Since Virgin Interactive's Japanese division was the only one who wanted to publish this, it ended up as an exclusive over there and one of the rarest games for the system. It's not really worth the hassle to buy, even if it was great.

From Manfred Trenz, the same creator of the Turrican series, Rendering Ranger is half run n' gun, half shmup. Neither are anything too stellar to play, as would be expected from Trenz. The controls are nice and I like how quickly and conveniently you can switch between weapons compared to the Turrican games, but the bigger issue is the stages are too long, too boring, and sometimes too hard. Stage 8 in particular feels barely even possible in a few spots, and then throws six different bosses at you if you somehow manage through its needlessly tight corridors. This is also well past the point in the game where it should be over, by the way. The game as a whole is about two hours, maybe just one or one and a half if you know it like the back of your hand.

The real star of the show here is the pre-rendered graphics. They're shockingly clean for the time, and cause the game to look like it would be more at home on the PS1 or maybe the GBA. It's really impressive for the time, especially on a cartridge allegedly half the size of DKC1.

But does this make it worth a play? Worth the price? No, and fuck no. It costs upwards of 600 dollars for an original cartridge. I suppose Limited Run Games reprinted it last year, but it's not really a collector's item in this form and it's much easier to just grab a ROM online, dip your toes in for a few minutes, and leave. Those first few minutes are probably the best it gets.

Enemies seem to disregard the player and smash into you with reckless abandon, quickly darting in from off-screen and mindlessly whipping around the screen. Add in that enemies and projectiles are oftentimes small and/or blend into the environment and attacks have very little telegraphing means this is very much a game of heavy memorization (in a bad way). Bosses also have way, way too much health with very simple and repetitive patterns, leading to extremely boring and drawn out boss fights.

Still I give it a higher rating for having so many unique weapons with unique bombs plus great pre-rendered graphics with no slowdown for a SNES game.

If you like Turrican, this is more of a linear and focused version of that; and you can actually aim in 8 directions, instead of just left and right... woah, how innovative.. Also, it thankfully actually has i-frames upon being hit.