Retro City Rampage Review, 7.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of retro gaming. I can appreciate the replay of a game that is years old, but I can say that, barring remakes for current generation consoles, I haven’t played anything from the PlayStation 2 or any consoles prior for years now. While my technophilia is the main reason I refuse to play previous generations of consoles, the retro age should definitely be praised for what it did.

Retro City Rampage is a work by one programmer and a small support staff which took seven years to simmer. It’s a testament to an era–to what the games of yesteryear have to offer. With a healthy dose of satire from numerous forms of media, does the first game from VBlank Entertainment live up to its name as the parody among parodies?

The year is 20XX in the sprawling city of Theftropolis. You comprise the role of Player, a hooligan for hire and doer of things like killing guys, driving fast under police pressure, and occasionally having “Iced Tea” with the ladies. As an 8-bit hooligan, you are under the employ of The Jester, the local criminal warlord who likes to wear a Jester’s hat and shoot numbered hooligans when things go slightly wrong and he has his sights on the biggest bank in the city.

On the day of the big heist at the Stoogemac Bank, everything goes somewhat according to plan aside from some weird bus traffic and cameo appearances by non-copyrighted version of both the Ninja Turtles and the A-Team. However, as Player was busy cutting a swath through the police line to cement The Jester’s escape, he happened upon a silver telephone booth that fell from the sky. After disposing of the communication cubicle’s inhabitants, he inadvertently engages the machine and sets off on adventure.

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

After exiting the hurdles of time travel, the antihero finds himself back in Theftropolis probably a few minutes after he entered the craft. With the abrupt landing it took on reentry, the craft is pretty much busted, much to the chagrin of the pompadoured youth. Enter Doc Choc, wack-job and believer of the technologically strange, who used his ecto-thing-a-m’bob to find your craft and take you and the booth back to his house to repair it. It will require six unique items that are incredibly hard to find in Theftopolis, but Player valiantly accepts the quest, if only to cause carnage and mayhem across time and space. He is, after all, a hooligan at heart, dreaming of Killceptions and blowing up dams with underwater explosives just because he can.

The star of Retro City Rampage is the story, as it is an insanely funny little romp into an 8-bit isometric crime game à la Grand Theft Auto. While the plot halfway into the game fell along the lines of an agenda against bigwig video game publishers, it does a good job at keeping the game on track with the singular purpose of finding all the pieces, Legend of Zelda style.

As one of its more publicized features, its gameplay is all over the place, borrowing from sidescrollers, racing, 2D platformers, and arcade arena fighters. The core of the game is a revisit of the GTA bird’s-eye view kind of action game. However, while Retro City Rampage was originally supposed to be a “devolution” of Grand Theft Auto 3 into an NES cartridge, it is full of an absurd amount of references to video games both old (Mega Man) and new (Halo), the silver screen (Inception, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future), comic books (Batman), and even old school television (Happy days with a slight chance of TEEN PREGNANCY!).

His name is actually Von Buttnick, but when you have a rocket launcher, you are impervious to bad grammer retorts.

Along with the tools of the hooligan trade like firearms, explosives, and a bionic claw here and there, Player is also granted unique power-ups like being able to run faster than any car and gib any poor soul that dares step in your path or a suit of bionic armor that takes a dozen police cruiser hits before it dies. These power-ups are used during certain story and side missions, but can be bought in the Theftropolis power bar once unlocked. Some missions will even change gameplay style from the GTA method of play to suit the theme, like having Player swim around Mario Bros.-style to set bombs underneath the city dam, or chasing after Doc Choc’s nemesis Dr. Von Buttnick like in the Sega Master System game of Hang On. These little touches really do make Retro City Rampage a nostalgic ride through the history books of video games of the 80’s.

While Brian Provinciano’s contribution to video games is a great addition, Retro City Rampage is definitely not without its flaws. The economy comprised of looting the thousands of people that you will end one way or another during your rampage as the Theftropolis Terror really has no influential meaning to the game, as enemies drop bucket loads of gold doubloons. I had enough money by story mission 3 to buy out every purchasable haircut, hat, and ink available, and weapons and power-ups were given out like candy from the cops and the armed forces and during missions. Much like the games that the core of RCR mimics, aiming weaponry was a very painful experience on a mouse and keyboard and probably much better on a dual analog stick controller, and the cover system was no better.

Could this be the end of spandex jumpsuits? Will the oddly named person be able to talk reason with the crocodiles, predators of the swamp? Will this caption ever end? TUNE IN NEXT TIME!

Retro City Rampage keeps true to the words in its own common sense warning at the title screen. This game is a parody through and through, but all the while I felt like I was playing this game through rose colored glasses. RCR is a retro de-make of a popular game, but I had to keep focus on the fact that this title was created in the present day and should be judged on the same foundations that I assess all my games for the site: Story, Gameplay, Design, and Production. While a lot of critics may praise it for being a great example of long-lost game design and keep going on and on about the N word (I meant “nostalgia,” you terrible person), there is a lot more going on here.

Before I start rambling, I’ll just lay out the conclusion to my thoughts on this retro wonder in an age of shooters, sports games, and never-ending DLC. Retro City Rampage is a good game with a hilarious story and the pillars of a solid title. However, with a game so chock full of references, there will be a lot of people that are just going to look dumbfounded when they don’t get the joke. Gamers of this generation, the adolescents and those new to gaming in general, will probably just scratch their head and keep playing, but RCR is a title for a niche crowd: the gamer that has been at this luxury pastime for a long while.  It still has some bugs here and there and some questionable systems, but its high fun value, its loony tune story, and its wide range of game modes and gameplay make for a budget title that you’ll keep coming back to again and again as you feel the need to take a break from the current generation.

A review copy of this game was provided by the game’s publisher for PC. The reviewer spent approximately 9 hours playing the game and completed the main story along with an hour in Free Roaming mode.

Retro City Rampage Review

By James C.

Are you a bad enough dude to take a lockpick, excuse the princess, and take an arrow to the knee, all the while jumping a shark made up of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey? Inconceivable!