The UI comes across as being disorientating. Any encounter exceeding a few seconds soon showcases the messy controls which result in you hopping around, turning back to fire only to be knocked down by an enemy’s bullet.Īs well as frustrating controls, the game will often have you access the map or business menu to buy the aforementioned modifiers to help your business grow and, well, it can be a bit of a pain.
This isn’t helped by an aiming system which doesn’t work well with any weapons. Shakedown: Hawaii embraces an arcade style of gameplay which is incredibly frantic but doesn’t give you a real chance to soak up the world.Īfter three or four hours you’ll end up repeating the same sort of missions, which is fine, but it doesn’t exactly send thrills down your spine. Each mission will have you either steal a vehicle, intimidate a local business owner or even shoot up a cartel group in South America, but all last only a few minutes. Basically, anything you do will earn you a wad of cash.Įach one of these actions is generally linked to a minigame or some form of a checklist which will keep you entertained as you get enough money to buy, well, the whole island. By roaming into local businesses, driving into people and crates, or buying up property and adding cash-grabbing modifiers, Shakedown: Hawaii’s main drive is to ensure your income is rapidly growing. Like the cash-obsessed man you primarily play as – who screams at every employee about why his failing business isn’t jumping onto the next money-making fad – you’re concerned about numbers and how much they’re increasing. The inherent problem is, though, parodying capitalism is a tough concept to pull off as most games have done it before, and better, so the jokes fall a bit flat. The reason, of course, is money, nicely boosted by unchecked capitalism. Playing as an out-of-touch business tycoon, his wannabe gangsta son and, for some reason, a hired mercenary based in South America, you’ll bounce to-and-fro around Hawaii exploiting, threatening and largely being a stereotypical grade-A nasty man towards the island’s residents. However, Shakedown: Hawaii’s tone certainly comes through as it highlights the ridiculous nature of capitalism and its effect on smaller countries and the populace. While the game aims for creating an island with a variety of different districts, it doesn’t pull it off. The natural downside, however, is as much as it does to hide it, the world quickly becomes a blur of repeated buildings, foliage and even the well-animated pedestrians milling about become too familiar. The residents bob up and down in that familiar way players are used to since the renaissance of pixel art games. It’s amazing the amount of world-building and sense of place Shakedown: Hawaii manages to create within such a short period of time and with as few pixels it has.
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Sure, it’s not thousands of kilometres of 3D-generated textures like GTA, but it mimics the ethos of trying to make a world full of character and people. With its 16-bit, top-down style, every pixel is VBlank Entertainment Inc.’s attempt to create its own, ‘lived-in’ world. clearly flaunt their desire to take GTA and boil it down into a more chewable, distilled experience. One of the more recent examples? Shakedown: Hawaii.Īs many have done it’s completely apt comparing Shakedown: Hawaii to one of gaming’s giants as, for better or worse. Its aftershocks are still being felt, rippling through video games of all shapes and sizes. The video game industry has felt wave after wave of its influence over the years: from publishers emulating Rockstar’s business models, to major publishers trying to recreate a ‘lived-in’ world – a phrase synonymous within the open world genre. It went on to make a fair few quid, totalling more than 11 million copies sold, and that was only the latest in a long-running, genre-defining, cultural phenomenon of a series. In 2013 a somewhat popular game called Grand Theft Auto V released – you may have heard of it.
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