I play and enjoy a lot of Rainbow Six: Siege, so when RICO came round for review, I was pretty damn excited. After all, who wouldn’t want to play a buddy-cop co-op shoot ’em up? At the end of the day however, I was left underwhelmed.
RICO undertakes the daunting task of bringing not only a first-person shooter to the Nintendo Switch, a console that is severely under-powered, but also procedurally generating all of its levels for practically endless content across several modes. Quick-play lets you dive into a level at random or pick one using a seed, case mode generates an entire rogue-like campaign to play through, and daily challenges earn RP which can be used to purchase weapon skins. Don’t ask me what RP stands for, I genuinely couldn’t find out. I spent most of my time trying the case mode as quick play felt pointless after a few attempts (although the wave-based lock-down mode was admittedly a fun change of pace) and the daily challenges gave so little RP that you’d have to play them all over at least two days for even one weapon skin; it just didn’t feel worthwhile for me.
Case mode can be played one or two players both in split-screen or online. For once, I actually managed to rope a friend into trying the split-screen with me, which lasted all of thirty minutes before he declared that the game was “shit” and wouldn’t play any more. When asked “What is so bad about it?” he replied “Other than the control scheme, the controls themselves, the responsiveness, the menus, the graphics, the sound design, the core game-play loop, the level design… The lore, the story. THE MOTHERFUCKING TUTORIAL. Not much.” While I don’t agree with all of his criticisms, there are definitely some valid complaints in there. So I’m going to try going through everything he listed one-by-one.
Firstly, the controls and their responsiveness. The joy-cons’ tiny little joysticks simply aren’t well-suited to precise aiming and shooting in the first place, but landing head-shots was made excessively difficult by them. On occasion I would find myself struggling to trigger the sprint since it’s mapped to clicking in the left stick while running forward, which is a bit tricky to pull off. I often found myself completely lost as to how to use the grenades too, or I’d switch weapons with ‘X’ when I actually meant to reload with ‘Y’ in the heat of the moment. There is one saving grace in that the game has optional motion controls and sensitivity sliders for some degree of customisation, and precision aiming was made a million times easier by turning the motion option on. It comes with the downside of killing your wrist after a long play-session, but I definitely recommend turning it on regardless.
Second, the menus. While functional, they’re not very pretty, usually being a black background with white text (which is at least easily readable) plastered onto a movie in the background. When the video becomes grey-scale and the menu options are also grey-scale it just looks ugly. The main problem I had with them though was that it’s difficult to scroll through options or access the menus I wanted as it doesn’t feel optimised for a controller at all. Plus, several menus can’t be left by pressing the ‘B’ button while others can, which just feels awkward and confusing.
Next up, the graphics and sound design. Personally I had no problems with either of these. Considering it’s running on Switch, it’s actually damn impressive. Blood splatters, detailed models, and busy environments are all here and RICO runs smoothly the vast majority of the time. I only experienced the odd bit of frame dips upon initially loading the level or when entering rooms with lots of enemies jammed together. Overall, it looks good in TV mode or handheld mode. When it comes to sound design I found the guns sounded great, there was some great audio cues, and nothing sounded out of place. I didn’t even notice music honestly, I couldn’t hear it over the gunshots most of the time, but at least that means it wasn’t annoying.
And now we get to the core game-play loop and level design. From what I could gather, RICO is all about breaching rooms and shooting dudes. You kick down a door, shoot the guys inside, loot the room and then kick down another door. Rinse and repeat. The main issue I’ve got with it is that I don’t know if you can have fun doing that without sacrificing health every, single, time. When breaching doors, you get a brief moment of slow-motion to pop a few shots off and nab some quick kills before returning to real-time, but I never felt like I could use it effectively because the A.I. responds so fast that I’d always take at least some damage. There’s no cover or leaning system of any kind, so if you want to shoot them, you have to be exposed to their shots too. This meant that I ended up playing on easy where I wouldn’t be punished with heavy damage for playing the game in the most enjoyable way. This complaint could be addressed by playing two-player but even then, the goal is to breach hard and fast, which doesn’t allow much time to actually co-ordinate your plans. We couldn’t manage this in split-screen, and I bet co-ordination is even less possible online, not that I was able to test it anyway due to the fact that no-one’s playing except reviewers.
The lore and story, though, is solid. The game opens up with a fantastic cut-scene explaining that RICO has been formed of the best of the best, to clean up messes before the legalities have been sorted out. The voice-acting of RICO‘s head honcho Commander Karen Redfern is superb, and really sells the whole idea behind the game. You are a bad-ass, and it’s your job to kill the bad guys. Just a shame that the game-play then didn’t deliver on the whole “bad-ass” part.
Last but not least, my friend mentioned the tutorial… It is severely lacking. It consists of one video clip, which explains a grand total of three button inputs and a few objectives that may come up in the randomly generated missions such as defusing bombs, destroying assets, and seizing evidence. Its delivery is great, much like the opening cut-scene, but it does almost nothing to help with controls. There is also an opening mission that requires you shoot cardboard cutouts, but my problem with this is that it’s mandatory. And I don’t just mean the first time you play, I mean every time you start a case. There’s nothing better than being forced to run around for several minutes shooting cardboard before you can actually start your campaign (sarcasm implied).
RICO is not a bad game, it’s just not great either. Once I tried easy mode I had much more fun with is as the intended core game-play loop actually became playable without inevitably failing, and the randomisation of levels and weapons available in the campaign mode makes for some variety in every play-through, even if it also leads to some dead ends and winding corridors sometimes. Overall, I’d say RICO is cool in concept, but unfortunately lacking in execution.
A digital copy of RICO was supplied for Switch by the developer.
