Rambo: The Video Game

"Rambo: The Video Game has NO reason to exist! NONE, WHATSOEVER! It's bad enough when these sorts of games go through the motions poorly to earn a quick buck on a recently released movie, but it is downright insanity that must have drove Reef Entertainment to acquire the license, dragging it up from retirement, just to murder the franchise, then parade its corpse around like a fucking puppet!"

- Angry Joe

Rambo: The Video Game is a 2014 rail shooter game based on the Rambo franchise released for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows, mh:awesomegames:PlayStation 3, and mh:awesomegames:Xbox 360. It was developed by Teyon and published by Reef Entertainment.

Gameplay
Players control John Rambo and use various weapons for combat. Terrain can be destroyed with explosives, and Rambo can use Wrath to slow down time and recover health. Overall gameplay is in the form of a rail shooter with occasional quick-time events.

Why It Should Be Blown Up By An Explosive Arrow

 * 1) Firstly, the graphics and visuals are terrible for a game released in 2014. The weapons look like blocky toy guns, the environments look ripped from an early 2007 game, and the special effects are on par with titles from 1998. It also suffers from texture glitches, frame rate drops, and crashes/freezes on every platform.
 * 2) The character models look even worse. Most of the characters don't look the same as the ones in the movie, with Rambo himself looking the worst.
 * 3) * Rambo is extremely deformed, barely even resembles Sylvester Stallone (some fans noting him to look more like Al Pacino) and looks like he has a plastic hair wig that flows awkwardly in the wind, and sausage links for arms. He also has a large unnatural shine on his body.
 * 4) * Teasle's face looks completely different from the movie he appeared in as well, to the point that he cannot be recognized as the same person in appearance. He appears to weigh less than he did in the movie due to his face being not as wide. Also, his eyebrows are always slanted (making him look like a Vulcan) and developers gave him a mustache for some reason. This model was recycled every time for the other police officers and the Russian soldiers later in the game.
 * 5) * Co Bao's face makes her look like she was in an anime due to having plastic looking skin, comically oversized eyes, and fake looking hair.
 * 6) * Some other examples include North Vietnamese soldiers from First Blood Part II chapter who barely even look like Vietnamese (some people even stated that they look more like Senegalese people), Soviet officers from the same chapter who have incorrect uniforms and Galt, whose mustache also disappears on high graphical settings for some reason.
 * 7) The rail shooting gameplay was considered a major letdown when it could have been at least a generic first-person shooter. Infact, the game heavily recycles sounds and animations from Teyon's other Rail-Shooters, Heavy Fire.
 * 8) Most of the game's dialogue are poor-quality audio bytes taken straight from VHS copies of the movies. The rest are new recordings also of low quality. Some audio clips are even reused over and over again, especially in the final mission where you'll hear a guy yelling "Come on comrades! He's a man, not a God!" every few seconds. This was done because Sylvester Stallone, who played Rambo in the movies, refused to do voice acting for this game.
 * 9) The game makes a seriously poor attempt at adapting the first film's story; notably, Rambo can kill any cop and national guard that attacks him despite the fact that he only accidentally killed one cop (Art Galt) in the movie (by contrast, Rambo did kill a lot of cops, civilians, and National Guardsmen in the original novel). The game encourages players to shoot their guns off their hands or their legs (killing them results in a score penalty), which doesn't really matter in the long run (like in Heavy Fire: Afghanistan).
 * 10) Despite the credits claiming to have a composer of original music (Jakub Gawlina), the game heavily recycles the Jerry Goldsmith score, which keeps repeating throughout the game, especially on the First Blood Part II chapter.
 * 11) The game's aiming is inaccurate, making firing at enemies difficult.
 * 12) There is little difference with the main and secondary guns used in the game, with the only major difference being that some guns have more ammo than others.
 * 13) Quick time events are used heavily throughout the game and the timing to complete them are too quick. There is also a perk that automatically clears QTEs, making them even more pointless.
 * 14) The game offers just over two hours worth of overall content, but unfair difficulty on the last level stretches out the experience.
 * 15) Despite featuring a cover system, your cover can be destroyed by enemies, leaving you exposed. In some occasions there isn't even any cover, instead having Rambo standing out in the open.
 * 16) The reloading minigame is terrible and can be easily exploited, as you can reload constantly until you get two times the amount of ammunition in your clip.
 * 17) Grenadiers are extremely overpowered. You only have a few seconds to shoot their grenades, which is made even more difficult by the bad aiming. If you get caught in a grenade's explosion you'll die, or at the very least take a massive amount of damage.
 * 18) Wrath mode is poorly implemented and a poor man's version of Sega's Rambo Arcade's Rage Ability. It's a cross between slow motion and health regen since when activated Rambo will start screaming and every enemy he kills he regains health. The problem is that when you use Wrath mode at any point, you can't stop it, meaning if you activated prematurely then you just wasted it.
 * 19) Wrath mode upgrades are virtually useless. The Wrath mode upgrades don't actually work as the description say they do (for example the upgrade that reduces the usage of Wrath mode to one quarter as fast as before only reduces it to one third) and some don't even work most of the time due to a game glitch. Also, the third and fourth Wrath mode gauges drain completely in less than 2 seconds, making them almost useless.
 * 20) The perks system is not thought out well, causing a situation in which there is a perk that only works in one level and the game doesn't explicitly tell you this, and actually letting you use it in other levels until you realize that it does absolutely nothing!
 * 21) The enemy AI is dumb since they will stand out in the open most of the time allowing themselves to be shot. Except with the final level in the game.
 * 22) Every enemy is thrown at you in the last level, including additional enemies such as tanks and helicopters, and commanders that double the damage output and defense of all enemies, making it unbelievably hard for no reason and creating a massive difficulty spike out of nowhere.
 * 23) The game cost $40 at release.
 * 24) False advertising: Screenshots and trailers of the game showed various locations to be pretty appealing, but in the release version, they are really downgraded.
 * 25) Artificial Difficulty: On normal difficulty, you only have 5 retries the whole levels (3 on the highest difficulty), and when you lose all of them, you have to restart the level all over again. This is super brutal, because if you fail a single QTE, then Rambo will get killed and you'll have to use a retry.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The developers released the Baker Team DLC, a fairly sizeable expansion to the single-player campaign, for free (albeit only on the PC and PS3, as the expansion exceeded the size limits for Xbox 360 DLC).
 * 2) As mentioned above, killing people in the First Blood chapter is actually accurate to the original novel which had a much higher body count of both civilians and police officers.
 * 3) You get unlimited retries on the easiest difficulty.

Reception
The game received generally extremely negative reviews. On Metacritic and GameRankings the Xbox 360 version received 28/100 and 40.00%, PS3 version 23/100 and 22.50%, PC version 34/100 and 32.93%.

Angry Joe gave it a 2 out of 10 along with an "Epic Fail" badge, stating the only reason it wasn't lower was because it made him laugh at how bad it was.

DX featured it on his "Worst Games of the Decade" video, saying that it is "a total bastardization of the films it adapts, which says a lot because two out of the three films it adapts are mindless action and they can't even get that right". Stating that "it's a slog to play through, it doesn't do anything good, it just does thing to differing degrees of bad. The only entertainment you'll get out of it is seeing how they try to recreate scenes from the movie with such a low budget".

Videos
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