RICO London – More linear than a Call of Duty campaign

RICO London removes pretty much everything I liked from its predecessor.

I really rather enjoyed RICO, the 2019 roguelike first person shooter. Your cop, with a friend in tow if you wished, would choose missions to take on in apartments, warehouses, and other such venues and need to head in and take down all the terrorists within, collecting evidence and helpful items along the way. Succeed, and you’d move closer to taking down the crime boss, with more money and weapons to help you. Fail, and it’s right back to the beginning I’m afraid. The fact that most rooms in the small environments had multiple entry points was a great inclusion, as you and your partner could burst into the room from different positions, utilising the game’s slow motion feature to clear the area in moments. It was really quite satisfying, if a little janky in places. RICO London takes away pretty much everything that was good about that previous game, leaving a shell of what could have been.

You play as police officers Redfern and Khan in turn of the millennium London. They’re staking out a building and see a crime group doing crime things, so they hop out of the car, grab some guns from the boot of the car, and go in to take down the entire mob themselves. Aside from the slight silliness of London police detectives packing a sizable arsenal of firearms in the back of their sedan, there isn’t much to be said for the story, which is fine as that absolutely isn’t the focus. The shooting is, and there’s a whole lot of it to be done.

After the brief intro, you’ll be dropped into the ground floor warehouse  — with no tutorial at all, I should add — and you’ll need to work through the incredibly linear environments towards the next floor. Gone are the somewhat open plan layouts of the original, being replaced with room after room of bad guys, with the occasional side room containing little to nothing of interest. You’ll fight through warehouses, offices, and apartments as you work your way up to kill the final boss and succeed in your self-appointed mission.

Each room normally contains between two and eight bad guys, regularly on the lower end of that range, and once you’ve killed them you’ll move onto the next. The actual fighting is quite fun, like in RICO London’s predecessor, with meaty sounding weapons — and there are a lot on offer to find and purchase — that feel powerful as you take down your foes. Slow-motion is back as you breach a door, giving you a few moments to get a couple of hits in before your enemies can react. You can slide along the ground, leap through the air like you’re in a John Woo film, and chuck out throwing knives and flashbangs to give you an edge. It’s solid stuff, and with all that weapon variety it takes a while to get dull.

You can find pickups in the rooms for things such as ammo and health, but they don’t stand out very well, meaning you’ll often scour each room you enter to find anything useful, which kills the pace of what should be a rapid game. Simply putting highlights around them would have helped out here a lot. Occasionally there are hostages to rescue to bump up your score, which allows you to buy upgrades once you’ve reach the end of an area, but that’s pretty much the entire game.

The areas you fight through are very long, and you’ll see the same rooms over and over again, some of which don’t make any sense. Quite why I was seeing a vehicle loading bay seven floors up I’ll never know. These long stretches without the chance to buy upgrades are quite frustrating as your health can be whittled down very quickly, especially by melee enemies who seem to harm you before they’ve even swung their weapon. That frustration coupled with the tedious linearity of the levels really are a detriment to RICO London. Those short, sharp missions of the original were the perfect length. This feels like a slog in comparison.

The visuals aren’t amazing, but there is a distinct style here. Bright, colourful environments and characters look quite striking which makes up for the lower overall visual quality, whilst the guns are very well modelled and textured. There are neat pieces of pop up text that appear, XIII style, when you land a headshot or a slow-motion kill. Sure they obscure your view occasionally, but it looks nice in action. The sound is pretty solid too, with those great gun sound effects and some reasonably solid voice acting. I hope you like hearing the same dramatic gunfight song playing for fifteen minutes straight though, as that’s what you get in the music department.

I didn’t hate RICO London, in fact, it’s got some fun that can be had in co-op. It’s just that this feels like a huge step back from the original’s fairly solid groundwork. If anything, playing this made me want to go back and play the previous game again! There’s a little fun to be had here, but as far as I’m concerned even die-hard fans of the original should just stick to that and give this sequel a miss.

RICO London is available now on Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and PC.