Rampage: Total Destruction – WII – Review

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.

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.