Rambo (NES Review)

Rambo
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December 4, 1987 (JPN) May, 1988 (US)
Designed by Akihiro Tokita
Developed by Pack-in-Video
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Since 2018, I’ve been on a one-woman crusade against the word “clone” in gaming, though stuff like Rambo REALLY makes me think I should just give up and use the term like everyone else. I’m not a fan of the word but if someone wants to call Rambo a Zelda II clone, I won’t passionately argue against it this one time.

Well, I did Platoon last week so I figured I should review a licensed war-themed game that makes sense for an action game. The first Rambo? Not so much. The second Rambo movie is practically already a video game come to life. Actually, Rambo the NES game released in the United States in the same month that Rambo III released in theaters. Rambo III was the most expensive movie ever made at the time it released, breaking the record Superman: The Movie held for ten-years. So Rambo III had real buzz behind it and a tie-in game with the hottest product in America made sense. What I’m not so sure makes sense is the chosen genre. Rambo was made by Pack-in-Video, a company I just found out predates home video games (being founded in 1970, two years before Magnavox released the Odyssey), and it’s pretty clear they thought Zelda II was awesome because they just copied it.

Insert obvious “I guess I missed the part in the Rambo movies where he fought a giant daddy long-legs” joke. Though honestly, I’d pay good money to see that film. Well, not GOOD money. Any money that would go to such a product would become filthy, filthy money that I’d need to do so many rosaries for. WORTH IT!

And, like Zelda II, Rambo has fans, and again like Zelda II, I didn’t ultimately like it, though my verdict was closer than I figured it would be. The problem with Rambo is that it just has no polish at all. None. It’s painfully clear that as soon as Pack-in-Video had a stable engine and a coherent map, they boxed it and shipped it. You feel it most of all with the combat. Rambo’s primary attack is a knife thrust that REALLY makes me want to throw-in the towel and just say “it’s a f*cking Zelda II clone.” Hell, Rambo’s knife and Link’s sword are basically the same length. Except, despite giving Zelda II a NO!, I loved the combat in that game. It’s SO violent and so cathartic that I could understand why Pack-in-Video would try to replicate it for a game based on the embodiment of movie violence. Except there’s something horribly wrong with the timing.

Actually it’s not even a thrust. It’s a straight-up OJ-style stab.

It’s not lag, either. It’s like the reaction to the knife registering damage is delayed. So the timing to all the knife-based combat is sloppy. That sucks because the stab (not the throwing knives) does the most damage of all the weapons. Somehow a knife is more lethal than an arrow shot from a bow, or an exploding arrow shot from a bow, or a bullet shot from a gun. And thus that satisfying OOMPH that nearly got Adventure of Link over the finish line all by itself is turned into Rambo’s weakest aspect. I really thought the combat in this was pretty terrible, actually.

The normal arrows were probably the most successful weapon in terms of violence because they cause damage immediately without that weird sense of delay AND they don’t let you down by having poor animation. It’s a f*cking bow and arrow. We moved past using them as a species because they weren’t deadly enough. (shrug)

The other weapons can’t rescue the combat either, and not because they’re weaker, but they lack that sense of violence. If Zelda II can feel like the weapons actually cause pain on enemies, Rambo should be able to do it, and it doesn’t. Hell, there’s an exploding arrow that doesn’t even look all that different from the normal arrow. It needed a huge explosion at the end, and that’s just not there. A satisfying BANG would have gone a long way towards helping the entire game. Same with the grenades, which make a little poof. The difference between the normal arrows and the gun is only the range. Bullets will fly the length of the screen. How weak is Rambo that he can’t shoot an arrow twenty feet? AND WHY THE HELL DO BOSS ENEMIES GET GIANT HEADS WHEN THEY TAKE DAMAGE?!

What the actual f*ck were they thinking with this sh*t?

Had the combat even risen to the level of satisfactory, I think I could have given Rambo a YES! I actually managed to beat it without using a guide for 95% of the game, and the only reason I did break down and use one is because I didn’t realize I’d missed a door in the waterfall section. The structure of the game is like Zelda II without the overworld and with the game broken up into clear chapters. You have to navigate the maps using special markers on the playfield just like in Platoon, with some sending you south and some sending you north, and you can also travel left and right through screens. Oh, I totally went in circles multiple times through my play session, but I thought the level design in general was the game’s strongest suit. It’s like it cut all the gristle out of Zelda II.

Truthfully, I didn’t need to be as stingy with the other weapons as I was early in the game, though it wouldn’t have made THAT much of a difference to my overall enjoyment because they’re not very fun to use.

Thankfully, Rambo offers a few quirks that ease the pain. For example, some enemies drop weapon refills and a rare few drop medicine jars that restore your health. Thanks to all the getting lost I was doing, I started to realize that specific enemies on each screen are programmed to always drop those items. Once I realized this, the next time I found one that dropped medicine, I left the screen and came back to test the theory. It worked, and from then on, I usually had the max medicine for the entire game. I can’t say the same about the exploding arrows or guns. While I did grind-up those resources, enemies who actually drop those refills are few and far between. When I finished the game, I only had eighteen gun bullets left. In a Rambo game. Seriously?

That is SO clearly the outline of the xenomorph from Alien that they just removed the sprite details from to try and avoid getting sued.

