- Players: 1
- Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch
- Release Date: May 21st, 2019
- Developer: Fallen Tree Games
- Publisher: Curve Games, Teyon
- Rating: Play It
Fallen Tree Games’ Grand Theft Auto-inspired isometric open-world crime game, American Fugitive is a throwback to a time long passed in today’s gaming era. We no longer get to play as masculine, capable, intelligent straight, white-males in a modern environment where they can be capable, intuitive, tough, and compelling while attached to an original and thrilling storyline. That age is simply gone. Heck, we rarely even get crime thrillers in the video game space these days, much less open-world crime thrillers. That in itself makes American Fugitive a unique entry in today’s world of video games.
Compelling Enough Storytelling
Powered by a clunky but doable Unity engine, American Fugitive follows the story of Will Riley, as he attempts to uncover the conspiracy surrounding his father’s untimely murder, which he’s wrongly accused and convicted of. The main gameplay loop picks up after Will manages to escape from prison, where he makes his way from one small southern districts set during the 1980s.
It’s a very different kind of atmosphere from what most gamers are used to, given that Grand Theft Auto, True Crime, Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row have gone all-in on mostly modern urban settings. Games like Generation Zero, Dying Light and Horizon are unique in their settings, much like Days Gone, but they’re more of the post-apocalyptic variety.
In many ways, American Fugitive is very similar in thematic location to Destroy All Humans with its rural farmland playscapes, but with gameplay mechanics and loops reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto 2, and a story atmosphere that is quite similar to The Getaway.
You’ll be tasked with driving around, completing missions for various NPCs and progressing through three different main districts in order to unravel the conspiracy involving the murder of Will’s father.
The story is both both and small in the best ways. It’s not some world-changing event, or something that puts national security at risk. It’s a small crime tale that expands no further than the city limits, but it’s big enough to feel impactful, which is something that seems to be missing from today’s gaming sphere.
Oftentimes stories are either really grand, or really small and intimate. The in-between seem to be lost to time, or only really focused on by AA-sized studios working on games like American Fugitive. Now keep in mind this isn’t some groundbreaking, revelatory, high-minded, intellectually profound game. Metal Gear Solid or Deus Ex this is not. However, for what story it attempts to tell, and for the characters involved, it’s good enough.
Functional Gameplay Loops
The core gameplay in American Fugitive centers around traveling via foot or via vehicle. There is enough variety in the vehicles to make it feel like a small town. This includes family sedans, luxury sedans, muscle cars, sports cars, several kinds of trucks, vans, and even tractors.
You can’t customize the vehicles, but they each come in different colors and some have their own unique liveries. Each of the vehicles handle appropriately and uniquely, some being faster than others, some being more nimble than others, and some being more powerful than others. You’ll be driving vehicles (or carjacking them) quite a bit throughout the game in order to complete most missions, which either revolve around traveling to a specific location to talk to someone, deliver something to someone, beat someone up, steal something, or search a location for a specific item.
Unlike open-world games like Saints Row or Grand Theft Auto or Sleeping Dogs, you can actually enter every building in American Fugitive. I thought how they had this setup was really cool, because it’s like a little mini-game where you have to attempt to get into the building without setting off the alarm. You can do so by acquiring tools like lockpick kits; alternatively you can use crowbars, hammers, or shovels to break locks or windows and enter into a house or building, or even carjack a ride, but be warned that doing so will set off alarms.
If an alarm goes off in a building, you’ll have a limited amount of time to search around before the cops arrive. One neat thing about the game is that you can also hold up any and every store in the game using the available weapons on you. You can also choose to beat up, kill, or restrain hostages. If you’re stealthy enough you can manage to rob a house or store without ever alerting the police, this can be aided by leveling up certain skills that enable you to improve Will’s stealth, attack rate, defenses, health, and more.
You can earn points to level up Will’s abilities by completing main missions or by completing side-objectives, such as races, rampage activities, stunt jumps, or successfully finding loot or hidden paintings. Earning points is only part of the equation of leveling up, you also need to pay money as well. While it might seem tedious to earn both money and skill points, it all balances out given that you can steal items from stores and homes and sell the items at the pawn shop for extra cash. Alternatively, you can earn quite a pretty penny from items ensconced in safes throughout the map, where you sometimes have to scavenge for a safe code to access the contents.
You can then use the cash to buy clothes, weapons, and even cars. American Fugitive essentially keeps a lot of the loops functional, simple, and intuitive, which is a nice twist compared to a lot of today’s games.
Controls That Handle Well
It’s easy for isometric games to make life miserable with wonky controls, but for the most part American Fugitive handles well. I did find it difficult to drive in the free cam mode, so I locked the camera behind the vehicle for a more traditional third-person control scheme, and everything worked out just fine.
While on foot, Will has a decent amount of speed, can hop fences and waist-high barriers, can move through shrubs and bushes, and has no problem kicking down doors, or breaking through objects using melee attacks (so long as you have a weapon equipped).
Melee fighting can be a little chaotic, but it’s certainly more intuitive than GTA 1, GTA 2 and GTA: London by comparison.
