might or might not know. Can you explain where they come from or what they mean? Note that I have taken more than 100 screenshots of those references so far.

Nicholas Picholas was the host of V&A Top 10

You got Story Missions that let progress in the crazy story where you want to become a super criminal. It also gives power ups and get you through many of the game mechanics.  The missions often use humour to get you through. For example there's a Chasing mission you get in every GTA like games. You need to follow someone in car without being spotted. When it starts, you tell yourself that it's so slow you might as well walk and walking you go. While pursuing the car, you must get coffee along the way so you won't fall asleep of boredom. You also get Arcade Challenges that consists in killing or breaking as much stuff as possible in a limited time.  This gives you the chance of uploading your score to the Leaderboard for bragging rights with your friend.

Now about the game mechanics.  It plays mostly like a top down shooter. You control the character with the left analog stick (or d-pad, for a retro feel) and shoot in any direction with the right analog stick.  I guess PC version will use AWSD and mouse to do so.  You can jump and pick up object and throw them as well. Finally you can get in cars, bike and other transports to move around town. There is a lot of stores where you can customise your character and buy weapons, tools, restore health,  and get power ups. Cheat codes (That's retro too) are written all over the places on wall for you to find. In addition to this, there's hidden items to find like Hidden Packages.

There's a Free Play mode as well where you get to move around town without any story missions, full of cash to buy everything you want. It's just a fun way of killing time and get those trophies as well.

Conclusion : 

It's definitely a fun game, but its true strength is its melting pot of references. It's easy to understand and to play­. It might not be worth the current 15$ price tag for everyone, but the more you have been into games, the more you'll get value from the references and the satire in the game. If you own it on PS3/PS Vita, know that it's a Cross Buy/ Cross Play game, so that adds  value to the game as well. You pay it once and can play on both system. There's a cloud save function that lets you continue your game from a system to the other without any pain.