The most interesting thing about Shakedown Hawaii might be the platforms it has been released on. This is a spiritual sequel to the original 2D Grand Theft Auto spiritual sequel Retro City Rampage and it was released in 2019. Given that you’d expect it to hit the typical 8th generation platforms of the Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The game itself is less interesting. 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. 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. 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. This mostly involves shooting or running over a bunch of hapless 16-bit NPCs in a lush pixel-art environment. 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. 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. 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 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.
Despite the fact that the game takes place in Hawaii it feels a lot more like Florida. It’s an urban environment with a lot of strip malls and industrial areas and no real natural beauty. Most of the trees in the game are deciduous and look like they could be in a park in Connecticut. It feels a little silly to talk about “representation” in a deeply unserious satirical game, but there’s no trace of indigenous Hawaiian culture anywhere, from the names of the businesses and areas to the people you interact with to anything else. Hawaii is only 25% white (the plurality of people are actually Asian, not Pacific Islanders) and I felt a little uncomfortable with what I’m sure was the unintentional whitewashing of the game’s city, even though there is some diversity in the cast. If you’re going to set your game in Hawaii then it might make sense to give it more of a sense of place beyond just “tropical America” but Shakedown doesn’t do that.
This is on par with the rest of the game, much of which feels a little sloppy and half-baked. The core gameplay of running around and shooting stuff and stealing cars works fine and makes for a fun and engaging gameplay loop. Driving around and shooting stuff feels about as good as it did in Retro City Rampage, which is to say it feels pretty good. It's fun to play at a basic level, which, along with a decent story, carries the game when certain other systems let it down. I didn’t experience any glitches or bugs beyond disconnection from the leaderboards when I came back from suspending the game, but the difficulty and balance seem wildly off. This is a very easy game, with generous checkpointing and not much challenge during the vast majority of its 7 and a half hour run time, until it suddenly becomes frustratingly hard at the very end. This isn’t a huge issue in and of itself, but it’s also a fairly monotonous game with a lot of repeating objectives and scenarios. Retro City Rampage was constantly changing things up and throwing out unique challenges and gameplay styles, mimicking a platformer or a racing game or Smash TV for little microgames that functioned as changes of pace. Shakedown Hawaii’s version of that is to slightly change up your task so that you have to, for example, cut the hair off a bunch of hair stylists to convince them to pay protection money to you, or pick up items and put them in a truck on a burglary mission or whatever. There’s some variety in the gameplay but it’s never enough, and pretty much everything you’re asked to do outside of combat feels like simple busywork, which is a bad thing because combat itself is pretty braindead. There are a couple minor puzzles where you have to select the right answers from a quiz to graduate from rehab or monkey with the components of a computer to break it, but they are few and far between and incredibly slight. When the game does decide to become more difficult it's in unfun ways, like throwing a bunch of enemies at you who are invulnerable to gunfire and taking away your explosives so you have to dodge their shots and beat them down in hand to hand combat. The end is not so tough that it ever feels unbeatable, but it does feel like the developers didn't understand their gameplay loop well enough to ramp up the challenge in fun and engaging ways, rather than just giving the enemies an unfair advantage.
The main focuses of the game’s development, outside of creating a smooth playing SNES graphics quality GTA clone, which they did, seem to have been on the game’s story and its property management system. There is an absolute ton of story in this game. It has 126 missions if you count the 15 side missions, and each of them has one or more cut scenes associated. These are simple animations with written text; there’s no voice acting, but it’s still pretty impressive for a game like this. It mostly takes the form of little satirical vignettes where your character will come up with some stupid or crooked idea, like advertising cut rate nutritional supplements, and then put it into action, but much of it is decently amusing. It’s never quite clear whether the game thinks it’s actually satirizing cutthroat corporate culture or if it is satirizing the toothless GTA brand of satire as a kind of meta-satire, but your character’s combination of ruthlessness and clueless vulnerability give him a kind of repellant charm that’s enough to carry the narrative as he does horrible things to mostly equally horrible people.
