Rampage World Tour is a colossal waste of time. You gotta wonder why anyone bothered to port this one from the arcade. There are probably a lot of arcade purists and retro-minded types out there thinking, "But dude, it's Rampage, bro," but there are also a lot of folks who still think the Doobie Brothers kick ass. The fact that it's a near-perfect port isn't due to the skill of the programming staff; it can only be due to the obsolescence of the arcade original. With 16-bit-quality 2D graphics and the most boring, fruitless gameplay seen in a long time, this one will leave you asking yourself the proverbial question, "Why am I doing this?"
Choosing from a giant gorilla, a Godzilla clone, and a giant blue werewolf-lookin' guy - each of whose individual contribution to gameplay and replay value is nil, since their moves and control are essentially identical - you set out to demolish cities, eat civilians, and... demolish cities and eat civilians. Were there justice in this world, the same would be done to the designers' hometowns. You know the drill: Run right or left until you get to a building. Climb up the side, ignoring the hail of bullets levied at you by cops, tanks, or whatever. Punch and kick at the building until it is destroyed, and move on to the next building. But wait, while you're destroying buildings, you can also eat humans and other food to regain health (with the punch button), and you can pick up infrequent power-ups (with the punch button), but watch out for poisonous bad food that (surprise) lowers your health! Repeat until dead or until city is destroyed, and move on to the next city, whereupon gameplay will be identical.
It's fun to smash buildings and kill people and stuff, but the game just doesn't go anywhere with it. Within the three minutes required to master the game's control, you've foreseen the entire remainder of the game. Admittedly, some variation from the boring city scenes does happen when you find a flag icon and spin it. This activates the "World Tour," meaning that the next five cities you face will be in England or France or... wherever. Who cares? Gameplay is exactly the same once you get over there. There is a short sequence during your flight to the new country in which, scrolling sideways, you must grab humans and other goodies in the air, while avoiding bombs affixed to hot air balloons. OK, fine. Thanks for the variation. Yawn.
Graphically the game is fairly inept. Cute monsters, sure, with nice cartoony oversized heads, hands, and feet. And lots of vague little humans to eat and vague little power-up icons to grab. All in all, this just looks like mediocre Sega Genesis fare. The sound is equally uninteresting, with a tedious and generic heavy metal soundtrack and a handful of canned smashing noises that do a great job at driving home the tedium.
For the first three or four minutes, it really is fun to be the bad guy and all. And you've gotta hand it to Midway, Rampage World Tour is the perfect game for all the folks out there sitting at home and thinking, "I wish they'd take a tired, repetitive arcade title with no replay value and port it to the Saturn." The rest of us will want to steer clear.
