Walk Forward and Shoot, Soldier

The evolution of John Rambo from shell-shocked Vietnam vet to action hero happened pretty fast. He was broken as hell in First Blood, but the next film couldn’t just be another drama (I mean, it could, but apparently that wasn’t what audiences wanted) so the sequel swerved hard towards action and Rambo became a shooting icon. The video games followed this as well, all but ignoring the first film in the series to make a progressive series of action games for the hero. Why spend time contemplating the horrors of war when there were dudes to shoot.

By the time of Rambo III, there was very little nuance left in the films and absolutely none for the video games. He was pure action and adrenaline, and the first adaptation of that 1988 film doubles down on everything that made the movie brainless and silly. Is there a war going on in Afghanistan? Who cares! We’ve got Russian soldiers to shoot and vehicles to explode real good. Taito, developers of the arcade game, figured there was no need to include plot, or drama, or anything. The company boiled the third movie down to just the action sequences at the end and set the game to kill. Kill them all before they kill you.

Rambo III puts you in control of John Rambo, murderous soldier extraordinaire, as he goes on a quest to rescue his ally, Colonel Sam Trautman. Across five levels Rambo and Trautman shoot everything that moves as they first walk left, then walk up, and maybe once or twice motorbike up, all while killing. A lot. Everything is out to kill you, after all, from soldiers to jeeps, tanks and planes, so why not shoot back. Killing is Rambo’s business and, for five stages, business is good.

Suffice it to say, Rambo III for arcades lacks nuance. That would be an understatement, really, as this game doesn’t even bother trying to address any of the ideas of the movie. That film spent half the film setting up the civil war in Afghanistan, the horrors the Russians unleashed, how the people of Afghanistan just wanted to be free. None of that is in the game, though, as this is a pure, run and gun, on-rails shooter through and through. This could have been any generic Rambo (or military) game, and it would have functioned the same. As an adaptation of Rambo III, when it comes to story, this game truly fails.

As a game, though… well, it’s fine. Rambo III isn’t the first run and gun shooter, as there were plenty that came out before the Rambo series, but it does have a few ideas that are interesting. The first is that, unlike other on-rails shooters, which usually just gave the player a reticule and had them shoot from a fixed positon (see: Terminator 2: Judgment Day), Rambo III gives players free access to move their position along the X-axis. The player’s screen isn’t the target; it’s the characters on screen that can take damage instead. This adds an interesting dynamic to the game as you aren’t just shooting, you’re dodging too.

The game also has a little bit of variety to its layouts, although only a little. The first stage is a horizontal scroller, having Rambo (and Trauntman) move from left to right while enemies pop out from both directions, as well as multiple buildings as well. After this first stage the perspective changes and the players move forward into the scrolling plane. They can still move side to side but the action comes at them directly from that point forward. Usually they’re on foot, although for one stage they ride motorbikes as well, and the enemies just keep coming. The perspective shift is nice, although its impact on the overall experience is lessened since it’s the standard play for the last four stages of the game.

This is cool at first, but it does become an issue over time as Rambo III lacks variety. If you manage to get through all five stages of the game (which isn’t easy as the game puts a lot of enemies up against you) you’ll see the same kinds of dangers, the same enemies, and the same vehicles over and over through the experience. It gets pretty tiring after a while, making you wish there was more to do and see in the game than the same kind of combat for five stages on end.

There also isn’t that much to pick up in the game. Although there are power-ups, all of them seem to simply increase the amount of damage you do. You can get a flame power-up that increases the size of your bullets, a machine gun that seems to improve the rapidness of your firing, and a larger reticule that might make it easier to damage your foes. I say this all as a maybe because, honestly, I never really felt much difference in the damage I was doing from one power-up to the next. I collected them as I saw them because they were there and I assumed they were doing something, but the power-ups lacked any kind of tactile feedback to show me they were really working.

Effectively this isn’t ContraStarted by Konami in 1988 the run-n-gun platform series Contra was, for a time, one of the flagship franchises for the company.. That series is known for its action and the variety of its power-ups, giving you a wide range of cool things to collect and use. I get the vibe that the creators wanted some kind of blend of Contra and on-rails shooters, but they didn’t quite hit the mark from either direction. The shooting feels underwhelming, the enemies oppressive, and the action constant. While I’m sure there are players that probably liked mindless shooting just for the sake of it, I felt myself wanting just a little more to make this game feel really interesting.

And then, weirdly, the stages all end in underwhelming fashion. You reach the end of a stage, a bunch more enemies and vehicles show up, and you continue shooting as if you aren’t effectively in a boss fight. Nothing feels different, or special, not even when you get the final boss who is just another plane you shoot down while other enemies are coming in from all directions. I would have liked a little more flare, a bit more pizzazz. Anything to make this game stand out and feel interesting.

But that’s just it: Rambo III isn’t interesting. It has a couple of okay ideas that are mashed into a pretty boring and repetitive experience. It came out soon after the movie because Taito has the license and they had to do something with it. That doesn’t make it good or interesting, though. It’s just licensed slop pushed out into arcades to leech quarters. I’m sure it worked at the time, but that doesn’t make it go back and see the game again. It’s aged poorly, when compared to all the other shooters that came out before and since. It’s just a Rambo game and that’s not nearly good enough.