Game #1094: Rampage - Total Destruction

  Total destruction of a franchise.

 Can you totally murder a franchise is most of the games in said franchise were awful to begin with? Rampage: Total Destruction tries to answer that question with astounding effort. First and foremost, I was actually looking forward to this game. I watched video reviews trashing it, but thought that the game looked decent, like something I could like. I was wrong.

 Like with previous games in the series, it's all about leveling a city as a giant monster, but now in pseudo-3D. Y'see, the game is still played on a bi-dimensional plane, however, now there's depth to the playing feel, so you can move into the foreground or background. The game does little to take advantage of this, there are a few buildings hidden behind others, but very few and they add nothing to the game. Bizarrely, there are invisible walls to the left and right of the map, as previous games would just loop the stage, as if it was a circular plane or something, which made the gameplay flow a little better.

 The game offers 30 monsters, although you've to unlock over 20 of them, and unlocking them is kinda somewhat random, as they may appear inside building windows, and hopefully you notice them or catch them before you destroy the building. All 30 characters are skin-swaps. a few have a few more unique-looking 3-D models, but for all intents and purposes, every character plays the same, they simply have different stats. You can unlock four different super moves, shared between all characters, by fulfilling special goals on each stage, which... is something, I guess? The game also offers Arcade versions of the first Rampate and World Tour. Being Arcade ports means no picking your character. Lame!

 So... there's so much wrong with the game I don't even know where to start. Let's go with the problems that the series has carried since the very first game: The core gameplay is super repetitive by nature and the game's premise quickly groes old. The game has like 50 3-minute long stages, but you've seen everything the game has to offer by the third stage. There are a few unique-looking buildings on every city, but they add absolutely nothing to the gameplay.

 As for what this game does even worse.... The controls. Climbing buildings is super awkward. Previous games played entirely in 2-D, so it was easy, you simply moved towards the side of a building and if you pressed Up on the d-pad you'd climb it. Easy, simple. In this game, it takes a while for the game to decide if you are trying to climb it or awkwardly walk towards it because reasons. You can also climb them from the front, but same issue. And some low buildings you can't even climb for whatever reason, forcing you to jump on them just to annoy you.

 This third dimension only makes things more awkward, it's hard to aim your punches and kicks towards enemies, even picking up people to eat can be a hassle. But the worst part about it? While climbing a building it's hard to aim at which window you want to hit, which can make it hard to grab items before they disappear, including unlockable monsters. The whole damage system is weird, sometimes you won't understand why the building went down so quickly, other times you'll wonder why it's not coming down since you basically broke every darn window. It makes no sense and it's super annoying. In previous games it was super easy to tell why a building was still standing.

 By city 5 the game becomes unfairly hard. Everything and everyone is out to murder you, with carpet bombings happening very frequently to the player's annoyance, making a boring game annoyingly boring. Add to that how slow the game feels and... yeah, it's not much fun.

 The Rampage series doesn't have very good games, and it has aged like milk, but this particular entry in the series is atrocious. It may look fine, it did to me, but once you play it you'll quickly realize how poorly it plays and how boring it really is. Like really, the best way to play Rampage is not to play it at all, but if you absolutely must, one of the home releases of World Tour is the one to get.

 2.0