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YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE.
The legacy of Rambo is one of death, destruction, and spent M60 shells. However, while the escalating bodycounts of the movies in the Rambo film franchise have made the character an icon of over-the-top cinema ultraviolence, it’s worth remembering that in First Blood John Rambo is responsible for precisely one death in 90 minutes. And, to be fair, it was kind of an accident.
This opening section admittedly takes place before the events of the First Blood, but you should not come to Rambo: The Video Game expecting much in the way of restraint or depth. That said, with its positively prehistoric rail-shooter underpinnings and its almost shocking unsuitability for its main control methods, you should not come to the Rambo: The Video Game at all.
Rambo: The Video Game is a light gun game without the light gun. Don’t be duped by the screenshots on the back of the box. It is not a regular
first-person shooter; this is Time Crisis without the colourful plastic pistols. Prior to its arrival I was not aware this was a type of game people made. After playing it I’m certain it shouldn’t be.
You use a mouse or a joypad to whisk a cursor around the screen while Rambo advances about various environments of his own accord. Playing a light gun game without a light gun is kind of like eating cereal with a fork; you can get the Fruit Loops into your word hole easily enough but without the milk you’re missing out on a crucial part of the cereal-eating experience. Neither a mouse nor a joypad are suitable proxies for a light gun. With a mouse I was simply scrolling about with ease, left-clicking on enemy heads like I was clearing a Minesweeper board. With a joypad it’s like playing a conventional first-person shooter with one arm tied behind your back; trying to line up bad guys by aiming with just the right stick on a static screen feels alien and unintuitive.
On PS3 the game features Move support for the sliver of players who still actively care about Move, which at least partially emulates a light gun, but the Move has never made anything more fun and Rambo: The Video Game is no exception.
That really is almost all there is to it. Shoot everything. There are a few segments of basic, Heavy Rain-esque on-rails stealth, like the obligatory police station escape from First Blood, but it’s mainly shooting. Developer Teyon has even put shooting where there was none previously. Remember that scene in First Blood where Rambo slaughters entire squads of National Guardsmen? Or how about the one where Rambo comes back to Hope and massacres several dozen local and State police officers? You shouldn’t, because neither happened. In Rambo: The Video Game you can shoot to disarm (although, as the tips point out, only against American citizens), but it’s cumbersome and leaves you vulnerable. You may be able to get through to Sheriff Teasel without slaying 38 policemen. I accidently killed a whole mess of them. It felt pretty out-of-sync with the spirit of First Blood.
Teyon has tried to encourage players to revisit levels over and over again by applying a score mechanic to the game. You can also unlock perks and buffs that make Rambo more lethal. I opted for a perk that meant I’d never fail the quick-time events (whether I pushed any button or not) and another that gave me a 5% health increase for every headshot (which are ludicrously easy with a mouse). Neither of these factors make any part of Rambo: The Video Game more fun the second time around. With or without scores or perks or unlockables, replayability isn’t this game’s strength. There’s one level you can choose to either opt for the stealth or action route but, other than that, nothing ever changes. It’s a rail-shooter. The enemies always run, dive, and sprout out from behind the same walls and crates, and stand obediently in the same positions until you kill them. Remember 1995? It’s back.
Rambo: The Video Game actually makes a decent fist of bringing to life several key locations from the original three Rambo films. The Hope police station in the game, for instance, really does match the one seen in First Blood. At times it’s admirably faithful to a fault; Teyon hasn’t opted to ‘fix’ the foibles of the past by featuring models of real Soviet choppers, for example. The so-called Russian Hind helicopters in the game still appear to be based on the mocked-up French Pumas from the films. That’s the kind of detail a Rambo purist appreciates; it’s just a shame the game fails so miserably at being much fun to make any of it worth a damn.
The cast of Rambo: The Video Game is a mash-up of two of the films' major stars (Stallone and the late Richard Crenna) alongside a bunch of generic replacements. However, because Teyon has lifted Rambo and Col. Trautman’s dialogue directly from the films the results are conversations that often sound like they’re being conducted with soundboards. The levels are often up and down and they just sound out-of-place alongside the new voiceovers recorded for the game. The remainder of the audio is mainly gunfire and it fails to stand out in any way.
Rambo: The Video Game also has a co-op mode but dragging a friend along only exacerbates this game’s general stink. In contrast to the light gun games of old (that is, the ones that supported actual light guns) Rambo’s glistening arms and weapon of choice are represented on screen. Unfortunately, adding a second player has no cosmetic effect on the game whatsoever. Player 2 doesn’t get his or her own screen and onscreen avatar, nor has Teyon done anything clever like add a second gun in Rambo’s left hand and have two players control a dual-wielding Rambo. No, player 2 is just an additional reticule on screen. It’s blue, as opposed to red. Pretty ground-breaking stuff.
It sounds trite but I cannot stress enough how much more fun I had watching the first three Rambo films back to back in preparation for this review. They’re much cheaper and more entertaining than this game, and – even at just a shade over 90 minutes each – they lasted longer.
Just do that. Seriously. It's over, Johnny.
THE VERDICT
In a bowling alley arcade, circa 1997, a Rambo: The Video Game cabinet replete with a hulking plastic light machine gun smeared with Dorito dust and palm sweat might have been one of the better ways to lose several dollars. In 2014, the idea of slogging through an entirely scripted, arcade rail-shooter with a mouse or a joypad feels like an unmitigated waste of time for everybody involved.
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