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Title Rampage
Genre General Action
Company Activision
Players 1-3
HD Installable No
Compatibillity Not AGA?
Submission Joachim Froholt Profiled Reviewer

Review
Watching Godzilla wreak havoc in Tokyo is all well and good, but what if
somebody offered you the chance to take his place? Would you accept? No??
Well.... In case you like the idea of killing hun.. thousands of innocent
people, turning sprawling cities into parking lots and stuff like that,
then I think you might be interested this little game.

In Rampage, you and up to two other people play monsters terrorizing the
poor inhabitants of various American cities. The objective of each level
is to get rid of all the local skyscrapers by, er, crushing them.
Of course, those pathetic little people who live in these cities are not
without means of defence, as they have called in the army. Hahahaha!! More
casualties!!

You see the action from the side, and each city (level) fills one screen.
In order to remove the various skyscrapers, you have to climb up their
walls, and smash in the windows & walls. There are several different ways
of hitting or kicking buildings. When a building has taken enough damage,
you'll see dust clouds and hear some rumbling noises. After giving you
"enough" time to get off, it falls apart. When you have crushed all the
buildings in one city, it's off to the next.

As I said, the army is out to stop you (poor suckers). First of all, they
have placed lots of snipers and grenadiers inside the skyscrapers. They
will stand in the windows and shoot at you. Fortunately, they are easy to
kill, because they can't move around (but they'll disappear after having
fired a couple of times at you). If you hold down the fire button (instead
of just tapping it, like you would when you punch), you can grab and eat
the soldiers. There are various other things to eat, and most will have
nice effects like improving your health. Keep your eyes open, though. The
army has cunningly provided you with some poison barrels for you to eat if
you're careless enough.

There are also some tanks which will try to blast you away, and some
annoying combat helicopters flying around. Individual army units are
pretty harmless, but if you ignore them all, you'll see the end of the
game fairly quickly. To survive, you should also try to avoid staying on a
crumbling building, because you'll fall when it goes down. Getting hit by
a fellow monster is bad too, and an accidental hit can often evolve into
wars between human players. When a player "dies", he'll turn into a small,
naked human trying to sneak out of the screen (covering his expensive
parts). Like everyone else, he can be eaten by the nearest monster before
he manages to escape. Yummy!

Rampage features okay graphics. The drawings are clear (if a bit small),
but the animation is rather unexciting. The sound effects are okay, too,
with some good munching sounds when somebody gets eaten, but I can't help
but feel that there should be more screams:). Sadly, the Amiga version
lacks the great music from the Commodore 64 version. All in all, the
presentation isn't very bad or very good, only functional.

Gameplay-wise, Rampage is ok, too. It can be quite fun to play, especially
if you play together with some other people, but it gets very repetitive
after a while. All cities look very similar to each other, and there are
no new elements introduced as you progress.

Rampage is a nice change from the usual shoot-the-bad-guys action games
(perhaps a modern, 3d version of Rampage would be a good idea? With loads
of sampled screams, of course!), and can be a nice reliever of frustration.
Needless to say, I've smashed the imaginary Microsoft building several
times.... On the other hand, Rampage doesn't really offer that much
longevity, so if I were you, I'd only buy it if it was cheap (somewhere
around or below 5 British pounds would be an okay asking price for this
one, IMO).