shakedown hawaii

Who remembers GTA 1. I do, it was amazing (at the time). Granted I was about 10 years too young to be playing it, but much like getting my mother to buy me South Park VHS' from Woolworths for £20 for two episodes, I did not care. As you may have got from that, this is a top down driving and shooting game, just like the first 2 GTA's (depending if you count London as a full game (also GTA 2 was no where near as good as 1)). There is a big aesthetic difference between the 2 games where Shakedown has gone for a full on 16 bit look, stepping up from the 8 bit look of their previous effort Retro city rampage. Point is it gives it a very different look to GTA.

This game hits hard on the story. You're a shady businessman who uses all the bad business practises in the book to rebuild his business empire that is on the edge of collapse. This leads to a lot of very on the nose cut scenes, some amusing, some not so much. It also leads to a fun property management mini game where you're ultimate goal is to buy every property on the map, starting with a tiny amount of money which you build with dividends through you're purchases, at first it may seem impossible to ever be able to afford everything but by the end of the game I was raking it about $5million a day, which is probably enough to buy half the island in one go (multipliers not included).

The actual gameplay is what you would expect, with the top down driving and shooting. There is a nice variety of things to do from very shooting heavy missions like taking over farms and weapon challenges, heavy driving missions and a whole lot of variety in the shakedown side missions (not all property owners are happy to sell ) where there's a large variety of ways you have to to get businesses to sell up from blocking the toilets with too much bog roll, to cutting off hairdressers hair and smashing up shelves. There's a fun array of weapons here from you're normal pistols, shotguns and rifles to water cannons, flaming hairdryers and ball guns.

There's something different in here that I enjoyed but I  think many wont. Yes, there's an open world but the plot is very linear and the meat and potatoes of this game are missions that last for 1 to 2 minutes, then you drive somewhere to a cut scene and repeat. It feels almost like a bunch of mini games in a way that the missions are so short. As I said though, I actually enjoyed this as it's a nice change to most other games.

I really liked this game, fun, bite size gameplay, a good property management side game and a generally amusing on the nose capitalism plot.

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Watched all (3 episodes) of the new Black mirror. Got to say I'm a bit disappointed, the show has basically completely moved away from it's distopian tech based origins and in to boring personal issues, which aren't that gripping for me as you only have an hour to get to know the characters. They also seemed more predictable now, if this were the Outer limits there would be some mad twist at the end of every episode, so where is it? Playing Rage 2 now, nearly done in fact. more to follow