Retro City Rampage Review

As a celebration of everything that made the 1980s and '90s gaming scene memorable, Retro City Rampage is an excellent museum exhibit. Its levels are a playable history lesson, from levels inspired by Robotron: 2084 and Tapper to an extensive list of visual tweaks that can make the 8-bit graphics look like it's being played on a GameBoy, DOS, or anything in between. It's certainly a love letter to a past era. However, as a modern game it's not nearly as successful. There's a reason why a lot of the design ideas of yesteryear have gone by the wayside over the past couple of decades: Many of them weren't very good.

The Good, The Bad, and The Retro

That's not to say old games are bad. In fact, many of them are still pretty darn brilliant. Nowadays, however, game designers have to be careful what classics they borrow from. The original two Grand Theft Auto games, which inspire the vast majority of Retro City Rampage's gameplay, is a good one to draw from. The top-down, open-world style of action game is still downright fun to play, and mowing down pedestrians and watching them fly through the air as you wade your way through the pixellated corpses of millions of dead cops is an absolute blast.


But some older design decisions that were necessary in the past are no longer acceptable. Not having a key on the map pointing towards stores, arcades, and character-customization spots may have been acceptable in Metroid, but they aren't in Retro City Rampage. Endlessly working your way all across the map for fetch quests made sense in an era where the 8-bit Final Fantasies were king, but these days it just feels like a chore. Too often, the adherence to that old-school feel gets in the way of Retro City Rampage being fun through much of it.

A Parody of Itself

What's weird is that Retro City Rampage is clearly aware of the problems of retro gaming, yet seems to delight in foisting the memorably bad parts of it upon us. The protagonist, cheekily named Player, constantly mentions how hesitant he is to go on a mission, particularly if it's one that's designed around a trope that is well-known to be aggravating to gamers. The worst instance of this is one where Player is asked to follow "Biffman" (Theftopolis' version of Batman), and then proceeds to whine about how bad follow missions are. He even requires a regular chugging of coffee to keep him awake through the boring experience.


This punishing approach to satire permeates Retro City Rampage, but at least there's some effort that went into it. Too often, references are simply thrown around with no jokes surrounding them. Eventually, it becomes a game of "Hey, I get that Sonic reference!" rather than actually utilizing the vast cast of characters that have been pulled out of the gaming consciousness as punchlines or even setups for jokes. Good parody takes the things it's referencing and toys with their premises in amusing ways. Retro City Rampage simply presents them to the player and expects a pat on the head.

Hell, even the story itself is ripped straight from 20- to 30-year-old pop culture. After an unfortunate accident with a pair of Bill and Ted lookalikes, Player's transported back in time and must return by way of building, piece by piece, Doc Choc's time-traveling car (not a DeLorean).

The Difficulty With Difficulty

Old games are, in general, far more difficult than their modern counterparts, and Retro City Rampage certainly takes after the former. After an enjoyable cruise through the city of Theftopolis to the next mission point, Player is often met with a hyper-difficult section. Amongst the biggest culprits are an 'Splosion Man-style platforming level and a level designed to mimic a Metal Gear Solid stealth mission, box and all.


The problem is that the Retro City Rampage engine does not seem capable of handling precision platforming or stealth effectively. Controls are often too clunky, the levels too punishing. Rather than requiring strategy or expert skill, they require trial and error and a smattering of luck to complete.

Of course, the difficulty complaint could be aimed at other contemporary super difficult, retro-inspired games like Super Meat Boy or BIT.TRIP Runner, but there's one huge difference: RCR deals with its difficulty poorly. Where Super Meat Boy had short levels and quick respawn times, checkpoints in Retro City Rampage are few and far between in many missions, leading to huge aggravation. Where in BIT.TRIP Runner, you always know exactly what you did wrong to fail, deaths in Retro City Rampage often feel cheap and unwarranted. It's a fine line to walk, and unfortunately, RCR falls on the wrong side of it.

At first, it's all very charming, but with the frustrations that come with difficulty spikes and often clunky controls, it gets old very quick. We don't play games for the same reason we go to museums, and RCR makes that frustratingly clear.