Retro City Rampage (Video Game Review)

Retro City Rampage is a unique title that promised plenty of different ways to play that all work well and more references and cameos than any other game has featured before. The game manages to deliver on all accounts, but a relatively short campaign makes the numerous references feel a bit forced at times and distracting away from the main plot of the mission. While it's clearly not for everyone, Retro City Rampage works like an episode of Family Guy that keeps the randomness and absurdness to a maximum while delivering a very tongue in cheek storyline has your attention from start to finish. The additional modes of play and numerous hidden secrets and fun mini-games just add even more replay value to an already exciting title.

In Retro City Rampage, you are the Player. Player is a former henchman that has just made it out of prison after making a series of poor life decisions and is looking for new work to make some quick cash. The opening mission sees references to Mega Man 2, Duck Tales, The Dark Knight, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario World and more, and that's before you even learn all of the controls of the game! After the huge rush of nostalgia, Player finds himself time traveling through the past, working together with the crazy doctor from the Back to the Future film series to make his way back to his own time while taking down plenty of bad guys along the way. The storyline of Retro City Rampage is actually a pretty good one even without all the great references that will leave any 90s kid with a smile on their face, and gamers will be able to enjoy even more game modes upon completion of the game.

Retro City Rampage features 62 different missions throughout its campaign. While most are of the shorter variety, most will have a theme whether it be working for the mob boss, Vanilla T-Cube, beating up preppy kids in Saved by the Bell missions or tracking down some ghosts with the Ghostbusters, and the themes will have around 2-3 missions each before moving on to other sections of the game. Driving around the city, hijacking cars and running over pedestrians all while taking in the sites and sounds is fun enough on its own, but the easily agitated cops can be a bit cumbersome when you're trying to complete missions. Retro City Rampage incorporates a new checkpoint system that allows you to die in combat and restart from convenient points through the fight. A hand autosave feature, online leaderboards and plenty of unlockable items are also present in the game to make it a fun title that has an old school feel with plenty of modern features that doesn't limit the classic gameplay or alienate it to a select age group of gamers.

In addition to the classics, you'll find plenty of references to newer content including indie titles such as Super Meat Boy, which is ironic in that Retro City Rampage has done for simplistic, open-world titles what Super Meat Boy did for platforming games only a few years ago. The game is fun, challenging, easy to pick up and play, and yet it is made almost entirely by the one man team of developer and programmer Brian Provinciano since he began work on the game back in 2002. Retro City Rampage is built to appeal to old school gaming fans, but the numerous elements that make the game comparable to an open world Grand Theft Auto clone means nearly any gamer can pick up the title and enjoy it. Custom colors, an 8-bit design and soundtrack gives Retro City Rampage an older look, but after playing the game for just a few hours, it's easy to tell plenty of time went into making the game fit current high quality gaming standards. For only $10, you can get your own ticket to Theftropolis, and it will be worth every penny!

Retro City Rampage is now available for PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Arcade and PC and can be purchased for $9.99 or 800 Microsoft Points. Retro City Rampage is rated T by the ESRB for Blood, Crude Humor, Sexual Content, Use of Alcohol & Violence. For more information on the game, check out the official Retro City Rampage website.

Game Features:

Single Player

60+ Mission Campaign

Arcade and Free Modes

Online Leaderboards

Achievement/Trophy Support

Game Information:
Developer: VBlank Entertainment
Publisher: D3Publisher
Platforms: PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Arcade (reviewed) & PC
Release Date: October 9, 2012 (PSN & PC), December 19, 2012 (XBLA)

Score: 8 out of 10