However, its mobile-esque method of grabbing your attention span and giving you some enrichment while your digital empire grows through carnage deserves a few hours of your time. It will get old and mundane if you’re not gelling with the on-the-nose satire and aesthetics. Your tolerance of Shakedown: Hawaii’s clicker-baiting may be offset with the fact that the game handles its top-down action in a solid, breezy, and occasionally fun fashion. Even the more dramatic and tense of fights can be taken down without much thought due to the game’s generous save system and cookie-cutter enemy behaviour. You have a plethora of weapons to sort your destructive tendencies: grenades, SMGs, shotguns, and flamethrowers to name but a few.Ĭhallenge-wise, you’re not going to die if your twitch reflexes are on the level of “getting through most of NES Contra with your default lives”. Punchy gameplay requires arcade-perfect controls, and thankfully Shakedown: Hawaii delivers that.
At least about 24 hours or so to get to three million in-game. Thankfully, this isn’t the case where you have to wait a single day for a paywall to reach its cooldown you just need to keep doing the game’s short and punchy missions. I want the money numbers to go higher, too. Its antihero’s flagrant and invincible dishonesty would go beyond parody if it weren’t kept in check by the player’s underhanded complicity. The more hours you spend playing the game, the bigger your empire grows. Shakedown: Hawaii energizes its open-world satire with the transparent and ruthless cynicism of modern commerce. As you play more of the game, you earn more money and up the value and daily revenue of your business. Stealing cars, killing innocent bystanders for extra cash nothing is sacred.Īnd then there’s the business aspects of the game, simplified down to “buy property if you have enough cash from your main job(s)”. Also, being a dick in this version of Hawaii helps. The story is simple: run your criminal-slash-business empire through questionable means by offering protection rackets, devaluing land by torching it down, repoing cars, and sabotaging the competition. This pseudo-sequel of sorts takes the best, and worst, aspects of today’s gaming cliches and habits specifically the addictive and mandatory attention-leecher aspects of a clicker game. Shakedown: Hawaii is an open-world top-down action game from Brian Provinciano, the man behind the much-lauded retro throwback Retro City Rampage. Genre: Top-Down Action Throwback With “Business Management”