A quite literal translation of the old arcade kaiju-'em-up Rampage into console 3D. Unfortunately, what that means is beyond the goofy humour, fun monster designs, and innate appeal of going Godzilla on famous cities of the world, all you get is a middling marathon of tedious button-mashing, further hindered by janky 3D controls - it's often a struggle to get your monster to actually grab onto and scale a building properly, or to focus on a target you want to attack. The campaign sends you to locales such as Las Vegas or San Francisco - which in practice are divided into stages of indistinguishable buildings, cars, and citizens - and within a time limit, you get free rein to wreck the stage as you please, with the stage ending once all buildings are levelled. But it often feels like you need to carefully fuss around smashing each individual window to actually topple a building, and between that & the finicky aiming, your blows often lack a satisfying impact. The level structure then repeats ad nauseam, and once you've smashed one street, you've smashed them all. There's moves & monsters to unlock on the way, but rather than being a reward for high scores, these come from you beating boring collectathon challenges or just using the right monster on the right stage, so it adds to the sense of turning your 'rampage' into a chore. The co-op's kinda fun in a 'beating up your younger sibling' way, and this comes with a couple of the old arcade Rampages which are decent time-killers, but not much else here to recommend.

Reviewed on Nov 24, 2023


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