Retro City Rampage tries to do the whole GTA/Bethesda game/Ubigame thing of being a big open world that you get familiar with by driving around a hub, and that's a pretty modern convention. It also tries to do this while clumsily weilding about what they will assert is a very retro playstyle. The thing is, this ends up being a worst of both worlds scenario, strung with boring and repetitive combat scenarios spread across a pretty uninteresting city, with little motivating you to follow through with the dozens of side missions that show up on your radar. When I did try to do them, they felt like they were repeating the worst parts of the main campaign, which itself was largely juvenile in tone and design. They throw a million expendable cops, thugs, and soldiers your way, with a hundred invisible checkpoints and an infinite supply of lives so that you die a million times (97 by the end in my case) without losing a lot of progress. And I can't help but feel like that blind jab at "difficulty" is what they believed would make their game justifiable as "Nintendo Hard". RCR is less a game and more a hamfisted, halfhearted, and mostly unfunny collection of cheap references and gags.