- Platforms
Hey guys! I just finished playing through Shakedown: Hawaii, a game from indie developer Vblank Entertainment (Brian Provinciano and others) that I had picked up on Steam during the Lunar New Year Sale for just 5 dollars! I wanted to give a short review and also to see if anyone else had played this one because I personally think it is a great sequel to Retro City Rampage.
First thing I want to point out is that the 16-bit graphics are beautiful. As you might be familiar with Vblank's previous top-down open world title, this one also has several graphics options to simulate the color grading of different dinosaur consoles, handhelds and PCs, but for my playthrough I stuck with the default 'Auto' (which you see in the trailer above) with the widescreen TV border, scanline enabled, "1x zoomed out" (see the second trailer below) with v-sync also turned on and running at a constant smooth 60 frames per second. In my opinion, Hawaii is a great setting for an open world game. Especially if you enjoyed previous open world games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and its prequel Vice City Stories; which is to say it's all very colorful and there is great attention to detail in the environment. Characters casts shadows and are well animated. Speaking of, the environment is destructible. There are lots of things you can destroy, driving through concrete barriers, fences, mailboxes, trees, flowers etc. as well as smashing and destroying literally anything in all of the interiors (and there are A LOT of interiors). It is an awesome sandbox experience that really feels like a love letter to anyone who grew up playing games on the Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance etc. Shakedown: Hawaii has gorgeous visuals, accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Matthew Creamer (returning from Retro City Rampage) that sets the mood for an action-filled 1980s romp through Hawaii.
I also really enjoyed the story. I thought the setup was pretty funny and entertaining, playing as an out-of-touch CEO trying to understand modern technology and modern business practices. Basically you strongarm the entire island (with the help of your deadbeat "gangsta" son, Scooter, and badass foreign "consultant" Al) into buying up all of the property - and I mean all of the nearly 400 properties - houses, apartments, various businesses (barbershops, restaurants, dealerships, offices, go kart racing and more), farms, warehouses, factories, parking, an airport, police, hospital and a prison. You name it, it's yours. Your wife even sells you her 2 million dollar home by the end of it all. But hey, you're the king of the island and the sense of progression felt great.
In the end, you go on TV to accept your humanitarian award for being a caring CEO who puts the planet first before profits, so it's a good ending taking into account your stellar public image and ignoring all of the chaotic dirty work and manipulative business choices that made you super rich.
The controls also felt really good. There is the traditional Vblank-style stomping where you hit the Shift key to stomp onto enemies after jumping. You drive with the A,S,W,D keys, lightly tapping them to go up or down, left or right and can park the cars and boats at various angles (more than you could in Retro City Rampage, if I remember correctly). Gunplay is mostly good; it still kind of suffers by its auto-aiming - you don't want to get too close to trees or you will shoot them before the enemies. But what is neat is that you can still move around and avoid enemy gunfire as well as taking cover. Some new mechanics include being able to swim and shooting from your vehicle.
While there are 120-something story missions, each of them never feel too long and you start most of the next missions close to where you finished the last mission. Even driving from point A to B is pretty quick and easy. In any case, you can save anywhere too except during missions. Some people say the gameplay becomes repetitive but there are actually different ways you end up performing shakedowns (killing protection outside, driving vehicles inside the store, tying up the clerk to your car and then driving around to scare him etc). Shakedown: Hawaii, much like Retro City Rampage, has a separate free-roaming mode where you can play as any of the three player characters from the story.
The game wasn't difficult. Definitely easier than Retro City Rampage. The final boss was a little tricky but hilarious because he throws ambulances at you. There was also one particular shakedown out in the street that was difficult until I remembered I could just steal a couple cars and run over the protection. The achievements are fairly easy to get as well. Currently, I have 24 out of 25 achievements unlocked. I only need to get gold in all of the challenges for 100%. But if you enjoy trying to get every achievement, I feel that Shakedown: Hawaii is doable. And it's a great game.
As I said, I picked it up for 5 dollars (regular price is 20 dollars) and I think it was a great deal. I hope to see a third open world game from Vblank Entertainment in the future. If not, then I'm still very pleased with Shakedown: Hawaii. Also, they ported this game to modern and discontinued platforms, so if you want, you can pick this one up for your Wii U, @teezzy.
