why does this exist | Rambo: The Video Game
2actioned oriented PTSD
REVIEW
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Rail shooters, emulation and Xbox 360 games. Completely fine entities providing all sorts of value in their own right but what might happen if you take away the good and only leave the bad? Well, this. Rambo: The Video Game, ladies and gentlemen.
The plot is both a blessing and curse in this game, mainly a curse. At the core, it attempts to mirror Rambo: First Blood Part 1, Part 2 and Rambo 3 where you can play events in John Rambo's traumatic and war-torn life unfolding through an interactive experience. Unfortunately, much of the source material is diluted to justify the rail-shooting mechanics. Much of what made the movies impactful (for better or for worse regarding Part 2 and 3) is either extremely downplayed or brushed to the side, leaving you with a bitter taste of what the franchise really has to offer. Whatever story is being told feels lackluster as you're constantly swarmed with having to kill armies full of Vietnamese, Russians and even small town cops surprisingly (which goes against the first movie). A combination of having dialogue introduced while taking parts of the movie's audio not even aurally balanced correctly makes for a jarring disconnect. While the perspective of "so bad it's good" can create a lens of comedy in response to how jank and stiff it is, ultimately it does not do the movies justice, taking away depth and complexity for generic "shooty shooty, bang bang".
Gameplay is the bread and butter but the novelty wears off over time. You are given an arsenal of weapons to attack enemies constantly throwing themselves at you in order to cinematically traverse through segments of each movie, while trying to obtain the best score possible. The game also throws in quite a lot of quick-time-events oriented by full frontal assaults or stealth to help build said cinematic experience. These mechanics by themselves are harmless and are quite appropriate to the genre of rail shooters but how this game uses them creates a notion of repetition and mundanity. You ultimately just shoot the living hell out of everything you come across with some occasional QTE segments but eventually circles around to the former. Nothing about this feels fulfilling as enemies just throw themselves at you with very little variety to engagements and barely feeling threatened (unless it's massive overkill like at the very end of Rambo 3 I experienced).
An even more damning aspect is how the game goes against the spirit of the first movie too as in the original, there's only 1 death and it was arguably accidental. In the game version though, you can stack up a ridiculous body count of cops and not be too penalized for it, possibly rubbing people the wrong way as Rambo is not some gangster archetype like from the GTA series. You are encouraged to "disarm" or incapacitate enemies but your weaponry is not meant to wound (imagine playing it safe with a M60 of all things) and the game does not make it easy to do so with forced auto aim. Taking the time to shoot slowly makes you vulnerable of taking a lot more damage unnecessarily, making this very cumbersome.
A silver lining I will give this game is it's nice to have a perk/upgrade system where you can have passive effects aiding you throughout the game. A low bar to set but at least it gives some benefit to actually trying in this game (although whether it incentivizes replay value remains to be seen). The reloading system is a bit neat too, a risk/reward system to time weapon reloads perfectly, normally, or risk jamming the weapon with less ammo. Perhaps these elements are staples in rail shooters across the board but at least the game gives you SOMETHING good to work with, even if it's not much.
How the game looks is atrocious, plain and simple. How a 2014 game looks more aged than the movies it takes source from is ridiculous. Environments are noticeably rough around the edges, enemy textures vary from minorly detailed to extremely polygonal if they're far away and SFX just feels choppy. Was it really demanding to run this game that they had to sacrifice resources for optimization? Even that's questionable in itself as crashing and freezing are apparently part of game's core, that things will hang on you out of the blue for no reason. Development 101.
I think I've learned my lesson why this game is considered a "meme". Even through vague recollection, I had reasonable hopes the game wouldn't be too boring and at times it's classic B-movie feeling. It's either humorous in the classic "so bad it's good" feel or a slog to get through, making you wish you just watched the movies instead. Usually, movie adaptations of games are hit or miss but it seems the opposite rings just as true. An unfortunate stain to the memory of John Rambo but the movies will always take precedence to his story than this sorry excuse of a game.
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