“It’s good that he’s dead”; always a positive start to a game! So just over thirty-one years since First Blood first hit our screens, John Rambo is still a massive name when it comes to action movie heroes. Indeed, his legacy is still lasting through both his own feature film series under Sly himself and has spread into many others, proving just how iconic a character he has become. Now we see his story reborn again in the gaming world, with the release of Rambo: The Video Game. An arcade-style shooter, the game offers you the chance to be a part of John Rambo’s story, taking you through key moments from the first three movies based around this man’s brutal journey. So does the game do justice to the legacy of one of the world’s favourite action heroes? Well my friends, if you would like to know then read on!
The first thing you should know about the game is that it is an arcade rail-shooter. Just remember that fact when you watch the cool Assassins Creed or Dishonoured-style trailers that have been showing it off, because some people have been caught out by that already. This is not an issue with the game, and in fact if you read the description in the Steam store it does quite clearly say what type of game this is, but it is just a point worth noting for your convenience. Shall we continue? Ok then. If like myself then you choose to jump into the story mode first, you are met with a fancy looking cutscene. Well, at first it seems like a fancy looking cutscene, and then you see the facial graphics. It is hard to describe what is wrong with these, but they are wrong. They just don’t look natural, and it’s a little disturbing. Then the voice over kicks in, in all of its 80s glory, and this too is sadly a little badly done. The audio hasn’t been cleaned up or anything, it is as if it has just been pulled straight from the movie. You have to admire the effort of attempting to include a legitimate audio track in the game, but if it doesn’t fit in, so you do have to question if it was really worthwhile… But we are getting held up on a cutscene here; let’s move onto the game itself!
So we kick the story off in Vietnam, naturally. Our friend has just been shot in the face, we don’t seem all that worried about it, and as if by magic the rope binding our hands becomes loose enough for us to get free and kill motherfu… people. All seems pretty standard for Rambo so far right? Anyway, we have a friend on hand who doesn’t actually seem to shoot at anything, so that is always good, and having acquired some weapons in our hasty escape it is time to go outside the hut and kill everyone, because as we all know, getting away from the prisoner of war camp as quickly and subtlety as possible is frankly for wimps. And so, we jump into the action! Or rather, the game walks us into the action at a steady pace, giving us tutorials on how to play slightly after we could have done with knowing what to do. But it’s ok, because the controls are thankfully fairly easy to pick up anyway. In fact, in some ways the on screen instructions overcomplicate things a little. Most things are fairly standard though; trigger to shoot, X button to reload, right stick to aim; at this point in the game the controls are pretty easy. It really is a good job too, because it doesn’t take long for every angry Vietnamese soldier within a ten mile radius to come and try to stop you!
Depending on the settings which you chose, killing these fellows can be rather easy or really bloody difficult. Not only do you select a standard difficulty setting, which influences aspects such as your resilience and how many respawns you are allowed, but you can also choose to have a fully automatic, semi-automatic or no aim assistance at all. Personal preference dictated that middle of the line on both of these options seemed like an adequate starting point. This decision led to two and a half revelations (that will make sense in a moment); that the middle difficulty is pretty hard (or I am pretty bad at arcade shooters now), and that the assisted aiming didn’t really appear to do an awful lot. Occasionally my crosshair seemed to lock to people while I went into cover, but how and why this was happening sometimes and not others I could not figure out. Anyway, after losing four of my five respawns in the same place on the first level, I decided to turn the difficulty down, which made things much more bearable. Those of you of different abilities may of course have different experiences in this area, and I can only really speak for myself in terms of difficulty settings, but personally I found this more difficult than other arcade-shooters I have played.
There are some quite different gameplay features on offer here too, both small and large. This is not a simple case of aim, shoot, cover, reload, repeat; there has been some more thought has been put into it than that. For example, you much choose how you take cover carefully. You can hide in multiple directions, and enemies will not simply wait for you to pop your head up to attack you. They will move around your cover and sometimes it is impossible to hide, forcing you to make quick decisions and make your tactics count. Reloading is also more than simply hitting a button. The better your timing the more effective your reload will be. Try to be too quick about it and your weapon will jam, but time things carefully and you will be done much quicker and have more ammo loaded to spend. No, this doesn’t make the blindest bit of sense realistically speaking, but at least it adds a level of interest. It is also important to pick your targets carefully; different enemies may have different roles, and it can be more important to kill those who would seek to move around your cover first than those who are hiding themselves.
