Title: RICO
Developer: Ground Shatter
Publisher: Rising Star Games
Platform: PC [reviewed], Switch, PS4, Xbox One
Genre: Action, FPS, Co-Op
Release Date: Mar 14, 2019
Price: $19.99
RICO is a dumb game. Now, that doesn’t mean RICO is a bad game, but I need to make it clear that RICO is a very dumb game. It’s the kind of dumb fun that doesn’t happen all that often in today’s very serious and earth-tone colored gaming landscape. RICO is less tactical FPS and more an arcade frenzy of blood and bullets.
The goal of the game is simple: you play as a pair of cops who live on the edge and play by no ones rules. It’s this attitude that gets you recruited into RICO, a organization run by a British lady who tasks you with taking down all the city’s top criminal bosses. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it gets into the action before you can even take a breath.
You can think of RICO as PayDay, but without taking itself all that seriously. You’ve got 24 hours to take down the baddies and solve your case; and by solve your case I mean killing anything that moves in each of the games several stages while gathering “evidence” to “convict” mob bosses. Your cases are all generated on the fly, so you’ll never play the same one twice, or go about it in the same way.
Gameplay consists of your basic FPS fare. The main gameplay feature of RICO comes from the door-kicking mechanic that feels pulled from every 90s cop drama the inundated the airways back in the day. Your interact button initiates your character kicking down the door you are at, with the game then going into a slow-motion mode for a couple of seconds.
It’s during this time where you have the best chance of eliminating enemies before taking serious damage. If you aren’t quick on the trigger the game will flow back into normal time and you’ll have to tackle the room you stormed like any FPS you’ve played. It’s all about surprising the bad guys and getting the drop on them before they can react to your presence.
Each level is built around a large building of some sort with each room, or connected open areas, having a set number of enemies inside. Once you kill everyone the game will alert you to it. This is nice as you can then focus on collecting ammo, health, and collecting the evidence you’ll need to bust all these now dead perps.
You are a loose cannon, but a good cop. Everyone might be dead, but you have the evidence to put them away just in case they survived their heads exploding like a watermelon slammed onto the ground. Along the way you’ll also be tasked with other objectives to keep things fresh. You might have to deal with disarming bombs on a floor in a given time as you deal with enemies.
That’s about as deep as the game gets. You kick down doors and kill everything/one inside. Sort of like an FPS version of Hotline Miami, only not as insane. As you can expect RICO isn’t a deep experience and won’t take you all that long to get everything out of the game, but developer Ground Shatter games have added some features to extend the fun.
Once you battle the main campaign you can jump into the Daily Cases which, well, drop every day. These mix things up and also offer up leader-boards and carious rewards for completing. It’s a nice way to make the game competitive and force you to speed-run these random cases. And since you really can’t practice stages, everyone is on the same page making it pretty competitive.
But the real star of the show is the co-op carnage that you can unleash with a friend. You can play locally (my preferred way since I’m an old fart) or grab another player online to take down the cases presented. Working together really calls to mind games like PayDay, only a lot faster and more chaotic.
Along the way you’ll unlock more weapons with the points you earn for completing various objectives in each stage. RICO also lets you customize your weapons with various traits as well, letting you find a weapon combo and perks that work best for the way you like to play. It’s all really basic, but works well enough to give a little depth to the experience. That said, there are some issues that are pretty bothersome.
The graphics feature a nice, almost cell-shaded look and feel that reminds of the the wholly under-appreciated XIII. Enemies look great and I’m a huge fan of color, but for whatever reason it all feels pretty lifeless. Enemies are pretty varied, but the all act accordingly and predictably. Another issue is it feels like there isn’t any AI to be had in the game. Everyone just sort of rushes you, letting you game the system by bottlenecking door ways. And if they don’t rush you they’ll just stand there waiting for you to attack them.
The music isn’t anything to right home about and you certainly won’t be humming or bumping any of the tunes once you finish playing. Sound effects are serviceable but guns don’t have the punch to them that you might expect and sound-effects from enemies can sometimes linger in strange ways . And then there’s the repetition. Sure, PayDay and the like were also very repetitive games, but they shined in how you tackled cases with a group of friends.
RICO isn’t quite as deep with only one partner, and even less so on your own. The gameplay won’t really change, only that you’ll have a friend to clear room with you, or other rooms in the level you are in. Physics also have a mind of their own, almost as if you are a magnet and everything not hard-coded to the floor has an opposite charge. Bumping into chairs will send them flying across the room.
Again, RICO is a dumb game, but it’s not a bad game. It’s just unfortunate that it feels only slightly a step up above some sort of tech demo or proof of concept for something bigger. It’s isn’t deep enough for me to consider it a complete game as it stands, at least not on PC. Fun, oh heck yeah, and playing with a friend really saves the experience, but I don’t know how long that fun will last you. Thankfully at only $20 you might just get enough out of it to warrant a purchase. That said, there are simply better options on the PC for this type of gameplay.
Where RICO really does have the best chance of shining is over on the Nintendo Switch. I can really see co-op busting in handheld mode being a real blast. And with the Nintendo Switch sorely lacking FPS games, let alone cop-op ones, I’d really suggest you go and pick up up that version instead of the PC edition of the game. In fact, I’m heading to the store right after this review goes live to track down a copy.
Pros:
Slick styling
Great co-op action
Fast & intense fun
Cons:
Repetitive
Not a deep experience
A.I. issues
“RICO is tons of fun, but with a lack of depth that fun may not last very long.”
Final Score:
3/5
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