Will Riley has been framed for the murder of his father and has been falsely imprisoned because of it. Will might not be an angel, but he’s no killer. He soon breaks out of prison to clear his name. As he does this he must make his way across Redrock County, a sleepy American town with a booming criminal underbelly, as he tries to prove his innocence, all while evading the police who want to take him back to prison and the criminals who want to put him 6 feet under.
American Fugitive is a top down open world crime game this is obviously heavily inspired by the early Grand Theft Auto games, but with more of an 80’s action movie vibe.
While the presentation is a nice throwback to older games and movies, the whole game does come across as very shallow. Every character is the bare bones stereotype of a character, and while it’s not a bad thing to have a character be bare bones, it has to be made up for with great presentation to carry it through to the end, but the presentation here just comes up short.
You barely get to know each character as your character only gets to briefly to talk to them before a mission in only a few lines of dialogue, leaving very little wiggle room to get even the most menial character development. The entire paragraph you could use to summarize any character is their entire character. I was not expecting much, but I wish there was enough time to at least develop the main characters.
And the plot is just as shallow, finishing of a very unfulfilling note at the end that just feels rushed. It also doesn’t help that the mission variety for the story missions is very small. Steal a car, steal something from someone’s house, beat someone up and take them somewhere, or just outright kill them. By the second area of the game it’s already become tiresome busywork.
What compounds this is that even the side content has more variety, such as finding hidden stashes, stealing items to resell, timed races, making jumps, and even getting to drive a tank around and destroying as much property as you can within a time limit. I don’t know why some of this couldn’t have been sprinkled throughout the story to not make it feel so repetitive. It could have even been used to get a few players to play a few of the side missions if they like a type of mission.
Not much would have needed to be changed when it comes to the game world to incorporate these missions into the story and it could have easily been used to give each character more depth. Maybe the developers ran out of time, budget, or both.
The game also comes with basic skills you can level up, such as the usual health or inventory space increase, but also more helpful things such as metal detector to let you know how close a hidden stash is or making it easier to know if a building is occupied before you rob it. The side content also gives you points to help level your character up too, which I imagine could easily be help a player who is having trouble with a mission, but I only found out by playing one of the side missions out of curiosity.
If you’re looking for a throwback to the old Grand Theft Auto games, there probably isn’t going to be much in American Fugitive to throw down the money for it. It’s probably worth it on a sale, but with just how little variety in content there is, it’s a lukewarm recommend at best.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/934780/American_Fugitive/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/american_fugitive
Cult Classic Corner - Video Games 