These systems mix things up a little bit, be it in a good or bad way, but are still fairly simple and basic, however there is more to the game than this. You must remember that you are not some random chap trained to fire a gun here, you are John Rambo, a highly effectively trained Green Beret soldier who has been tied up and tortured for months in a prisoner of war camp. In other words, you are about the most effective and clinical killer out there, and there are features in the game intended to put this image across. For example, in order to regain health in this game, you must kill. You can send Rambo into a rage, during which time each enemy he defeats adds health to his health bar. It is an interesting design choice, but if you ignore the issue of realism in this it is one which does fit well to the nature of the character and the atmosphere being created. Does it make you feel like Rambo though? Hmm not so much…
When you come to the end of the first level, you may not really be quite sure what’s going on with this game, and may be thinking positively to yourself “maybe it will get better”. Unfortunately, things just seem to get more bizarre. What follows are a couple of levels which can only be described as unfitting and pointless. This may seem harsh, but when the premise of these is just quick-time events, not even shooting as you would expect from the rail shooter, you have to question what the creators were thinking. There are also massive gaps in Rambo’s story as you progress, which is confusing and takes out even the possibility of a continuity factor.
One level in particular which offered little sense of, well, anything really, was taking on the police in the forest as in First Blood. You learn a couple of things in this level too. For example, this is where you find out that those tactical and stealthy kills which the game boasts about are not actually a choice, the decision is already made for you, all you control is if you hit a button soon enough to make it non-fatal. You also learn that there simply isn’t time or point enough to attempt the non-fatal takedown of the entire police force of the state, and thus end up mowing them down horrendously. Still, at least the police officers here look visually different, as opposed to the Vietnamese soldiers of the first level who all, awkwardly, seemed to look the same…
One thing the game does have which has not yet been mentioned is progression! But it’s a rail shooter, and therefore this is peculiar. It is also not very meaningful to the game. The improvements you can gain are minimal, with 5% increases on offer for example. There is little or no need to really bother with this as you won’t see a true improvement until you have increased a skill by a few levels anyway. Some of the perks on offer are more useful, but in some cases maybe too much so. Very early on for example you are offered a perk that never lets you fail a quick time event. This would be a mind-bogglingly overpowered perk in most cases, however these events are so simple there didn’t seem much need for the crazy perk anyway. It is nice to see that the developers tried to integrate an integral part of all RPGs into this rail shooter (see the problem there?), but they really shouldn’t have…
If you have any crazy friends who you think might wish to join you in this adventure, then you are in for a wild time on multiplayer mode. You each shoot separately, but control only one character, and it is damn near impossible to work with this. You can use a different weapon to your partner, you aim separately and you have separate ammunition. However, if you wish to cover then you must both cover, the model on screen will only display the weapon of the first player, and your health is shared so there is no helping a friend up; if you go down you both go down. It has to be one of the most unusual, awkward and sadly unworkable multiplayer experiences which I have ever experienced. One positive of this; we laughed like hell, but this really wasn’t the intention of the developers I believe, and so can’t really be sold as a strength…
Sadly, Rambo The Video Game falls very short of expectations. For something which had been well publicised and had some good looking trailers (again, ignoring the faces), it doesn’t seem like it is nearly as good a title as people may have been expecting. The reason for this I do not know, perhaps time or money restraints, or maybe this was genuinely thought to be a completed game. In reality, it feels more like a late alpha-stage demonstration of the game, with imperfect controls, difficult handling, questionable graphics, quite simply poor audio… just read back through the review, it is all there. It is unusually difficult to pull out positives here, and even speaking to a friend the best we could muster was that it felt like a bit of a nostalgic blast back to 2003 gaming and that it really made you appreciate the modern productions we have now. Rambo The Video Game just didn’t hit the right notes, and didn’t quite make the cut this time. But with tags such as “hair physics” and “Rocky” popping up on Steam already, it seems that the fans are at least getting some level of fun out of it…
The Good – There is a level of nostalgia surrounding the game, and it makes an effort at least to create an authentic experience drawing on the story and previous works of the Rambo legacy.
The Bad – Gameplay, graphics, audio, multiplayer, progression system, quick-time events… It is sadly a pretty poor show in the grand scheme of modern gaming.
Editors comment: This game is more suited for the Mobile Platform, with a lower price or even free with adverts.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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