Shakedown: Hawaii energizes its open-world satire with the transparent and ruthless cynicism of modern commerce. Its antihero's flagrant and invincible dishonesty would go beyond parody if it weren't kept in check by the player's underhanded complicity. I want the money numbers to go higher, too. And I'll destroy or ruin anyone in Shakedown: Hawaii's lush pixel paradise to see it through.
Sponsored content. All-natural products. Charging a premium for exit-row seating. Software update subscription fees. Mail-in rebates. Targeted advertising. Raw water. Store credit cards. Superfoods. Day-one patches. Vacation clubs. Multi-level marketing. Oversold seating. Fuel surcharge. Convenience fees.
If you have found yourself blankly paying for some kind of service (or absence of service) you don’t quite understand, you are not alone. Shakedown: Hawaii is keenly aware of this wave of social decay and, rather than fight the tide, enables players to do everything imaginable to keep it rolling. To fuel its open-world crime syndicate, Vblank Entertainment trades Retro City Rampage’s arcane and overt 8-bit references for the more relatable ornamentation of a corporate hellscape. Shakedown: Hawaii is what might happen if Retro City Rampage sold out, and that is very much the point.
As the slovenly CEO of Feeble Multinational, a proprietor of VHS rentals and cabs and other things no one uses anymore, you’re an ideal position to disrupt the state of Hawaiian commerce. The CEO (who I don’t think is named!) awakens from what I assumed was two solid decades of martinis and daytime television to discover his coffers are nearing empty. Newly conscious of the outside world, the CEO, his idiot son Scooter, and his South American henchman learn of every imaginable scheme 2019 has to offer and venture to wreak havoc on every animate and inanimate object in the vicinity. It’s a blundering and blunt-force path of destruction.
Shakedown: Hawaii quickly establishes a pattern. Through some form of electronic or social osmosis, the CEO will learn of a competitor employing some ingenious grift and then seek to apply that grift to suit his own purposes. He figures out, for example, he can adjust a container to only contain half a product, and yet still sell it at its original price. He hears buzzwords like “augmented reality,” “blockchain,” and “data mining,” and, with no idea what in the exact hell any of it means, orders a pivot in order to boost profits. Shakedown: Hawaii is a hailstorm of deception and marketing gimmicks expressed through the bleary eyed ignorance of a corporate executive. His eyeballs are always dollar signs regardless of what he’s actually seeing.
In terms of action, Shakedown: Hawaii operates like a streamlined version of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto. There are over one hundred mostly sequential campaign missions on the island. You can highjack any car on any street for immediate transportation and without much of a penalty (police are present, but never created anything resembling a threat). Pedestrians can be run over and churned through at will. Cars can be dumped in any nearby river or left abandoned. You can kill a million people with a flamethrower or almost no one and experience the same result. Shakedown: Hawaii renders its trio of protagonists as unrepentant psychopaths and never backs down. No one, ever, admits failure or wrongdoing.
Shakedown: Hawaii’s entire demeanor would be off-putting if it weren’t so firmly committed to its craft. At no point does anyone learn anything but the worst possible lesson. No one apologizes for anything. On the rare occasion someone is actually busted they evade any sort of punishment and only experience, at best, a minor inconvenience to their day as punishment for murdering dozens. The lengths to which Shakedown: Hawaii goes to demonstrate the CEO’s depravity is wonderfully impressive. We live in a society that allows men of wealth and privilege to bypass the legal system and Shakedown: Hawaii, while greatly exaggerated, aptly captures that particular American sideshow.
There’s more to Shakedown: Hawaii than driving around. The henchman is dispatched to South America to source some kind of exotic fruit or retrieve a chili pepper from a prison’s vending machine, or some other impulsive task. This transitions Shakedown: Hawaii into a twin-stick shooter with a limited number of firing angles and a neat jump-dodge mechanic. There’s even a vague homing ability for your shots. The objective is to always kill everyone in sight; a task neatly accomplished with ample amounts of ammunition and generous health allocations. Shakedown: Hawaii will gladly kill you but charitable checkpoints ease any point of frustration.
Real estate management composes the backbone of the entire operation. It begins by the player, operating either Scooter the idiot son or the CEO, barging into local businesses and shaking them down for protection money. Resistance is applied but overcome in a variety of actions. You can cut the ponytail off the barber with scissors. You can throw wads of paper towels down their toilets or ride a moped around the grocery store. You can step outside and murder the gang members they were already paying for protection. More than eighty businesses are available for shakedowns and, while some tricks are repeated, the ludicrous context behind each one is delightful.
