Rico London Review

The original Rico was a surprise hit for me. It offered the simple joys of kicking open doors, charging into rooms in a blur of slow motion, and shooting everything in sight. It helped that it had a solid roguelite formula underpinning the action that kept the game varied and offered up meta progression to keep coming back to try out new things. It was addictive enough that it graced my top ten back in 2019.

So, it is with great sadness that I must say that Rico London is worse in almost every way.

It is still a First-Person shooter at its heart and kicking down doors triggers slow motion, there is still permadeath and procedurally generated levels but, that’s about it.

The branching paths and diverse objectives are gone. The piecemeal levels are gone too. Instead, the player is placed at the bottom of a building, and they must fight their way to the top. There are points where there are per-run upgrades using rewards for doing well in the level and these can be guns, passive power-ups, or health and ammo.

The time limit, 24 minutes to complete a run, is also gone. The developers have replaced this incentive that propels the player forward with a combo meter. As the player kills enemies a meter goes up, but it ticks down at a rapid pace whenever the player doesn’t.

This seems like a good idea on paper until I brushed up against a number of other design decisions. Most of these involve how guns are now handled and the aforementioned upgrade system.

In Rico, the player starts with a pistol and as they complete objectives, they can buy upgrades and new guns on a per-run basis. Any weapon dropped by enemies in the first game would fill up the carried guns keeping things brisk.

In Rico London, the player can pick up any weapon but the ammo for each weapon is limited and running over the same weapon type only gives a little each time. Ammo types are now much more granular, meaning that one shotgun won’t have the same type as another. Depending on what the proc-gen levels generate for the player this can result in spending time scrambling to find a different gun which means the meter is going down.

There are pouches randomly through the levels that award refills for any weapons the player has, but these are not always easy to spot, and picking them up requires holding down the A button, which again means the meter is going down. The player isn’t awarded for efficiency either as each weapon is limited to a set amount of ammo that can be carried at any one time. That means that it can’t be hoarded if a drought of pickups occurs.

Every time the meter is not going up the chances of getting precious bonus currency goes down. Not that it matters all that much because the expensive guns that can be purchased are rendered pointless if the right drops don’t appear.

There are rare moments when everything clicks into place and the dice rolls line up – I got a good weapon and enough easy refills, and I flew through sections taking out rooms of enemies. The throbbing electronic music urged me on through the slow-motion carnage, doors splintering and bullets gliding past my head. When that flow gets going Rico London rivals Bizarre Creations’s most underrated title The Club.

Far more frequently though it was me killing a few people, looking for ammo, then clearing another area and rinse repeating because of a lack of health and resources.

There are other baffling design choices too.  Enemy grenades do run-crippling damage and destroy doors but do not kill other enemies. Player grenades are far less effective. Rico had more things to interact with like explosive barrels to detonate that could turn tides or destroy players. These are absent entirely and anything in the world is purely window dressing.

As if that wasn’t enough, a game that is already hard and puts an onus on bullet conservation decides it needs boss battles. The last one ratchets it up so by placing an infinite number of lower-level enemies as well as a bullet-sponge boss.

Then there are the bugs, invisible enemies, invisible guns, being shot through walls… These are not inconveniences but game-jarring experiences that will end a run.

Rico London, currently on sale for twice the price of the original, is half the game and a crushing disappointment as a sequel.

Conclusion

Less content, less interesting, crippled by bizarre design decisions and bugs. Rico London feels like a weak test run for its precursor rather than a fully fledged sequel.