Like its NES-ish predecessor, Shakedown Hawaii is a top-down GTA parody styled after that series’ earliest entries, painted in crunchy retro console visuals. Like Retro City Rampage, it’s also an endless parade of references - but unlike the often-tiresome parade of callbacks Alec lamented in his Retro City Rampage review, it does seem like Shakedown’s drawing from a more contemporary well. Prods at VR, hypercapitalism, gamification and streaming culture are the norm here.
I reckon your fondness for aggressive, reference-based japes will make or break whether Shakedown: Hawaii is for you. But fussiness over storefronts soon shouldn’t. After over a year locked on the Epic Games Store, Vblank’s throwback crime spree is heading to Steam later this summer. Of course, that’s after they sort out a particularly odd physical release. See, I normally wouldn’t shout about console ports on these hallowed PC pages. But developers Vblank Entertainment like to get weird with platforms, previously bringing Retro City Rampage to MS-DOS. Shakedown isn’t going quite as far back in time this time ‘round. Instead, after a “whim of curiosity” one Friday night, Vblank are opting for a release on the Nintendo Wii on July 9th. Eh? “I’m no stranger to porting games to discontinued platforms, even when I know they won’t see the light of day,” the devs explained in an announcement post. “It’s just something I enjoy. The older the platform, the more fun it is! The cleverer I need to be! The more ways I’ll need to figure out how to optimize things! However, for fun or not, if there’s even a small chance that a port can be released, I’ll do all the legwork I can to try and make that happen.” There’ll only be 3,000 copies of the Wii version released next month, and it’s first come first served. After that, the game will hit Steam (and, err, the Wii U) sometime this August. And if you’re really not fussed, Shakedown: Hawaii is currently available over on the Epic Games Store for £15/€20/$20.
