Rambo III

"Endless bullets, Endless Enemies, Coincidence?"

If you\'ve seen the movies you know what to expect. You are Rambo - you don\'t take **** and you don\'t wear shirts. You like your ammo infinite, your explosions immediately, and your enemies dead.
You\'re a special U.S. military operative during the cold war, and your mission is to help rescue an officer trapped behind Soviet lines.
You attack enemy camps, bases, strongholds, and prisons headfirst and single-handedly, with the basic purpose of either making it to the other side, or blowing up specific targets. Enemy soldiers, who are unfortunately equipped with poorly designed rifles capable of firing only one, ridiculously slow moving bullet, are simply obstacles to slow you down; so expect the kill count to be in the hundreds by level 2.
A great top-view shoot em up, Rambo III is one of the frustration rearing, gameplay focused, shooters that made the 16 bit era what it was.

Gameplay: 7/10
Rambo III is a standard shoot em up with a bird’s eye view camera angle. Controls are simple up, down, left, and right DPad movements. Your standard and perhaps greatest weapon is your machine gun. Holding down fire will let lose an endless stream of bullets that Rambo will literally spray back and forth. Your secondary weapon can be switched between knife, a chargeable bow and arrow, and a timed explosive. You can pick up arrows and explosives by stabbing enemies with your knife, and use arrows and explosives to take out large enemies including jeeps and guard towers.
The levels are fairly simple, you run through enemy encampments killing everything that moves while avoiding bullets and grenades. Both you and your enemies take one hit to kill - so the body count rises fairly early. Somehow everywhere you go has a self destruct button, so expect to spend half the game running away from wherever you finished breaking into.
All in all the gameplay\'s solid, while repetitive and frustrating, it\'s addictive and frustrating.

Graphics: 6/10
The game utilizes basic 16-bit sprite animation, and while the definition is pretty good, the lack of color, and effort put into the backgrounds hurts the overall pictures. Though the graphics during the vehicle battles are superb, overall more focus could have been put into this area.

Sound: 4/10
Easily the biggest turnoff in the game, both the background music and sound effects are grainy and annoying. What I can only assume was an attempt to be spooky and intense turned out bland and disruptive.

Dificulty: 7/10
The enemies in this game are nothing if not persistent. The constant barrage of faceless, mindless, and endless enemies will wear you done, and the lack of a health bar means that a single screw up sends you to the beginning of the level.

Buy or Rent? Rent
While a fun shooter for the SEGA Genesis, Rambo III lack\'s any kind of story or diversity ruins the games charm after about 8 hours. The sheer repetitive blitz of frustration and killing is fun for a night of marathon gaming, but that\'s about it.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/06/03