Yeah, that’s the weird thing about Rambo: you only get one actual gun and it’s not that fun to use. The f*cking cover is literally Sylvester Stallone in all his roided-up glory firing a machine gun, and I didn’t get my first gun until over an hour into the game and I ran out of bullets for it like ten seconds later. I thought the enemies were going to start dropping them more often. They really didn’t. I think I found three or four total refills for it the entire game, one of which I spent a few minutes grinding on because I wanted to have a gun in a Rambo game without running out. Even with the gun, it still never came close to feeling like Rambo because shooting someone with a gun doesn’t feel any different than shooting them with an arrow or even a throwing knife. Despite the truly silly cut scenes and a sloppy likeness of Stallone, Rambo never feels like anything but a bad knock-off of Zelda II.

What the f*ck is this thing? Did Dr. Wily teleport into this world too? Is Rambo a Wily-build Robot Master? “To defeat Steroid Man, use the Urine Test Ray you got from Anti-Doping Man.”

Rambo is bad at a lot of things, but one of the things it struggled with the most are big moments, which are usually boss fights. I say “usually” because I just remembered there was one other thing I had to look up. At one point you have to hop into a helicopter while bombs rain down from the sky. Only the helicopter moves up and down. I wasn’t sure if the helicopter was the thing that was firing the missiles and I was supposed to kill it. No, I was supposed to get in it. Except the game is very, very fickle about where you have to jump to while holding UP to enter it, and the game is literally pouring unavoidable missiles the entire time.

My sprite is LITERALLY on top of the helicopter. This didn’t count as entering it. It’s so badly programmed. Thankfully you get all your health back after this.

The bosses are all spongy and never are set-up to feel like bosses. You mostly just run into them. That Mega Man thing I showed? That’s a boss that I just ran into in the middle of a mission. The big-head guys (and there’s more than one) are bosses that I ran into in the middle of missions. Only the final boss is given a proper boss arena and it’s one of the worst final bosses on the NES. You can only hit it with grenades, of which you have a max capacity of nine. I think I must have thrown at least a hundred at the f*cking thing and used a ton of medicine before I won the fight. The raining bombs from the previous helicopter also return for the finale AND the game also rains enemies because they provide the refills for the grenades you need to beat the game.

I was literally about to look up to see if I was doing this wrong when I scored the winning hit. I mean seriously, I think another two seconds and I would have paused the game.

I’ve been really harsh on Rambo. But, while I’m giving it a NO! because I spent most of the game just sort of bored by the sloppy, underwhelming combat, I can also see why it has fans. Nobody can accuse Pack-in-Video of lacking ambition. They could have whipped-out a generic Ikari Warriors-like game with a handful of levels and called it a day. They didn’t. They built a relatively complex game that has better level design than Zelda II. It also handles its experience system better than Zelda II, at least up until the finale when they just said “f*ck it” and started having enemies pay-off in 500 point intervals. And hey, the bad combat with spotty collision detection discourages grinding XP. Every cloud has a silver lining, right? But the personality isn’t quite right. There’s these guys late in the game who burst into flame when you hit them:

Flame guy part one.

Flame guy part two.

And when they burst into flames, they can damage you for a few seconds (and they even spit fireballs at you) until they finally die. I think the gag is supposed to be that the guy is smoking and you turn that into making them burn to death. Somehow. I mean, it’s not like they’re standing in front of oil barrels or you’re spraying their cigarette with gasoline. It’s lame, but it didn’t have to be. The flaming death sprite could have been a cool risk/reward idea for, say, a flamethrower weapon. I don’t remember if there’s a flamethrower in Rambo II, but hell, I know there’s no giant f*cking spiders in it. Anyway, that guy catches fire the same way every time, regardless of how you inflict the first bit of damage. It’s like they set up the perfect gag for a fire based weapon, but the guy catches fire even if you just stab him. It’s missing the logic of why it would happen that way, but that’s the Rambo NES experience in a nutshell. They were on the right track and then ran the train right off the rails.

It also tries to tell a coherent story that involves a brief character swap. Rambo becomes a POW and you have to take control of this woman and free him. But the storytelling is laughable. She gets the key by just saying she’s the POW camp’s commander’s wife, and it works. There’s no action for any of this and it just ultimately becomes a break in the flow of the game that didn’t work for me at all.

There is so much about Rambo that feels like it’s THIS CLOSE to being a great game, and I don’t even think it’s good at all. It just never gets out of the starting blocks. It’s got good music, I guess, but it’s hard to complement the music when the sound effects are so badly done that they contribute to the lack of OOMPH. If they wanted a primarily knife-based game, it needed a much faster attack and the enemies needed better death sprites and sounds. But really, if they wanted it to feel like a true Rambo game, they probably should have dropped all the animals and focused on human enemies that have projectiles. Contra feels more like a Rambo game than Rambo does, and I kind of wish they’d tried to copy it instead. Though I imagine that would have gone just as bad as copying Zelda II. The thing that made me smile the most about Rambo NES is when I realized it came out in the United States before Zelda II. So, in theory, there were kids in America in the late 80s who thought Zelda II was a rip-off of Rambo. Come on! That’s objectively hilarious!
Verdict: NO!

So is this: