Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Climbing a building and battering its windows is a wonderfully direct way to begin a game. Rampage makes the job easy to understand: get onto a wall, break enough of the structure, and move away when it starts to collapse. The soldiers trying to stop you have understandably chosen a less relaxing afternoon.

George and Lizzie are the two playable monsters in the NES game. You can punch, jump, climb, and grab things from the buildings while helicopters and ground forces keep up the pressure. A second player can join in, giving the destruction a much more sociable feel.

The appetite is part of the job. Useful food can restore some strength, but reaching into a window is not a guarantee of finding something helpful. That makes each building a mixture of target and temptation while the army chips away at you from outside.

The NES manual explains the creatures and hazards in more detail, but the basic rhythm is immediate. The difficulty is sustaining the excitement over a long succession of similar streets. Early demolition feels gleeful; later demolition can start to feel like a very unusual maintenance shift.

Graphics

The monsters are pleasingly large beside the city windows, with George’s brown bulk and Lizzie’s green body standing out against bright blue skies. The buildings use simple grids of windows, and the dark silhouettes behind them give the streets a little sense of depth.

There is only so much variety in a succession of rectangular buildings. The more appealing pictures are the ones with both monsters hanging from opposite sides of the city, small people visible inside, and a helicopter taking the unwise decision to fly close. The artwork gets the joke across even when the skyline begins to look familiar.

Story

George and Lizzie were ordinary people before experiments turned them into enormous monsters. They now have the size and appetite to make a serious mess of an American city.

The police and military respond with guns, vehicles, and aircraft. You spend the game on the receiving end of the kind of resistance that would normally make you root for the defenders.

As one set of buildings falls, the destruction moves on across the country. The unfolding disaster is an excuse to keep climbing and eating, with the human inhabitants doing their best to interrupt both activities.

Overall Experience

Rampage is at its most enjoyable when another player is helping turn the street into rubble. There is an easy comedy to sharing a skyline with a second monster while both of you try to grab something to eat and avoid the army.

The repetition is harder to overlook alone. The central idea is good, but the game keeps returning to it with relatively little change. A brief bout of demolition can be satisfying without making a long campaign equally compelling.

For a noisy, undemanding two-player session, the NES game still has an obvious attraction. Pick a monster, find a wall, and enjoy the wonderfully irresponsible business of making the building disappear.

Retro Replay Score

6.5/10