An irrelevant attempt to bring a decade old game to modern consoles won't hold your attention for long.
(-) paper-thin gameplay nothing more than mashing buttons gets old after thirty minutes / most of the environments look the same / many of the attempts at humor miserably fall flat / overly cheesy art style and sound effects
Rampage was never an enormous success even back when it fitted in with the rest of the video game industry back in the early 90's. Sure, the monsters destroying buildings would be fun for five minutes at some sort of quarter entry-fee arcade machine before one gets the chance to get bored out of their mind of it, it just doesn't cut it as a console game of any decade because the gameplay is so devoid of any sort of depth that it's very difficult to be interested for long. And I need remind you, that was back when a game like Rampage was native to the times, when it didn't compete with much more than basic run-and-jump 2D plat-formers and single dimensional races. Competition in the video game industry has gotten a lot more intense now, and Rampage Total Destruction suffers horribly because of it.
You're not missing on a lot if you've never played a Rampage game, but the only objective is to choose a monster and wreck waves of demolition on an unsuspecting city. That may sound deep at the surface, but after your first few seconds of gameplay, you'll see that there isn't much to it at all. You have basic punches, crushes, kicks, and bites, breaking through the sides of buildings, ceilings, and windows. But it's not like the developers didn't even try to add some depth to this knee-deep formula, they just didn't try nearly hard enough. When breaking through the windows, you can gain extra points, recovery through a variety of foods, eat people, or be penalized by eating something poisonous or flammable. This isn't the slowest way to destroy a building though, that honor goes to trying to destroy the building from the side. You could always hop of the ceiling and try to demolish the building while standing still, as opposed to needing to shift to different locations just to circulate damage, but if you ignore the rumble on your controller, you'll suffer some damage if you fail to jump before the building crumbles down. Citizens of the town will often bring choppers, tanks, and guns to take you down. This may sound like it makes the game more challenging and fulfilling, but these people only annoy in a game that's already notoriously known for causing head-aches.
Obviously where this game got most of its focus was the character selection, which boasts a wide variety of different monsters, all cleverly designed and unexpected but welcome guests. Some of them, like the infamous guerrilla, are familiar, but there at lots of new ones too, like a snake and a squid. But it's a shame that the only deciding factor for which monster to choose will end up being taste, because as far as functionality goes, all these monsters fight, move, and play the same way. A small redeeming factor, if you're somehow convinced to play this game long enough, is to gain experience with your favorite monster of choice to increase their ability. But there's little point in doing so when the game just isn't much fun to begin with.
Rampage Total Destruction does make a decent effort to try and flesh out itself with this vast variety of playable characters, and different large cities to wreck havoc in, but it doesn't go so well. Having locations on offer such as Hong Kong, London, and Los Angeles sound appealing from the start, but they're essentially only difficulty settings. And a bigger stingers is it's increasingly difficult to even tell these cities apart, because save for some minor difference that only either a fanatic or a skilled observer could identify, they're all the same in the end. This really severs the already scarce replayability in this title even more so.
From a technical light, the graphics in Total Destruction are okay. There's bright colors, and the buildings do crumble up quite nicely. And while the cartoony art style is appropriate for the likeliest target audience of this game, it's the biggest reason why most of the levels tend to blend together after a while. The cartoony graphics also make the opening cut-scene difficult and awkward to watch, with people of various different face sizes and monsters that never seem to look different than plush toys. The music is repetitive, and the sound effects can get downright painful to listen to at times. And while the game tries to be humorous by having people you eat from windows make remarks, it's tiring hearing "You can't eat me! I'm a lawyer" over three times in five minutes, and it's not like the voice actors sound that motivated. And maybe it was thrilling to watch a giant monster turn into a naked human after losing all health back in '92, but today its just plain weird, which is fitting for a game that all in itself can't seem to stand the test of time.
The biggest knockdown of Total Destruction are the inclusion of the original NES and SNES games. But especially for nostalgic fans of the game, these are a novel inclusion, and an already budget-priced game packed with two classic titles makes sense as far as values go. But the SNES version, with tighter controls, better fighting mechanics, more variety in the environments and a better all-around art style, it actually surpasses the current Total Destruction game! Having them both on one disk makes it easy to compare them with one another, and more fun and depth can be had over a game that's been collecting dust for a decade now than this current Gamecube release. That's a shame, but at least the game has some redeeming value.
Rampage Total Destruction is too simple and repetitive to be any fun for much longer than thirty minutes, and you'd practically have to be burned out of each of your favorite games in your possession before playing this game shall even be in consideration. Granted, those who may have enjoyed the past game might have some fun with it out of nostalgia, but everyone else shouldn't go anywhere beyond a rental or a dirt-cheap used purchase, and even that might be pushing it in some cases.