The shooting is actually far more satisfying than I thought it would be. The rifles and machine guns are especially responsive, and have good range, too. The ragdoll effects when enemies get blasted by a high-powered weapon makes the guns feel impactful and devastating. It’s a shame because so many modern games out there have made it a mission to devalue the impact of weapons like it was a law of thermodynamics.
It’s a bit unfortunate because there actually aren’t many shootouts to be had in the main story, maybe just under a dozen. Yes, under a dozen shootouts. Any other time you plan on whipping out your guns will likely be due to unintended (or potentially intended) encounters with the police.
In some ways it makes sense that American Fugitive would run thin on purposeful shootouts because in the story premise Will is trying to lay out, and creating a trail of massive carnage would be the opposite of that. But at the same time, it would have been nice if there were maybe more side-missions where you were able to throw down with projectile weapons to make use of them a bit more than what use you would find of them during the main story missions.
What the game doesn’t have a shortage of is car chases. You will be whizzing and whipping vehicles around the map quite often and in sometimes spectacular fashion. The problem however, is that the vehicle physics – while decent – aren’t quite on par to games like Driver or The Wheelman to warrant that amount of focus on car chases.
In fact, it would have seemed like it should have been reversed, with players having to do more shootouts with a smattering of car chases sprinkled in every now and then. Again, it’s not that the vehicle physics are bad, it’s just that a lot of the nuances of car chases is a bit lost in an isometric view. The shunts and bumps don’t feel as visceral being so zoomed out, and many of the small handling corrections of over and understeer aren’t things you can appreciate from an isometric perspective. Pit maneuvers, spinouts, and powerslides – while possible – also lack the same level of effect as they would in games like Grand Theft Auto, BeamNG or Wreckfest, and that’s simply to do with perspective and physics.
Great Soundtrack With Solid Sound Effects
The soundtrack for American Fugitive really stood out because it consists mostly of country-rock, which is not something you get in most games these days. A lot of modern action titles consists almost of either rap music or rock music or some variation of the two. Country is almost never on the charts in video games, so it was a nice surprise here and it quintessentially fit the atmosphere perfectly.
The music isn’t constant, and the tracks are limited, but what’s there works, and what works is a great fit for the missions, atmosphere, and action present in American Fugitive.
The sound effects – while they aren’t there in plentiful abundance – are good enough to bring the action to life. It’s not one of those games that needs the level of audio ambiance that you might find in Red Dead Redemption 2 or Star Citizen, but you do get a great sense of rural farm life within the setting. The vehicles sound like old V6 and V8 monsters from the 80s, while the weapons have an audible punch equivalent to their in-game effect, creating a synergy between what you hear and what you see on the screen.
There is no voice-acting (though, to be fair, I’m somewhat thankful for it given that it’s overdone a lot of times in many AAA games), so there’s nothing much to judge there. But where the audio counts is what fits best for the experience that American Fugitive delivers. It just works.
Technical Specs
Let’s be real here, the game has a decent enough pseudo-cel-shaded art-style, but it’s by no means pulchritudinous. You won’t be writing home about the shadows, ambient occlusion, texture quality, or model geometry. The entities are modeled well enough insofar that you can very obviously tell one thing from another, and the texture work is good enough to convey what’s intended to be visually rendered on screen to match the story, atmosphere and setting, but there’s no stringent visual standards here to push the Switch to its limits… which is actually a good thing.
The 720p resolution leaves a lot to be desired on the sharpness front, but it’s obviously done to reduce the load on the Switch’s GPU, wherein there are certainly struggles to be had by the system overall when you hit a 5-star wanted rating and the military sends tanks after you. It’s not so obvious that the frame-rate renders the game unplayable, but it can become noticeable at times. Thankfully it’s never so intrusive as to interfere with input latency or the control mechanisms.
As far as technical shortcomings are concerned, the AI can be a bit dumb when engaged in shootouts. They either run at you with melee weapons or simply surround you and fire away when they’re armed with projectiles. Enemies that would run, hide, or seek cover would have made for more dynamic gunplay, but I guess when it comes to a budget open-world game, beggars can’t be choosers.
Additionally, the game does take a while to load up. Initial load times can be excruciating especially if you’re focused solely on the game and you aren’t multitasking. However, on the upside, once the initial load is done, like all Unity games, the main gameplay is pretty smooth and the loading isn’t issue unless you travel to a new district.
Overall Verdict
I have to say that American Fugitive is well worth playing if you have a Nintendo Switch. It’s really the only game of its kind, set in the kind of era that it is, and allowing you to play through the game with a level of freedom and fun-factors without beating you over the head with sociopolitical commentary or pushing a regressive message.
You get to play as fettle, straight, white-male who isn’t undermined by a female deuteragonist, nor is the character upstaged to make room for a BiPoc character. Instead, you get to play through an enjoyable crime thriller that takes the necessary twists and turns but doesn’t leave you feeling as if it jumped the shark. With a few narrative choices left up to the player to determine the ending, American Fugitive has just enough leeway to warrant potential multiple playthroughs and enough side-activities to fill out maybe a total of 10 – 12 hours of gameplay. Given the scarcity of games like this on the Switch, it’s a definite must-buy for anyone who enjoys isometric action titles or open-world crime games.