NOT
Story is… Confusing
While it would be silly to expect a quality story from a game with Rampage in the title, the story is also pretty hard to follow. For the most part, just about every mission is more of a justification for a mission or simply a fun idea. Like one story mission has you coming from the future, just because “this car is too cool to wait for the end of the game”. All of these elements are certainly welcomed and the story makes sense in a general sense, but if you’re expecting a linear logical experience, you won’t like it at all.
Sprees
Besides having a number of story missions for you to complete, Retro City Rampage features some challenges called Sprees. Every spree is based off a general concept, like set people on fire, use your SMG, push people into the water and award you a medal based off your performance. However, they’re more frustrating than actually enjoyable.
You see, every mission has a fairly small amount of time to run around doing each task, so messing up will cost you big time. Additionally, the game randomly spawns people off screen, which means you can never predict which is the “right” path to go. Due to the limited time and strict requirement, it wasn’t uncommon for me to redo the same mission 20+ times to gold it. It seems many others had the same issue, since many leaderboards had less than 30 gold medal scores, so I don’t see many trying after they hit gold medal status.
VERDICT
Regardless of the minor issues, I found Retro City Rampage to just be amazingly fun to play. People born in the 80’s or 90’s will laugh at some of the references and just enjoy the nostalgia alone. While the 8 bit design might turn some people off, the amount of detail will make quick work of that notion. While it would have been nice to have better side missions, you can easily spend hours searching the town for references, styles and hidden collectibles. Long story short, if you’ve been gaming since the Nintendo Entertainment System / Sega Genesis or just enjoy those type of games, then you will certainly get your moneys worth of Retro City Rampage.
[Editor’s Note: Retro City Rampage was reviewed on the Playstation Vita and PS3. The game was provided to us by the publisher for review purposes.]
