You know, I’m starting to wonder a lot about myself. Last year, I loved playing a serial killer in Party Hard, and now here I am mostly loving Shakedown: Hawaii, a game about an evil CEO learning to embrace his inner mobster. If not for the end game, this might have even been a 5 star review because I loved being evil, which makes me wonder: dudes, what the hell is wrong with me?
But let’s start with the plot. The CEO of Feeble Industries is watching TV when he sees a report that his empire is failing. His CFO Ron explains that streaming is killing his video stores, online shopping is killing his retail empire, and most of his other enterprises are falling behind as new technologies supplant the things he’d invested in. So this CEO decides to get “aggressive” to return to prominence.
I think the best part of this story is how many times the CEO discovers how modern business models are forcing him to pay more for bullshit like convenience fees or HD streaming, and he’s mad, but not because they’re fleecing him. No, he’s mad because, as he says, “Why aren’t we doing this kind of con already?”
In a lot of ways, this is like a top-down GTA clone, but there’s so much freedom in how I can choose to play the game. I can pull the triggers to fire, or use the face button, or even use the right analog stick turning this into a right lovely twin stick shooter. Whatever feels good for you, go for it.
Then there’s the variety of mini-games used for the titular shakedowns of local businesses. Some require smashing the furniture or shelves to get the clerks to agree to protection services, which also allows the CEO to buy the shops outright for extra profit. But other shakedowns ask the CEO to intimidate customers, intercept and hijack delivery vans, conduct scare mongering campaigns amongst the locals, or to simply leave a bad Yelp review. So even though a large part of the game is all about buying out businesses through shakedowns, the methods to get each business remain mostly fun and fresh.
Then there’s buying up all the real estate at cheap prices so the CEO can eventually jack up the rent. Since this causes the poor to flock to the trailer park, he buys that too, then burns down a forest to double the park’s capacity. Well, I say burn down, but the flamethrower is ridiculously easy to kill oneself with, so I opted for stealing a truck and mowing down the trees. Which, yeah, not realistic, but still kinda fun.
In addition to these local activities, the CEO has contracted “Al,” who handles side quests to “liberate” farms from a cartel in other countries. Many of these early missions involve showing up with only a bare minimum of weapons on hand, but Al can pick up guns from the locals to become a one man killing machine.
Then there’s the CEO’s son Scooter, AKA: DJ Jockitch, who is desperate to become a famous rap artist. He figures the way to do this is gain street cred as a gangster, but the gang he joins give him jobs that are frankly pretty mediocre. His exploits eventually lead to a city-wide gang war, but it’s less because he’s a badass, and more because his former boss carries a grudge for way longer than is healthy.
There’s so much more to cover with the plot, but it’s all spoilers, so I’d rather move on to why this didn’t get that coveted fifth and final star. Mostly it has to do with the end game suddenly getting ridiculously hard. The last shakedowns had counter clerks decking themselves in bullet proof body armor, meaning the only way to fight was having a supply of grenades or Molotovs on hand to defeat them.
But then the cartel shows up, and the game just got dumb. Al is tasked with fighting across town against a flood of ever spawning enemies. Even after completing his first task, he has to flee to the airport, again pursued by enemies armed with every gun and rocket launcher in the game. Even then, I might have been okay with it, except for how the game’s police handle all this. Despite five or six guys using SMGs and automatic rifles, killing the local with reckless abandon, the passing police see nothing. It’s only if Al fires back that the cops go, “Whoa, that is uncalled for!” Same goes for fleeing in a vehicle. The cartel plows through a sidewalk of pedestrians in front of a squad car? It’s fine! If I so much as tap a bumper while fleeing from four vans full of crazed killers firing indiscriminately, there’s now cops and killers trying to give me a bad day.
Then there’s the final level, in which almost everyone is bulletproof, Al gets next to nothing to defend himself with, and the final boss is bullshit. He gives the impression that I should be learning patterns and getting better. But if I hid behind cover to wait out his Vulcan cannon bursts, he just stomps the ground to make a piece of the ceiling hit Al and knock him out of cover. I won by ignoring his pattern and just shooting and jumping like a noob.
After finishing the main game, I tried out the free roam mode. I had expected this mode would task me with taking over the city and building up my arsenal without the story and its related side quests. But that’s not the case at all. Instead, my selected characters starts with 99,999,999 dollars, a full arsenal of fully loaded weapons, and all the properties already owned. So it’s just there to provoke the police and see how long I can survive at the highest most wanted levels, and that didn’t even appeal to me in Grand Theft Auto V. It’s a bit of a letdown, is what I’m saying.
If I have any other issue with the game, it’s a minor lament about the music. Just like in GTA, when getting into a car, the radio starts playing music, and you can change the stations. Which is fine, but every song is really short. Sure, they’re just video game techno loops, but let a song play for longer than ten seconds before changing to the next, you know? Besides that, most of the music is good, so I wouldn’t have minded if they played for three minutes or so.
Setting aside the end game difficulty spikes and the free roam disappointments, I’d still give Shakedown: Hawaii an enthusiastic 4 stars. It’s a great short game that understands what makes parodies funny, and the variety of side missions means even the seemingly most repetitive part of the game manages to stay fresh up to the end. I’d recommend it for fans of the old school GTA games as well as anyone looking to blow off some steam by blowing away some evil corporate overlords. Yeah, you’re replacing them with another older overlord, but isn’t that always the case?