August Assassination #4

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American Fugitive is an endearing mid-game. It's fun enough that you want to keep playing it until you beat, but not good enough for you to remember it after beating it. It's bad to the point you wonder why you're playing, but not bad enough for you to stop playing. It's a game that absolutely deserves to be bought on a sale, or even full price if you want to 100% it, but that has no chance of becoming a classic or to be remarked among the greatest games of the year.

In short, it's a throwback to the top-down GTAs, but adds enough flavor to be its own thing. The camera perspective, missions structure, open world, car-robbing, spray painting, and simplified gun combat from GTA 1 and 2 remain, but we're also introduced to house-robbing mechanics, skill trees, lockpicking, chest digging, lots of stores, clothes-swapping, pawning loot, and many gimmicks such as towing cars, operating cranes and forklifts, etc. Those are not revolutionary additions, but they mostly work in the game's favor. The problem is that those systems are too simplified or irrelevant to really matter, and most missions are too simple to take advantage of those systems. It's nothing that drags the game down, but never really helps it to soar high.

It's similar to graphics. The top-down camera perspective is familiar, and looking at individual models show that they are detailed, but then the world as a whole is really generic and unremarkable. You start to learn some of the map by heart after traversing it so much between missions, but it's never varied enough for you to really know where you are, which is a shame. It's good individual asset quality, but poor general art direction. Sound is similar - individual sound effects and songs make sense and have interesting production values, but once you quit the game, it's very hard to remember any of it. The lack of voice acting really hurts here, because the game tries really hard to tell a serious story (it's almost cute to see) but then the delivery is kind of slapstick.

Again, there are many negatives in the game, but they are not enough to justify a thumbs down. This is pure stupid brainless mid-level fun, and I'm fine with that