The only good news is that the camera is locked in place, and you cannot typically end up behind a building. When a building falls, you don't even get nice-looking smoke effects or decent-looking rubble. They lose their luster and fluid sense of your dealing damage, even though they are perfectly functional if you look at any one screenshot of the game. The graphics, which are simple and enjoyable when taken in the context of 2D sprite-based graphics, become devoid of detail and convey less of a destructive feeling when converted to polygons. It takes much longer than it should to get used to the controls, which makes the core playability issues all the more obvious. This could have worked if the conversion to 3D had been simpler to understand – unfortunately, Midway decided to add command after command after command, until you cannot be sure what hitting a certain button will do for sure. Your punches also go right through things you assume they would hit and damage. This produces several major issues, not the least of which being that they preserved the rather wooden control scheme that defined the original titles, which results in your character moving like a slug with a red target on its back for the military guns, whose damage capability has been toned down to the point of eliminating any sense of difficulty.
Some games just don't work as well when you take a pseudo-3D style and turn it into the real thing. You can enjoy the game or get some of the unlockable items – pick one each time you play through one of the seven 10-level sets. This turns the relatively joyous smashing into annoying pixel-hunting. The problem is, that if a building holding an item collapses, you can't get that item, making it either a crapshoot to get the items you need, or an annoying process of smashing in every window and hoping you get lucky. Find two, three, or four of a specified item, and you get a special move. To unlock new things in Total Destruction, you find them in the buildings – grab a miniaturized freezing tube, and another of the 30 basically identical characters pops out. Unlockable content in a poorly handled fashion, "upgrading" to 3D while trying to preserve the transparently grid-based simplicity of the original versions, adding in boss fights at the end of every 10 stages, "improved" multiplayer support, and more available actions end up turning the game from a fun destruct-a-thon to barely tolerable, almost chore-like wrecking, while hunting the pixels that will get you new items. The core problem comes in trying to stay pure to this formula while performing a severe feature creep operation. The formula is exactly the same but progressively more complex with each iteration – the original had Jump and Punch buttons, World Tour threw in kick buttons, and Total Destruction throws in 3D controls and a dedicated grabbing button – but you are still simply wrecking buildings and going to the next one. Wreck every building in an area, and you go on to the next, destroying more and more complex neighborhoods over time, ad infinitum. Needless to say, political correctness is not a hallmark of the series.
Victims could be the omnipresent military forces, gawking bystanders or a giant American flag – anything that's the right size for you to grab and destroy. Basically, you play as a giant monster that climbs up and down buildings, making sure to eat or break anything in its way. Midway's followed this procedure to the fullest with Rampage: World Destruction, and unfortunately, the results are not exactly the most impressive in the modernized classic meter, falling somewhere between Shadow the Hedgehog and Megaman X7 in terms of quality on almost every level, with one very major exception.įor those who have never played Rampage before, first off, go ahead and rent this version and press X at the main menu so you can play the original Rampage arcade game and/or the comically styled Rampage: World Tour, the first remake. It's a classic formula: Take a classic (or simply old) game, modernize it for the latest console, and sell for a quick buck.