American Fugitive

This top-down retro journey into the 1980s criminal underworld pairs car chases and con artistry

American Fugitive is an exceptional open world playground for dumb fun, but it fails to capitalise on that when tailored mission design is brought into the fold. One too many repetitive objectives drag the experience down to a crawl, but for some, the narrative will be just about enough to make it worthwhile.

Overall it feels a little like death by a thousand cuts with American Fugitive, with one too many niggling little problems letting the whole thing down.

American Fugitive is a fun romp through a colourful, top-down GTA-inspired open-world crime-fest. While the game has some issues, such as repetitive missions, as well as stability problems on the Switch, it doesn't stop it from being an all-around fun and engaging title when you're actually playing.

If you ignore the bad artificial intelligence of the police and actually the whole city, American Fugitive is quite a fun game, accompanied by a great musical background and its art graphics processing is great. The developers tried to create a game inspired by the good old classics and they succeeded to some extent. You can buy the game on Steam for €19.99.

American Fugitive is fine if you can overlook its slew of flaws. From shaky AI to an overzealous crime detection system and spotty controls, there's enough here to make one quit the game rather quickly. It helps that the core aspect of the open-world gameplay and the small town setting are enough to keep some people interested. If you really want a throwback to the old GTA system, then this will do, but don't expect something as polished and varied as Retro City Rampage.

Overall view of American Fugitive is that this could be a brilliant game on the Switch, it’s presentation is brilliant and it looks beautiful, there’s destruction to be had all around Redrock but the issues with the game mentioned above kind of hold this back, plus the bizarre choice when respawning after death just brings the game down from all out gang warfare to playing with super soakers. If you can get past the annoyances, I would say go for it and give the game a try, it does have potential but again, the downsides can’t be ignored.

With all the variety of story quests and nice graphics, American Fugitive is a very buggy and boring game

A few technical issues – and the over-reaching arm of the law – tarnish American Fugitive slightly, but it’s a game with a wonderful sense of place, impressive levels of detail, and a slew of engaging gameplay mechanics.

American Fugitive is a blast to play. Despite some difficulty balancing issues, the gameplay is fun, the story holds up, and the audio is amazing. For $14.99 you're going to get some solid gameplay, even if you just want to blow through a farmers fence and tear up through a cornfield in a high-speed chase.