Thanks to Rising Star/Thunderful Games for the review code

Title: RICO
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $19.99
Release Date: 03/19/2019

---

Story

In a city filled with crime, you take control of an officer who must set out to raid suspicious facilities, bust criminals and do what you must to keep the town safe, all while working your way deeper and deeper within the crime ring to find their bosses and take them out. Outside of an introductory cutscene, Rico doesn’t really have much of a plot at all, so what you do get is just an excuse to kick down doors and shoot criminals.

Presentation

Right off the bat when I launched this on my Switch Lite after so long of not touching it, I was a bit taken aback by just how ugly RICO looks, at least at first glance. The menus are pretty clunky looking and play over rather unimpressive B-Roll footage, and outside of an intro cutscene that looks and sounds OK, this game really leans heavily on a cell-shaded look to hide the fact that most of the models and environments are very, very dull and ugly. Even the enemies end up looking a bit goofy, and that’s disregarding the fact they tend to ragdoll all over the place. Expect to hear the enemies say the same few voice clips over and over and over again, too, and the music here is completely forgettable.

Yet somehow, I found myself getting used to RICO’s look the more I played. It still doesn’t look that great when trying this docked, and in split-screen Co-Op it can be a bit of a mess, but the game runs pretty stable once you get into the actual solo play, and I was surprised by how the framerate kept relatively consistent and didn’t do the typical Switch porting dips I tend to see from a lot of multiplatform titles. Everything still looks ugly, but the cell shading and performance makes the game feel fine in motion, and I’d much rather take some buildings looking bad if that was required to make the game run well on Switch.

Gameplay

RICO is a FPS roguelike where the main goal of each stage is to gather all the evidence of crime in each of the locales you head to, all while fighting off waves of enemies and investigating each building to see what other objectives and discoveries you can find. Sometimes you may stumble upon a valuable server that needs to be destroyed, or you may be told to do a certain amount of headshots or clear the stage as fast as possible.

Either way, each level has you kicking down doors or busting them open, which leads to each room of combat starting with a brief slow-motion period where you can aim your weapons or land the first strike before the enemies notice you. The main game mode puts you on a branching path where you can take up varying stages of differing levels of challenge, and the main goal here is to survive each level and make your way to the big bads to take them out and stop the crime ring. Thus, each run consists of many, many, many buildings and identical looking rooms to explore, and clearing each room out of enemies before you can move onto the next set.

Between each stage, you can use the merit points earned by clearing objectives to buy new weapons or upgrades for your officer, and these pretty much require you to clear all the objectives in a stage to maximize your potential; you don’t *have* to do so to beat the stage, but leaving a stage early without clearing the main objective will mark the mission as failed and close that entire path off for you. Yet early on with only a basic weapon, the initial areas of RICO can be pretty tough, especially if you rush into a higher difficulty encounter right off the bat.

These tougher stages are still doable, but are definitely meant for when you’re able to acquire better weapons and grenades to better defend yourself with. There’s also the big fact that in order to regain your health, you may have to spend your limited merit points on a health pack between stages, since recovery items within levels usually give only a small percentage of your health back, so you really have to play carefully to make any progress.

Of course, that’s where the main draw of RICO comes to make things a lot easier; either with a local co-op partner or an online companion, you can tackle the stages together, which makes clearing rooms much, much easier. This was how I dabbled in the game right before the 2019 derail, and I can vouch that playing the main mode with a co-op partner makes the game a lot more fun. You still are going through very repetitive buildings of enemies hunting for evidence, but with a friend you can do cool things such as a synchronized door kick to gain a bit of extra slowdown time, and taking out enemies is just generally easier with two players versus one. I never really got into an online match and thus won’t be able to give a verdict on that, but locally, RICO becomes a lot more fun.

There’s also a few extra modes that make the gameplay a bit more solo-friendly. You have a daily challenge, which randomly generates a room for you and tasks you to clear the main objective as fast as possible for the sake of climbing up a speedrun leaderboard, and you have a set of puzzle-esque challenges where you go through handcrafted stages with their own objectives in order to clear as many of them as possible. Since I felt the randomized elements worked best for the daily runs versus the main game, these challenge stages were a lot more fun due to being handcrafted, while also serving as a pretty good way of teaching the player different weapons and techniques.

Conclusion

With a decently fun local co-op mode, RICO is at least a solid shooter time with a buddy, and a serviceable time killer for quick bursts of play. However, when coming back to this solo all these years later, I found RICO to be extremely dull and repetitive when played solo, though the post-launch Challenge stage mode does add a bit of puzzle-like fun to the gameplay loop, and also serves as a great teaching tool.

The controls are satisfying, the gameplay loop is fine enough, and the game runs surprisingly alright on Switch, but man, if you aren’t playing with a friend the game becomes a lot more boring. There’s still a goofy satisfaction to slide kicking through a door and then tripping criminals to death as they go flying, but that can only go on for so long before the roguelike loop wears thin.

Still, for the challenge mode being pretty decent along with great co-op, RICO turned out to be a pick up and play FPS that was a lot more fun than I remembered it being. The MSRP is a tad high for my liking if you’re only able to play this alone, but luckily it goes on sale pretty often and finding a buddy to co-op with makes RICO more than worth giving an afternoon’s go at it. At the very least, the challenge stages are worth clearing if you aren’t able to get a buddy to come over to some multiplayer door kicking action.

I give RICO a 6 out of 10.