Retro City Rampage™ DX

I'll be straight with you: Retro City Rampage DX is one of those games I planned to play for twenty minutes and then looked up to find two hours had disappeared. It is a top-down open-world action game that wears its GTA 1 and 2 DNA very openly, but the moment you are sprinting through Theftropolis lobbing weapons at cops while the game switches perspective to a side-scrolling Contra homage, you realise this thing is doing something much weirder and more ambitious than it first appears. The moment-to-moment play is accessible in a way that genuinely matters. Controls are twin-stick friendly right out of the box: free-aim with the right stick, tap to lock on, stomp on enemies from above to knock them out. Hijacking any of the 50-plus vehicles is a single button press. The driving does have a slightly loose, floaty feel that takes a session or two to get comfortable with, but once it clicks it works fine for what the game needs. There is no multiplayer here - this is a solo trip - so anyone hoping to split the couch will need to look elsewhere. That said, the Arcade Mode's timed Slaughter Spree challenges make for excellent pass-the-controller moments if you and your crew want to take turns chasing leaderboard scores. What keeps things interesting well past the opening is the sheer variety of mission types across the 60-plus story stages. One level you are doing a top-down car chase; the next throws you into a side-scrolling platformer section, then a Pole Position-style boss fight. The writing leans heavily on 80s and 90s parody references - Back to the Future, Metal Gear, Contra, TMNT, Ghostbusters - and your tolerance for that will define a lot of your experience. If reference-dense comedy lands for you, the pacing is relentless and genuinely funny in places. If you find that kind of constant wink-wink humour exhausting, some missions will grate. Reviewers consistently noted the story missions as the strongest part of the package, while the open world between objectives feels a little thin. The map is not enormous and most of it blurs together visually. The PC version comes stacked with extras that make it one of the better-value builds of the game. Mod support lets you swap in custom vehicles and characters. There is a Free Roaming Mode where you can play as unlockable guest characters including Meat Boy, CommanderVideo, and Steve from Minecraft. The package also bundles the MS-DOS port Retro City Rampage 486 and the NES prototype ROM City Rampage as playable bonuses - the kind of developer love that is rare to see. Sixteen graphical filters let you skin the game to look like CGA, EGA, NES, C64, or several other retro platforms, which is a genuinely fun toy to mess around with. Steam sits at 88 percent positive across nearly 1,700 reviews, and critics on OpenCritic landed around an 83 average, so the broad consensus is warm without being hyperbolic.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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