#SHAKEDOWN HAWAII VITA PHYSICAL UPGRADE#

In later sections, Shakedown: Hawaii does pick up the pace. It’s mindless repetition: the monotonous moments of repeatedly pressing down and “A” on each and every property to purchase its upgrades is far from fun.

Within Hawaii, there are hundreds of buildings to buy, each with thirteen upgrades that you’ll have to manually apply. Maybe you’ll save up for an expensive building and dump all of your money into upgrading that – it’ll make a good bonus for your daily revenue. In between shakedowns and story missions, you’ll pop into your map and purchase a few properties.

Since the shakedowns are placed in large clusters on the game’s map, you’ll most likely be tackling them in groups at a time, highlighting the repetitious nature of the signature mechanic. There are 81 properties to shakedown, all of which come down to performing one of six different activities: eliminate gang members, scare away customers, cut off someone’s hair, escape from an underground jail, steal a shipment or drive away with the shop owner on the hood of your car. It’s mindless busywork.Īs a game that ridicules the worst of consumerism, Shakedown: Hawaii adopts one of the most reviled aspects of modern gaming: a Ubisoft-style checklist style of completion. You’re simply buying a thing from a list of things that only serves the purpose of allowing you to buy even more things. It’s a mechanic that never evolves, it only gets more tedious. Each building adds more revenue to purchase, yet more buildings and upgrades simply add a percentage increase to that revenue.

#SHAKEDOWN HAWAII VITA PHYSICAL UPGRADE#

Once you purchased a building, you can upgrade it from a list of thirteen bonuses you’ll discover through story missions. Unfortunately, this is the most prominent part of the game.Įvery few in-game minutes you’ll be granted daily revenue from your properties which immediately gets dumped into more properties. Opening the game’s map will show the many purchasable buildings which you’ll have to acquire, upgrade and perform the titular shakedowns in. With the world being blown up to four times the size of the original, VBlank has made sure there’s something other than mindless-albeit-fun violence to do within it. There are some chuckle-worthy scenes but, for the most part, it gets stale quickly and the dialogue is never as witty or clever as it was in Rampage. Instead, you’re stuck with that one joke throughout most of the story. That is the point the character you’re playing as is hilariously out of touch, but Shakedown: Hawaii never evolves. Large day one patches and console UI advertisements deserve to be heavily scrutinized, so too do egregious store-specific credit cards, but most of the jokes here are simply of the “old man yelling at a cloud” variety. That tiny shop? You’re going to burn it down to the ground.Ī lot of the jabs here are fair game. That lovely-looking brick wall? You’re going to drive right through it. Most of the game’s gorgeous objects also have numerous states as you’ll inevitably destroy them at some point during your playthrough. There’s no denying the attention to detail here. Civilians stroll around taking selfies, streets are filled with varied NPCs, trees sway and puddles cut as you drive through them. While a pixel-art world will never be as immersive as the fully 3-D landscapes of Red Dead or GTA, Hawaii’s compact world is so detail-rich that you could imagine being there.įine details are plentiful: every corner of 16-bit Hawaii has something to gawp at, even if you’re just flattening pedestrians on your way to a mission. While Rampage’s 8-bit visuals were appropriately amiable, Hawaii instead opts for a gorgeously detailed 16-bit aesthetic. Unfortunately, it never hits the gold standard that was set before it.įrom a purely presentational standpoint, Shakedown: Hawaii is vastly superior to its predecessor. After years of delays and an even longer development, you’d hope that Rampage’s successor Shakedown: Hawaii would be a grand return for VBlank. in short, pretty much everything you’d want in a video game. Featuring everything from high-octane action to time-travelling shenanigans, it was a game that got everything right. VBlank Entertainment’s Retro City Rampage was a remarkable indie jab at video game giant Grand Theft Auto.

Shakedown hawaii vita physical