Rampage: Total Destruction Review


The monsters of Rampage are back, and they’ve brought along a few of their friends. George the ape, Lizzie the dinosaur, and Ralph the wolf are back to their old tricks of smashing buildings and snacking on passer-bys. This time out they’re joined by a whole menagerie of giant critters that range from a squid to a lion, all of whom share the same misfortunate origin as test market subjects for a particularly bad batch of a new soda drink. Your job is to pick your monster and then unleash your frustration with corporate America by leveling one city after another.

Obviously not an art lover.
Well, you don’t quite get to level entire cities. It’s more like you get to knock down a series of small city blocks. I would have loved to play a fully 3D version of Rampage that let me unleash my inner monster on an unsuspecting city – a War of the Monsters meets The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction kind of thing. Unfortunately that’s not what we get with Rampage: Total Destruction. Instead the game is still essentially a 2D side-scroller with very limited depth of movement added to make it a pseudo 3D game. Things would have been better off had they been left strictly two dimensional, though, as the additional degree of movement adds far more problems than it adds depth to the gameplay. The primary problem is that in order to destroy the buildings you must climb your way up their sides punching as you go. To begin climbing you must align yourself exactly with a building’s edge at which point you’ll automatically grab on to it and begin climbing. The problem is that the game makes it impossible for you to precisely align yourself with the buildings’ edges since you can never tell exactly where they are. On top of this the game is pretty finicky about letting you grab onto a building, even if you appear to be perfectly aligned to do so. This creates an endless source of frustration for you as on each and every level you will constantly struggle to just get your %$^&#* monster onto the side of a building.

Your monster’s attacks consist of punching and kicking, with a grab attack that lets you scoop up and eat attackers and bystanders or pick up and toss cars. The toss is pretty much useless as thrown objects almost always just fly off the screen without managing to hit a building on the way out. The punches and kicks can be frustrating at times as there is a slight delay between the button press and your monster’s response. The game also seems to queue up the button presses, so you may press a button several times to try and get your monster to throw a punch and then be forced to wait as he has to throw one after another for each of your frantic button presses. Each monster also has an assortment of unlockable special attacks, but these are not of any particular note. In fact, each monster is supposedly rated in a few categories but they don’t play any differently and so are entirely interchangeable. Just use the monster skin that you like the best when deciding on which monster to play because the experience will be the same no matter which one you choose.

In Total Destruction the simple gameplay and small levels quickly make for repetitive gameplay, and the fun to be had in it is squashed by the frustrating controls. The police and soldiers shooting at you don’t do much damage and can pretty much be ignored. If you ever do find yourself low on health you can fix yourself right up simply by grabbing and eating the nearest person. This means that there’s not much tension in the game as there’s not much danger. You’ll play level after level, breaking building after building, without ever losing a life.

In addition to the single player “story mode” (there’s really not much of a story here) there are a couple of multiplayer modes available that let up to four players smash buildings together. At first it is fun to smash it up with friends, but there’s no hiding the repetitive gameplay and it will eventually have you losing interest in multiplayer matches. The game also includes the original arcade games Rampage and Rampage World Tour. These are a nice bonus addition to the game, but they also make it painfully clear that the game doesn’t add anything all that new to the twenty year old game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 54%. Rampage Total Destruction is far from being totally fun.

Gamers rate it: 0% · Gamer reviews