So me, a kid with a Nintendo 64, had friends, also kids and also with Nintendo 64s, and this one day a buddy told me about this game he rented in which you played as a giant monster, climbed on walls and leveled a city, you'd also drink a liquid of sorts and turn into a giant bat. It doesn't matter who you are, if you were 10 or so, that would sound AMAZING. And so I'd tell my parents about this game and how I HAD to own it. And eventually, I did. My father came home one day with two carts, which was very weird since whenever they bought me a game it would be brand new. Now, he said that he threw the box and manual away, pretty weird, but I'll always think he simply purchased them as used games but didn't want to tell me, since my mother used to have this weird negative bias against used stuff. One of those carts was Mortal Kombat 4, and the other one, Rampage World Tour, the game I had been longing for. I think I liked it quite a bit, and I remember taking turns with my sister when taking the chemicals that would turn your monster into VERN, the giant bat-creature.
Bonus flashback, a few years ago I played Rampage 2 - Universal Tour. It was awful, but I suspected, based on memory alone, that it was worse than the first game for the simple fact that I could very easily tell that a lot of features where removed and the new additions(Different stats, more monsters, super move) were but fluff that didn't help the game in any way. And I was right. I popped in the cart, to make sure it was working, and expecting to get bored soon, but what happened was that I played the entire game all the way to the end. Just like that. On the very same day it arrived. Don't get me wrong, it's not a good game, but it's much better than the sequel.
Based off an Arcade game of the same game, Rampage sees you taking control of any of three monsters, Lizzie the giant Lizard, George the giant Gorilla and Ralph the Giant Wolf, as they lay to waste the entire world. All three monsters are pretty much identical, what changes are their favorite food and favorite item, which only changes which items heals them the most and grants them the most points. The game takes place on a 2-D field, and you can climb on either side of any building, as you punch and kick their walls down. You could also simply get to the top, and start smashing it with downward jumps or downward punches. If you're not in a hurry, it's better to hit them on the sides to uncover items for health, power ups(FIRE BREATH!) or even silly interactions(Soap makes your monster spew a bubble).
Cities are sprawling with people, either inside buildings or running across the streets, and you can eat them for points. Or kick them into a bloody splatter. The game is 129 short stages long, with a few secret levels, and your objective on each stage is to destroy every building. But the police and the army won't make it easy for you, so you'll have to deal with an endless petering of bullets and lasers. Bullets are tiny and fast, so it's pretty much impossible to avoid damage, thank god for what appears to be infinite lives. There is a main objective, believe it or not, bring down every SCUMM facility around the world, and you can alter how you travel by finding flags inside buildings and hitting them until you see the country you want to travel to. SCUMM stages also feature the purple waste that turns you into the flying bat-creature VERN, make you overpowered and invulnerable. Only one player can drink the power up, so in a three player game you might have to duke it out for the right to turn into VERN.
4.0 out of 10
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