Once a business is shaken down, it’s available for purchase. Buying out a business allows the player to retain its profits. The CEO will stumbles into new and exciting schemes that can be bought and applied as multipliers for those profits. Conducting “independent studies” is good for a 5.5x multiplier. Selling “unrefined” versions of products creates a 5x multiplier. Hiring a lobbyist, paying for “sponsored content,” and, the granddaddy of them all, working in a Multi-Level Marketing option, are all highly profitable multipliers.
Managing a real estate empire can become addictive. Once I started buying the really expensive stuff—parking garages, luxury apartments, the local airport—I bought every multiplier in sight for each property. Then I started doing the same for almost every business that I owned. Shakedown: Hawaii pays out every single in-game day, which is incredibly fast. Before I knew it I had more money than I could ever spend. And I still kept buying more businesses and buying all the multipliers, even as I was approaching 500 million dollars. When I finished Shakedown: Hawaii I had fifteen hours on the clock and (because it measures this) two of those hours were spent in menus.
Almost like an idle/clicker game, Shakedown: Hawaii quickly made me only care about the numbers escalating. The CEO was consumed by the idea of raw profit at any means necessary and, as a person who enjoys playing videogames and watching numbers get higher, I was happy to go along for the ride. Murder, sabotage, mindless expense, ruining the lives of thousands of the islands inhabitants—sure, whatever. Do you see how much money I’m making? Isn’t that cool? Money is cool and now I have a lot of it. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, of course, but it means I win whatever game I’m playing.
Even in the face of god-like prosperity and power, Shakedown: Hawaii still allows the player to nickel and dime the local populace. I can ram fake-Amazon trucks off the road to stop the pace of online shopping. I can hijack coffee trucks and bring them to my coffee shop to increase my bottom line. I can enter over two-hundred real buildings, steal whatever is inside, and then go pawn it for petty cash. Having some walk-around money entitles me to character upgrades—a double jump and running speed among them—at the local doctor. Having more money on me than I need is also cool because of the Worthington Law.
Other odds and ends compose Shakedown: Hawaii’s basic tenets of gameplay. The CEO’s quest to get on television leads to a series of Running Man-like screen tests where jumping over bullets is as important and nailing down a target. Some terse rhythm games compose aerobic workouts. Rampage sequences with each weapon (and sometimes cars) are available everywhere. Shakedown: Hawaii suffers with its repetition but its ludicrous context is always available to dull the pain.
It doesn’t hurt that Shakedown: Hawaii is one of the more gorgeous pixel-art games around. Positioned as an homage to the 16-bit era, it more closely operates as one of the 2D 32-bit games publishers allowed to exist. The animations of the pedestrians, the careful perspective work when cars take turns, and the explosions are all best-in-glass performance within its chosen aesthetic. The vacation-centric, tropical-paradise vibe of the island is also an easy sell (I haven’t been to Hawaii but it all resembled my time in Key West), and really fits the scammer’s Shangri-La envisioned by the CEO.
Shakedown: Hawaii‘s boisterous art and music also help contrast and offset its utterly repugnant themes. When characters enter a one-on-one conversation, they almost always bounce (literally bounce) in with an accompanying bass jamboree that gives way to low-key dirge. The field music is a mixture of high energy chiptunes and mellow, almost wistful meditations. Everything on the radio is an earworm. Trumpeting the glory of a retro-throwback with 16-bit music in 2019 may roll eyes, but the skill behind Shakedown: Hawaii‘s art and the diversity of its soundtrack both deserve to turn heads.
It’s also worth mentioning that I played most of Shakedown: Hawaii on my Vita, a device that is somehow more than seven years old. When I played it on my PlayStation 4 I used the cross-save functionality to effortlessly send my save over to my Vita. Then I sent it back to the PlayStation 4. I know this technology was available seven years ago (Retro City Rampage used it as well) but it remains a neat feature that, in some alternate universe, was the norm between all PlayStation 4 and Vita games. And, god, that screen is still so nice.
Shakedown: Hawaii energizes its open-world satire with the transparent and ruthless cynicism of modern commerce. Its antihero’s flagrant and invincible dishonesty would go beyond parody if it weren’t kept in check by the player’s underhanded complicity. I want the money numbers to go higher, too. And I’ll destroy or ruin anyone in Shakedown: Hawaii’s lush pixel paradise to see it through.
