RPM – Road Punk Mayhem – PS5 Review

RPM – Road Punk Mayhem is a vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up from Panda Indie Studio who, along with publisher eastasiasoft, have been responsible for a few shoot ’em ups in recent times.  They’ve had mixed results though with Z-Warp and the Project Starship games being okay but with Feeble Light and Excessive Trim being pretty awful.  Two things that all of their games have in common though is Panda Indie’s unique and confident visual stylings and interesting difficulty curves.

RPM is much the same in those respects and it stands out from the crowd by being a road-based shooter.  Although eastasiasoft did also put out Dead End City this year which also had a similar Mad Max style theme but where that game felt, pretty authentically, like a mid-’80s arcade game, this one feels a lot more modern.  And insane.

Christ, we don’t even know what the plot is.  We’ve seen the opening comic book panel storyboards but what matters is that you get to pick from one of three drivers, each with different attributes (that aren’t brilliantly explained or particularly matter) and then you take on five stages full of enemy vehicles, road-blocking hazards and big bosses.  On the face of it, it’s pretty standard stuff and actually has a lot in common with Dead End City‘s structure.

You steer your weird car thing with the left stick (or d-pad) and you’ve got two buttons to worry about.  You’ve got your standard fire button which fires your character’s primary weapon, however we pretty much never used those and just held the button which gives you a powerful laser and slows you down a little, which helps a lot with navigating the bullet-hell style offence that comes your way.

Your other button (already mapped to a couple of options on the DualSense but we used R1) lets you warp.  This is an interesting mechanic.  You hold it down and then place yourself somewhere within the circle around you and release to warp.  Failing to release will trigger a bomb.  You’ve got to time that to make it effective.  We barely bothered with it though as it felt unintuitive and not all that useful.

The warp mechanic is essential to master because you do get obstacles that can’t be avoided any other way and bosses can drop near-impossible to dodge bullet-hell patterns.  It’s super useful, and unlimited bar a short cooldown period, but it can initially feel awkward to use.

Aside from that, this is pretty standard shoot ’em up stuff.  Where the game really changes things up is with the visuals.  The game uses a very bold cel-shaded style with means lots of vibrant colour and big outlines on everything.  On the plus side, it looks exciting and does elevate things a bit (as does the soundtrack with sees Panda Indie reuniting with Elezeid to great effect) but the look is messy and the visual information you’re getting doesn’t exactly match what is happening.  By that we mean the collision detection can feel a bit off (albeit in your favour).  And obstacles can sometimes get absolutely lost in the chaos which means you’ll need to replay stages a few times in order to get used to when they are going to appear.

But that said, we got through the whole game (using up all our continues) and we enjoyed it.  It’s not amazing at anything, it’s just a short but solid shooter that represents a bit of a return to form for Panda Indie and while we can’t see ourselves being drawn back very often to replay it, it was fun while it lasted.  There are leaderboards on offer if you fancy testing your skills against the rest of the world and you do get two versions of the game (PS4 and PS5, both being identical) if you fancy double dipping the Platinum (it’s not quite the gimme that you usually get from eastasiasoft).

The short but balanced challenge of the game makes it fun to work through and fans of bullet-hell shooters should be able to get their money’s worth from RPM.  And you can’t really argue with a game that exudes this sort of confidence.