Despite the premise of this easily being something that could pave the way for a truly hectic, brutal experience that really taps into a lot of the more exciting elements of arcade games, Rampage is a pretty big disappointment with how it handles it all. The sense of scale and power that you'd really expect to feel in a game where you're a violent kaiju monster (especially with the nature of arcade games being even more geared towards being instantly eye catching and able to hook players with just a level or two) is the biggest thing to be entirely missing, and I feel like a lot of it stems from the way the character controls. Rampage seems to really play into the whole feel of being some sort of huge, lumbering beast while not exactly providing a big enough sense of power and scale to compensate, with everything feeling clumsy and difficult to have a full grasp on, while also not providing enough raw destructive power to make it feel like there's enough weight behind these slower movements.

This is especially problematic when taking into account the fact that there are bullets and explosives etc. from the enemies flying everywhere that there's literally no way you can dodge. This works fine early on where there are few enough enemies on screen that you're able to tank a lot and end up having this feeling of being outright unstoppable as long as you're quick, but after a few stages there ends up being so much going on that it feels as if you die in a matter of seconds while also not feeling as if you had the faintest hope of being able to do things differently and succeed. While the multiplayer side of things definitely do make things a bit more engaging with how cool the spectacle of having multiple hulking giants destroy a city is, the fundamental issues remain and in the end it feels like the game wants you to see how long you can survive without fully giving you to tools to actually survive properly after a certain point. Definitely one of the cases where mobility feeling off is damning to the point of not just weakening the experience, but potentially flat out ruining it.

This is a review for the NES verion.

Yep, it's Rampage on the NES. extremely simplified and watered-down. It's very boring, very slow, just not really fun. You're better off playing literally any other Rampage game I'm pretty sure. you can literally just jump around and punch buildings, all levels being very similar, the music is literally just one little song on loop I believe.

This game is nothing but an obsolete relic now. Play the PS2 Rampage instead.

Sometimes I like to imagine that characters and worlds in the games you and I are playing exist beyond some kind of metaphysical veil and the actions we perform in them have consequences both good and bad for those theoretical people, and in this case I took control of a Godzilla beast to basically do 9/11 over and over again to all the major US metropolises, not just New York now but also San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Chicago, you name it, killing hundreds of thousands of people I don’t know trapped and shrieking inside their own collapsing buildings, or plucking them off the street and shoving them into my foul irradiated maw, costing the US army millions in taxpayer dollars by stomping on tanks and punching helicopters out of the air, just causing unspeakable harm and suffering to a number of strangers I can’t even imagine outside of graphs and statistics, just so I can log on to a game reviewing website and say “while this classic game has an irresistible premise, it unfortunately does little to break up the monotony of playing each level long-term. Three stars, marked as abandoned.”

One of those games that gives you less the more time you sink into it. The core gameplay loop is solid enough, but by Day 5, you have a feel for the game's controls, and around Day 30, you've taken on about everything the game has to offer. There are 128 Days. Running through in free play, it took me 3 hours, an impossibly long time for an arcade game. Multiplayer probably helps extend that playtime a good deal, but even with three-player, I can't imagine this game has enough content to warrant its long, long runtime. I say this as someone who has a lot of nostalgia for the weirdly mellow vibe you get after a couple dozen singleplayer levels of quietly leveling skyscrapers.

It's a solid enough play if all you want is to run out a couple credits, but don't go for completion. The reward on the final stage isn't worth it.

This game (The NES version) is sadly missing the option to play as Ralph, the werewolf. But otherwise, its a faithful (even GOOD) port of the arcade classic, and has essential 2 player co-op play. The game is definitely repetitive, as the arcade original was more of a "see how far you can get on one quarter" type of affair. But as a 2 player game, it's quite fun. In fact I have fond memories of my friend spending the night when I had rented this, and we stayed up going through the entire game. Good times.

The NES actually had a wealth of high quality arcade ports, and this is certainly counted among them.

In my hazy memory, this was an arcade perfect port but with the addition of a 4th playable monster. Cute graphics, big monsters climbing up buildings and smashing them until they fall down, eating people and the soldiers trying to stop you. It's great fun... for about 3 levels, at which point you realise every level is exactly the same and you're just going through the motions of punching buildings until you eventually die from the army attacks. Great for a single credit of fun in an arcade, but not so great for a full-price home video game.