The property system does not fare as well. In theory it’s awesome that you can buy every property on the island, but in practice it’s pretty meaningless. Your company finances are separate from your personal finances so in theory you can have millions in the company account but still not be able to afford weapons or the game’s few character upgrades (like a double jump and extra healing). You can pay yourself as much as you want as a salary (and you can also put money back into the company if you want) but beyond the upgrades there really isn’t much to do with the money except buy property. And the properties don’t do much except spit back more money, give you discounts on certain services, and occasionally open up side missions that in turn give you more money and opportunities to buy property. The GTA game feeds into the property game in several ways, including requiring you to do “shakedown” missions to open up certain properties for purchase and opening up others at certain points in the main story, but the property game doesn’t feed back into the main game in a meaningful way so it seems like this massive minigame that’s divorced from the rest of what you’re doing except for a few missions that are gated off by purchases.
The game’s eponymous shakedowns involve threatening store owners for protection payments and break down into a few different mission types, even though there are 83 shakedown opportunities in the game. There are a few varieties of fights, some chase missions, a couple missions where you have to escape the sewers, and missions where you smash stuff up in the store. They’re all quick and could serve as nice pace breaks if they weren’t so repetitive of the main campaign and each other. Succeeding in a shakedown increases your daily take of cash in your company investment account instead of your personal account, for some reason, and opens up that building for purchase. Some buildings with shakedowns can also be opened in other ways and you can shake down buildings you’ve already bought, which makes no sense because it implies that your company is paying protection money to itself…and profiting from it. The economy is broken in other ways. You can get per building upgrades to increase the income from your purchases, but they are only worth it for a few very high income buildings. I finished the game around day 80 and platinumed it at around day 90, so for any investment to pay off it would have to work on that sort of timeline. Fully upgrading a building costs $280,000 and multiplies your “take” by 6, but many of the buildings only give off $100 or less in profits, meaning that even if you could somehow upgrade them at day 1 you’d never come close to making your investment back. Missions and shakedowns provide constant income without investment and are your best bet of improving your income until you can afford some of the more expensive buildings and to upgrade those, making the majority of the buildings kind of pointless to buy. It just all feels like it needed several more layers of refinement.
Needing more time in the oven is a theme throughout the game’s systems. You unlock two additional playable characters as you go, and each character has their own persistent inventory, wallet, and life, but they all play pretty much the same, and if you launch an activity that only one of them can do you automatically switch to that characters so the system feels pointless except as a reference to GTA V. Mission design is a huge step back from Retro City Rampage and even the weapons are mostly interchangeable. Except for the flamethrower, which can easily set you on fire, which will kill you quickly unless you can find water, which is impossible in many places. I only used the flamethrower if the mission absolutely required me to. You can also change your appearance by buying various items but though those changes will be reflected in dialog boxes they won't be in the cut scenes. That's understandable, but it only serves to contribute to the feeling that a lot of this game's features were cut back to get it polished and functional for launch.
There are also some weird quirks in the game. After certain missions the game will swap your weapon back to your fist, which can be a real issue if you don’t notice because the weapon swap menu is awkward and it’s easy to find yourself in over your head and throwing punches when you thought you were going to be shooting your AK. Also the cops are very strange. There’s a wanted meter that increases but I could never get it to go over 2 because when you start killing cops one of them will drop an icon that resets your wanted meter. That means that the cops are never more than a minor pain, and there are no missions that ramp up the wanted level or try to take advantage of them as an obstacle. It feels like the wanted system was never fully implemented.
I’ve been complaining about a lot of aspects of Shakedown Hawaii and in the interests of fairness I should say that I didn't have a bad time with the game. I think the game looks good, sounds decent with an okay soundtrack, and plays mostly fine. The story isn’t top notch but it’s amusing enough and should carry most players through to the end. You don’t have to focus on the property management stuff if you don’t want to and if you just play this as a GTA clone you’ll have a pretty good time. I had a pretty good time with the game, and even when I took the time to do everything and platinum it I found it a mostly pleasant experience.
The reason I’m harping on the flaws is that I’m disappointed that this game didn’t live up to Retro City Rampage. That game was cleverer and much more polished. This game feels a little ragged around the edges and thrown together. If the developer had crammed in less stuff but focused on making what was there stronger it could have been really great. Instead it’s just flawed but decent. Worth the $20 asking price but inessential. It’s not my place to tell the developer how to conduct his business, but maybe a little less of a focus on novelty ports and a little more on nailing the game’s basic systems would have made this a standout title instead of just a strong story and presentation attached to a kind of average game.
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