The journey Retro City Rampage took me on went from smiles to curse words so casually that I was actually caught off guard when I put the game down and didn't want jump back into it right away. Packed with throwbacks from Back to the Future to Saved by the Bell to the old Adam West Batman, Retro City Rampage is a treasure chest of nostalgia and humor, but spikes in difficulty combined with poor checkpoints make missions more annoying than rewarding.

Loading

If you can imagine Grand Theft Auto in 8-bit form with chiptunes and more pop culture references than I have time to list, you know Retro City Rampage. As "Player," we're transported to the future of Theftropolis and turned loose as a henchman for hire, both fighting to get back to our own time and murdering and stealing as much as possible.It sounds like a lot of fun, and for quite a while, it is. Carjacking's a breeze, the lock-on for attacks is welcome, and there's even a twin-stick shooter free aim mechanic tossed in. It's third-person, over the top action that even allows you to Mario-stomp foes. You take this into Retro City Rampage's 60 story missions, 40 arcade challenges, and free roam mode. Layered on top of that are mini-games packing the likes of Epic Meal Time and Super Meat Boy.There's so much content in this game -- 50 vehicles, different video filters, leaderboards, cameos from the PlayStation Blog and Destructoid editors, and more -- but in the end, that's not what I was left talking about. I was left talking about missions that just weren't fun.It all starts off innocently enough with us running to and from Doc Choc's lab in an effort to get the time machine working again. You run out, shoot up a place, get the item and head back. As you get deeper into the story missions, this kind of fetch questing keeps on coming. Sure, there's a sneaking mission here or a flying suit there, but you're still walking into rooms and blasting people to death.Again, that's all wrapped up in the nods to other properties from Ninja Turtles to Super Mario. There isn't a voice to the tale in Retro City Rampage; it's just reference after reference leading you from one mission to the next.Then the difficulty spikes. Retro City Rampage keeps track of each death, and there were quests where I was accumulating 20 fails before quitting to another mission or finally slipping past. These missions didn't inspire me to keep trying. Having to work my way through two different rocket launcher gangs spread across the map and then dying during the third and final gang only to discover the checkpoint sent me back to before the missions began -- egads, man!

And that isn't the only instance of checkpoints throwing stuff off. There's a cute little LARPing mission, but then after making my way through a bunch of goons, the main guy comes out with a flamethrower and just wrecks shop. Having to restart that mission over and over and work through the same low-level foes just wasn't doing it for me.

This is the weird thing about Retro City Rampage. The game is gorgeous with its bright 8-bit visuals and fun to play when you're just roaming the streets and blasting baddies. It's that core that won so many IGN editors over at PAX and other trade shows -- that core of wandering the NES scene playing GTA. But when it's applied to a full-on game, the gameplay wears thin. That's a shame -- especially considering it's a crossplay PlayStation 3/PlayStation Vita title that shares a Trophy list.