Retro City Rampage Review

Game: Retro City Rampage
System: PS Vita (also available on PS3, Windows, XBLA, and WiiWare)
Genre: Action-adventure
Developer: Vblank Entertainment
Release date: October 9, 2012


Pros: Great sense of humor, diverse missions, packed with content
Cons: Some spikes in difficulty


There has never been a greater video game parody than Retro City Rampage. The game is filled -- overflowing even -- with pop culture gags, parodies of classic video games, and subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at the video game industry. It's smart, it's satirical, and it's very, very funny. Retro City Rampage is a contender for funniest game of all time. Moreover, the game itself is designed and executed masterfully. Despite its small size, Retro City is a true open world, filled with all the nooks and crannies players have come to expect from sandbox games.

Retro City Rampage takes place in Theftropolis, where "Player" is a hired thug working for a crime syndicate. During a heist-gone-wrong, Player is thrown forward in time where he must work to repair his time machine and stop the ambitions of an evil corporation. Part of the fun of Retro City is experiencing all the sight gags, inside-jokes, cultural references, and plot twists for oneself -- so I'll close the summary here.

Police will respond to illegal actions.

Although Retro City takes aim at all manner of classic video games, it's mostly a parody of Grand Theft Auto. Player roams around a giant city taking on main story and side missions. Along the way, he can hijack cars, attract the attention of police by causing destruction, or simply wander around the city streets looking for trouble. Theftropolis isn't nearly as sprawling as Liberty City or Vice City, but it's packed with people, buildings, secrets, and sight gags. Along with the main campaign mode, players can access "Free Roaming Mode," which allows them to explore the city at their own pace and cause as much devastation as possible.

In fitting with its homage to 8-bit video games, Retro City Rampage features graphics that seem to be pulled directly from an NES. Graphics snobs might protest, but the graphics are full of charm and surprising detail. The top-down perspective might also frustrate players used to a less restrictive point-of-view, but again it fits with the source material. Retro City is packaged as a retro experience, after all, even if its gameplay is much more modern than its name and appearance suggest.

Tanks for nothing.

Retro City borrows something else from its NES forebears: a high level of difficulty. It's no secret that video games have become much easier over the past few generations, moving past the steep difficulty curves that defined the first three generations of video games. But Retro City embraces the old-school mentality of "easy to learn, impossible to master." The missions in the game are difficult, but not unfairly difficult. Only once or twice did a mission seem excessively grueling.

Overall, Retro City is a masterful game, all the more impressive because it's almost entirely the work of a single man: Brian Provinciano. The jokes are smart and funny, the missions embrace gameplay elements from many different genres and eras, and throughout the game there is a thrilling sense of discovery and adventure. It's a brilliant synthesis of old-school sensibilities and new-school technologies. It's proof that game design and creativity will always trump glossy graphics and orchestral soundtracks. It's the best game of 2012.