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Last month, Vblank Entertainment announced Shakedown Hawaii, a 16-bit follow-up to the 8-bit Retro City Rampage. That predecessor was a colorful, imaginatively nostalgic experience, but it also had some big problems.
Will Shakedown Hawaii address those issues? After spending a bit of time with the new game and developer Brian Provinciano, we're hopeful. In addition to even more ways to wreak havoc, Shakedown Hawaii features heavily destructible environments, allowing for more thoughtful strategies than the previous game.
Provinciano also revealed to Polygon that he's not using the 16-bit style to limit himself this time. With Retro City Rampage, he wouldn't let himself do anything in the game that wouldn't work in an actual 8-bit, NES-era game. With Shakedown Hawaii, the art style is 16-bit, but the actual technology behind the game can stretch and do things that never would have been possible on a Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.
You can witness the destruction possible in Shakedown Hawaii for yourself in the 10 minutes of gameplay featured in the video above. The game is planned for release on PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Windows PC, with additional ports to Mac, Linux, 3DS and possibly Nintendo's new NX hardware being considered. Provinciano told Polygon that he's hoping to finish the game in 2016, but he does not yet know if that will be possible.
