Nintendo Switch Review: RICO London (2021)

I play RICO London on my Switch every so often, even relatively recently, and not because it's any good. It's not. I've just left it in my system every time I return from a work trip or vacation, and then I don't touch the thing again until I'm out the door for another long trip. This is a horrible cycle in which I play RICO London way too much on airplanes and buses, and I don't really know why I keep doing so. There's a bunch of fun digital purchases on there for me to mess around with instead of this game. I own a physical version of RICO London because I imported it. I don't really know why.

Maybe part of it is probably because I loved the original RICO and wanted this to be more of that. It's not. The first RICO (2018) was a fun, unsophisticated, procedurally generated mess of an FPS with cool co-op and some really goofy, solid slo-mo shooting. You could slide through doors and enemies and bust down doors with your boots! It was therefore a good game. RICO London takes that blueprint and screws it up virtually from top to bottom. There's an oddly compelling game here, but it's hidden underneath the backsliding gameplay, dated graphics, and consistently awful performance.

They tried to add a storyline to this one! Ha ha. There's even little comic book panels with voice-over narration to transition between some floors of the building you're sent to infiltrate, as it's supposed to be New Year's Eve and you're an inspector lady trying to bust some drug dealers on multiple floors of a high rise building in London. This means you get a bunch of different floors, including a garage, casino, and penthouse, and a group of Eurotrash baddies in beautiful track suits. The rooms on the floors are mostly random, but they're straightforward and linear (unlike the first game), and they always wind up in the same place against the same boss characters. You can pick up weapons now, but there's much, much less ammo, and your enemies are bullet sponges this time around, so you're constantly juggling a bunch of random guns as you dump ammo into them. The combo system is fairly well-implemented, pushing you to run through the levels in order to keep your combo up, score higher, and upgrade your character. That part mostly works, but the rest of the game often doesn't. Performance on the Switch isn't just bad, it's broken. The game just crashes for no reason, or crashes after the framerate often stutters real bad. I hope your enjoy rebooting games often.

Just play RICO again instead. Don't be like me. I beat this game. Take RICO London out of your Switch, or don't put it in there in the first place.