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This roguelike first-person shooter won’t have you exploring exotic locations or demon-plagued netherworlds, instead it keeps things focused on a singular building at a time, typically composed of between 1 and 3 levels of procedurally-generated rooms. Your mission is to infiltrate the building and seize critical evidence, but beyond that your secondary objectives can vary wildly. Whether as easy as knocking out equipment in a server room, something a bit more dicey like trying to defuse multiple bombs that are on a timer, or action-oriented challenges like headshotting a certain number of perps, you’ll need to keep an eye out for them as you go since sometimes they’ll continue to evolve as you work your way through the building one kicked down door at a time. An element that is absolutely crucial to your consistent success is that in solo play every time you bust down a door, or in co-op if you’re able to coordinate both of you kicking down a door at the same time, you’ll get a brief period where everything moves in slow motion. These moments can easily make a difference between you coming out of a firefight relatively unscathed or torn to bits. If you like to live a bit dangerously you may be able to take out some people who are close by if you charge the door and then slide into the room, but keep in mind you may hit nobody and find yourself in the middle of a crowd of gun-toting thugs when luck isn’t on your side. In order to even your odds you’ll want to hit the armory between missions to spend your hard-earned merits you’ll gain from completing objectives. Whether in the form of a new and more powerful weapon, enhancements for your existing gear, or healing and body armor to try to patch yourself back up and prepare for more how you choose to spend your points can be vital to your success. While the control and flow of gameplay can be tough to get into initially, once you get a feel for things there’s a certain zone you can get into after a while that makes things more fun. More often than not being aggressive, using any elements like oil drums you can to your advantage, and being sure to sweep around the room to know where everyone is while you’re still in slow motion is crucial. Also of critical importance is knowing when to simply use your melee baton to knock someone out rather than trying to reload or waste your bullets when you’re at point blank range. If you’re not careful and ammo pickups don’t happen to be in the cards for you there’s a chance you’re going to run dry, so be sure to waste as few of your shots as you’re able. All of this is well and good but while I’m a huge roguelike fan there are some elements that aggravated me in single-player that were either buggy or didn’t make a lot of sense. Twice I had to end a mission because the game thought I hadn’t picked up all of the evidence but a sweep of the entire building found absolutely nothing, which was disappointing. While abandoning a mission can be done, in the connected dots of the main board as you try to bring down the head of an organization they then represent dead ends that you’ll have to back up and work around, fail at enough and all avenues to success will end up closed. I suppose aside from the bugs I hit this would be fine if there weren’t times where bomb defusing missions in particular are heavily stacked against you. If you fail to defuse all bombs on a level the whole building will blow with you in it. If it’s clear you’re not going to make it in time you have the option to fail but you’ll need to plan ahead to be sure you have time to get out. What usually got me though were big rooms or worse stairwells that I’d hit while trying to find the bombs. Until you’ve cleared a “room” you won’t be able to bust down other doors so if you’re running low on time and hit a multi-level stairwell you’re not likely going to make it and should get out of dodge. Elements like this, the overall timer for the main mission that’s only available on the overview screen and will keep going even past your time limit into negative numbers just don’t feel fully tested or thought through and really detracted from the action and just being able to enjoy the game. A partner will help to reduce these pains but more care to streamline your concerns and not let players get bogged down in too many elements that are only there to hold you back regardless of your shooting performance would be appreciated. Aside from some of these design decisions and things that simply feel like bugs or unintended consequences for solo players in particular RICO does manage to be different, delivering what feels more like an arcade experience in the vein a game like Time Crisis rather than a typical FPS like Doom. While the novelty can be counted as a strength, unfortunately the repetitive action can also wear thin depending on how much of a thrill you get from busting down doors and popping heads. There are some alternative modes but nothing strays too far from the core formula, though the modes that play out more like an open area Deathmatch demonstrate that the door-busting mechanic is what makes the gameplay work best. All of the elements are in place for it to be consistent fun, but it’s hard not to point to the balance and overall setup still being in need of some tweaks, at least for solo players. If you’re patient, can hook up with a friend, and are looking to get an FPS fix RICO isn’t perfect but gets enough right to be interesting.
Justin Nation, Score:Good [7.0]