Rampage: Total Destruction Review (gamezone)

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The Rampage franchise has been around for a very long time now. I remember seeing this game in the arcades when I was very little, and as I grew up I saw the Rampage on various systems and had a blast playing it with my friends. Now that the Nintendo Wii has been released the developers at Midway have released Rampage: Total Destruction with Wii centric controls. Does this game stand the test of time and remain fun to play with the new control scheme?

The premise of Rampage: Total Destruction is as simple as you can get and it has not changed throughout the years. First off pick your monster of choice, the choice is mostly aesthetic but there are a few minor differences in the stats between the monsters. After you make that choice and then you pick a city and try to wreck as much havoc before your timer runs out. You have to take out all the buildings and also avoid being shot at by the police. To help avoid your health going to zero you can eat the people on the streets and any food you find lying around. The premise is extremely simple yet addictive.

There are a couple of different modes that you can participate in, and each mode is multiplayer. First up is the campaign mode which you will destroy various cities and try to free hidden monsters created by the Scum Labs Corporation. King of the City is where four monsters compete to try to conquer a city, each player which causes the most damage to each city block wins. King of the World plays exactly like King of the City but in multiple rounds. The last game mode is Time Rune where you are challenged to destroy an entire city in a certain amount of time.

Do the Hussle!

Where the game really starts to falter is that it is still a 2D game that has 3D elements in there. By now the developers should have made the entire leap into the 3D world or at least made the 2D world bigger with more to explore. You can move your characters left and right and move them from the background and the foreground. The main problem is that it is very hard to get your orientation in this game.

In the classic games if you were right next to a building all you had to do is hit the up direction and start climbing the building. In this game if you are not correctly aligned you will go into the background more. The problem is that it is really hard to tell where you are at and you will spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to actually climb a building then what is necessary. The same problem can be said when hitting the building, it is hard to move up the building and hit another part of it without hitting the exact same spot over and over again, in other words you will be wasting a lot of time hitting the same spot instead of hitting a new spot.

The biggest highlight to this game was the inclusion of motion control to the characters. What happened is that this seems to be broken as well. You can play with the Wii-mote and nunchuk or just the Wii-mote (the later I would highly discourage). If you use the combination you will move with the nunchuk stick and without it the Wii-mote acts as a sort of joystick that seems broken. The actual controls are easy with (A) being punch and (B) being jump. The motion sensitive controls to the game only seem to work a portion of the time and make the game less fun since it doesn’t work all the time.

Bob now regrets giving the cows steroids.

The graphics for Rampage: Total Destruction are decent but the Nintendo Wii is capable of much more then this. It is apparent that this game is just a port of the game on the other consoles with Wii centric controls. With that being said I really enjoyed the animation of the various monsters, as they will do some pretty funny things form time to time. It is also really enjoyable to see the buildings crumble to the ground when you destroy them and seeing the smoke bellow up as well. The city environments are really decent and have decent background animations going on. The best part is that each city looks completely different form each other and they each have their own look and feel to them.

The music is pretty generic but that is not necessarily a bad thing since it never gets annoying or overly repetitive. It would have been nice to hear some additional and fresh music more often. The same can be said of the sound effects. They get the job done, but they are not as good as they could have been. The over-the-top announcer is back as in the previous games and makes you feel at home while you are playing.

Rampage: Total Destruction has two really nice bonus games that are available to play from the moment you load the game for the first time. The games are the original Rampage and Rampage: World Tour. These games can be played by holding the Wii-mote like an NES controller. These games are really well emulated and play great on the Nintendo Wii.

Rampage: Total Destruction is rated Everyone 10+ and contains violence.

Review Scoring Details for Rampage: Total Destruction

Gameplay: 5.5
What really kills this game is that the motion control is not spot on and that really hurts while playing it.

Graphics: 6.0
The graphics are decent and the animations are really funny for all of the various monsters. I really like the fact that each city had a unique look to it. The problem is that the game looks dated for a Wii game.

Sound: 5.2
The music for this game is as generic as it can be. I still enjoy the announcer telling what is going on during the game.

Difficulty: Easy
The game is really easy, just destroy everything in sight and eat anyone in your way.

Concept: 4.0
The gameplay hasn’t changed for years now, and Rampage: Total Destruction has two classic games included that prove this. The implementation of the motion controls is sloppy and not always accurate.

Overall: 5.9
I wanted to really like Rampage: Total Destruction as I thought that it would make a great addition as a party game for the Nintendo Wii. In concept it is a great game, but the execution and half baked controls really ruin this game that would have been on gamers must have list. In the end this game ends up being a really sloppy port of a game on other consoles.