➤ I'm the one who comes to get you 🎮

The importance of Rambo in iconographic terms, especially if we are talking about the second chapter of the series, is undoubted. Sylvester Stallone entered the collective imagination by right by playing this character as muscular as he is tormented, a veteran from Vietnam who finds himself waging war again.

First in an American town, following the arrogance of a sheriff who does not want trouble with the veterans but ends up creating a lot of them; then back to Vietnam and Russia, to fight battles that seemed to be over and that instead left a long aftermath of violence and tension. It is not the first time that Rambo becomes the protagonist of a video game, but things from this point of view have never gone in the right direction and probably the best transposition remains the arcade shooter Rambo III, which circulated in the arcade in the early 90s and which you may remember for the cabinet with attached Uzi machine gun. Unfortunately, the new multi-platform production created by Teyon does not improve the average and on the contrary ends up burying it, giving us a mediocre mix of railgun shooter and quick time events in first person whose levels are based on the situations seen in the three films, naturally enriched with unpublished events for to be able to reach about four hours in duration.

Rambo: The Video Game could be the worst video game of the year ... and it's still February

I wage a war you don't even dream of

The first stages of Rambo: The Video Game represent a synthesis of what we should expect in the rest of the campaign as well. It begins with the funeral ceremony of John Rambo (excellent omen, no doubt about it), in which an anonymous officer says that it was good that he died (well!) Because in the course of his "career" he killed quite a few little people.

So the first "flashback" starts, that is the mission in which Rambo is still in Vietnam, a prisoner with his companions, and manages with a flicker to free himself shortly before being killed, obtaining a rifle and making his way through the enemy ranks in waiting for reinforcements. This section, which represents the bulk of the gameplay, works exactly like a gun shooter, with the only problem that we don't actually have a gun. We will therefore have to check the aiming reticle by acting on the analog sticks, a real nightmare due to the semi-automatic coupling system, which only makes everything even more inaccurate, and an excessive sensitivity of the controls. Fortunately, it is possible to modify both parameters and obtain a response to the inputs at least decent, advancing from one position to another and trying to expose yourself as little as possible to enemy fire. It is not always possible, in the sense that the possibility of crouching or hiding behind cover is not obvious (nor does it guarantee immunity to the blows of all enemies) and in some moments we will necessarily have to eliminate everything that moves on the screen to avoid to take too much damage. Finally, once the "fury" bar is loaded, we can activate a special mode by pressing the A button and hit the Viet Cong to recover vital energy. This is the only way to avoid the game over, since the difficulty is fairly high but above all the hitboxes leave a lot to be desired. In the event of death, we will have five "lives" available to start over from the last checkpoint, otherwise we will have to start over.

Xbox 360 achievements

The twenty-seven objectives of Rambo: The Video Game are obtained by looking for the best possible performance in the levels, thus carefully avoiding enemy fire and placing a good amount of headshots. Getting two stars in the various stages translates into the unlocking of as many achievements, while for the others we move on to numerical issues: killing a certain number of enemies, reaching certain score multipliers and so on.

Day to day

If the rail sections constitute the bulk of the gameplay, there are clearly parts of the film trilogy that did not lend themselves to firefights (not even those added for the occasion) and that the developers have seen fit to represent through sequences filled with quick time event.

The result, if possible, is worse than the parts in which you shoot: the interactive component is reduced to a minimum, the challenge is practically nil and the visual spectacle offered by the game is terrible, at times even comical. Just think of when our character escapes from the police station of the first film, always facing the same cops in the rooms of the building!

One, in particular, the guy who is thrown into a window, at one point did us an incredible pain, since he was the one who took the most blows of all, in the sense that his polygonal model was re-proposed in the most painful situations. . Also on the technical front, beyond a dignified realization of the forest, always that of the first film, Rambo: The Video Game is a bitter disappointment. The protagonist has such a big head that it seems they wanted to make a parody of it, the polygonal construction is poor and everything smells terribly of "old gen". The question of the enemies all the same is however the most serious thing, and if in the case of the Viet Cong perhaps little attention is paid to it, when fighting the police or the military this defect appears in all its evidence. Not even the sound is saved: the music is those of the trilogy and therefore well known to the fans, but it was decided to repeat the same dialogues between the characters, obviously capturing them with a cassette recorder from an old VHS and without operating any equalization, so much that in some cases you can even hear the echo effect of the speakers.

Comment

Version tested: Xbox 360 Resources4Gaming.com

3.0

Readers (69)

2.4

Your vote

Rambo: The Video Game is a disaster that is undoubtedly a candidate for the palm of the worst video game of the year, despite the fact that 2014 is just beginning. The one made by Teyon is a tie-in along the lines of what was used to do in the early 90s, that is to exploit the popularity of a brand to sell a few copies but without worrying in the least about the quality of the game. Here we have opposing bad shooter sections and even worse QTE sequences, and knowledge of the film trilogy and the iconic character played by Stallone is not enough to erase the enormous problems of a product that we really do not explain how it could have arrived in stores.