RICO: London

I came into RICO: London knowing the original had a solid breach-and-clear loop, and for the first few floors of this high-rise follow-up, that loop still pops. You step close to a door, hit Breach, and get a Max Payne-style slow-motion window to headshot every East End gangster in the room before time snaps back to normal speed. When it clicks - assault rifle in one hand, scavenged shotgun ready to swap - there is a genuine arcade rush here. The cel-shaded comic-book visuals hold up, and the weapon variety (the loadout includes things like a Lockstock sawn-off and a Yippee-ki-yay SMG, named with obvious wink-wink intent) gives you enough to fiddle with between floors. The problems stack up fast though, and they're the kind that matter to anyone who cares about whether a shooter is actually built properly. Enemy health has been bumped up from the original, which sounds fine until you realize clean headshots aren't reliably lethal - that kills the fantasy of a slo-mo door breach almost immediately. Ammo is scarce and pickups blend into the environment because Ground Shatter stripped out the highlight outlines that the first RICO used, so you end up skulking around already-cleared rooms hunting a medkit instead of pushing forward. Melee enemies register damage before their swing animation connects. The final boss room difficulty spikes so hard it feels like a different game was bolted onto the end. These aren't nitpicks; they're core loop problems. The structure itself is a step back from the original RICO. Three modes exist - Operation (the roguelite campaign with an easy/no-permadeath or normal/permadeath toggle), Daily Play (fixed loadouts and floors, global leaderboard), and Challenges (time-limited bite-size rooms). That's a reasonable framework. What kills it is the linearity: London ditches the branching paths and sub-objectives of the original in favour of one long corridor upward, and the room assets repeat badly enough that you will see vehicle loading bays several floors into the sky with zero explanation. There are no persistent weapon upgrades between runs. A single playthrough clocks in somewhere around three to five hours, and once you've seen the room pool, you've seen everything. Co-op is the advertised centrepiece, and it's genuinely more fun with a partner - kicking in a door while your friend covers the left flank has legitimate buddy-cop energy. But online co-op shipped with significant bugs at launch, with missing door assets creating literal walls where your partner should be able to follow you. Friendly fire on Normal mode adds tension but also means close-quarters rooms with hostages can punish coordination mistakes harshly. The online population was never large and the Steam review count reflects a mixed-at-best reception. If you can guarantee a sofa co-op partner, the local play holds up better than the online. Bottom line from someone who watches frame pacing and weapon feel before aesthetics: the shooting controls are just good enough to make the core breach satisfying when the game isn't fighting you. The TTK on standard enemies is workable, the slo-mo trigger is responsive, and the scavenged-weapon loop adds light resource tension. But the bugs, the room repetition, the stripped-down progression, and the unbalanced difficulty curve drag this below the line of something I'd recommend at any price outside a deep sale with a friend confirmed to split screen it.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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