Rampage World Tour

"What's scarier than gigantic monsters with frequent flyer miles?"

Even though I have owned plenty of consoles and handhelds in my time, rarely has a game ever really captured the feel of an arcade title (even direct ports) better than the Rampage games. There's just something about taking control of giant monsters and destroying city by city in the way that Rampage does that just makes you feel like you're standing in an arcade, chewing bubble gum with a crowd of people standing around you looking over your shoulder. Unfortunately, this awesome retro feeling washes away after a few levels and you'll be left utterly disappointed with Rampage: World Tour.

Instead of adding a fourth monster in order to allow four player cooperative play, the developers strangely only have three monsters available, meaning that the game is pretty unique as it is one of the only games that I know that only allows up to three players for multiplayer.

Besides that odd flaw, the monsters are at least pretty cool. George is a giant ape, Lizzie is a giant lizard, and Ralph is a giant wolf. Obviously, since they are huge monsters, they can cause plenty of destruction and instead of just focusing on one city like most monsters do, these guys plan on demolishing the entire world in order to get back at the company that created them.

Your basic goal is to destroy every single building in every city you go to before a bunch of planes drop some bombs. You are given a very decent amount of time to accomplish this, so the time limit isn't really all that stressful. To destroy buildings, you can climb up and down them to punch in each individual window, stand on top of them and beat them down, or bounce on their rafters in some cases. While this is all fine and good at first, the gameplay becomes very repetitive since you'll be spending plenty of time just scrolling back and forth, destroying buildings that look too much alike for comfort especially when the game's big draw is that you're visiting different places around the world to cause mayhem.

Levels are measured in days and each day means a new city for you to destroy. In order to travel to cities in far away places like Europe or Japan, however, you must find a flag item in one of the buildings. When you see this flag, you simply have to punch it and then the flag will change to a flag from a different country.

There are plenty of other things to find inside and outside of buildings though. You can eat various foods you discover in buildings in order to increase your score or you can find some helpful items like some weights that give you the strength to knock out an entire floor of a building with a single punch. Other special powers include a roar that will shatter windows and an extremely useless move where you spit little fireballs.

Human is also a great food for you to try and you'll be eating plenty of people in Rampage: World Tour. You can snatch them from windows or scoop them off the sidewalk and people will be doing various things. Some people won't even move when they see you, others attack you and others still will try to get as far away as possible.

The humans usually attack you with guns or various explosives, but they aren't the only thing you have to worry about that will try to end your killing spree. Various vehicles will also try to do you in and they range from the extremely annoying tanks to flying UFO-like spacecraft. Helicopters will also fly around your head in true King Kong fashion, but just like in true King Kong fashion, you can destroy these adversaries. Scooping them to death or punching them out of the sky is the easy way to go but you can also jump onto the back of the vehicles for a good pummeling if the need arises.

Little mini-games appear that break up levels somewhat. While very brief, some of these mini-games will provide a little bit of fun. One mini-game has you flying through the air and your goal is to collect items while avoiding missiles in order to get points. I loved that mini-game for some reason, but I absolutely loathed the people-eating mini-game since it was basically what you do in the main gameplay, just condensed.

There is a special power-up you can eat that will give you a special power to turn into a flying pink demon creature that has very powerful attacks. This creature doesn't appear often enough to really be considered all that useful, but it is still a nice addition to the game and saves it from the depths of video game hell.

One huge flaw that Rampage: World Tour has is that its gameplay gets painfully repetitive. Seriously, it almost gets as repetitive as Assassin's Creed! There are a ton of levels to play through and while playing with a couple of friends is nice, they will get bored too. On top of that, you have a ton of lives. In fact, I don't even know if you can die all of your lives. I died at least four dozen times in this game and at one point it told me I had one life left, but when I died again I was able to just continue right back where I was. What I'm getting at is that Rampage: World Tour is so pathetically easy that you won't be worrying about any of your enemies and this means that you'll probably just eventually end up turning the game off before you ever get a game over.

A group of researchers have turned people into gigantic monsters and now these monsters want revenge for their lives being ruined. So, they decide to destroy every building this company, Scum Labs, owns and that means traveling around the world in order to deal their punishment. Little snippets are shown between every few levels to get an update on the “story”, but there really isn't much plot in Rampage: World Tour which is a shame because the game really could have had a decent storyline if it wanted to.

The monsters look great and are brilliantly animated. People on the streets all do their own thing which is pretty good for the Nintendo 64 or any console during the fifth generation. The spaceships and other flying vehicles, which are rendered in 3D, all look great, but the background looks like it was lifted directly from a SNES game. It's also a little disappointing that nearly all of the buildings look identical, meaning that the whole “World Tour” aspect of the game is thrown almost entirely out of the window. A lot goes on at once with bullets flying everywhere and people running for their lives on the street, so the game does capture the feel of a good monster movie pretty well I'd have to say.

Unfortunately, Rampage: World Tour suffers from corny voice acting and a soundtrack that isn't memorable at all. Various monster noises don't do much to add to their element, but there is something oddly pleasing when you hear people scream for their lives, running around your gigantic monster feet. There aren't that many sound effects in the game though so everything just really seems to sound too similar.

After about a few hours of playing Rampage: World Tour with a friend, you will probably be done with the game. You might want to take the time to complete it, despite its painfully repetitive gameplay. A lack of unlockable content also hinders the replayability as there isn't much incentive to return to the game after you complete it. Also, because the developers decided to only allow three players to play simultaneously, that means that the game's replayability is brought down even more.

While it's fun for a little while, Rampage: World Tour fails to have the legs to maintain itself. You'll have some fun with the title while playing with your friends and honestly I feel that one Rampage game should be played by all gamers at least once. Unfortunately, World Tour isn't one of the best games in the Rampage series due to its lackluster audio presentation, repetitive gameplay, and lack of incentive to want to replay the game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/17/08

Game Release: Rampage World Tour (US, 03/30/98)