Wii Game Roundup

Midway's original Rampage coin-op was a near-perfect concept for the mid-'80s arcade market - 20p bought you a few minutes' worth of monster-fuelled city destruction low on variety, high on enjoyment. It's just a shame that the game ever left the arcades because the core concept of relentless, monotonous destruction simply never worked on the home consoles.

Rampage Total Destruction tries to paper over the cracks with a bogglingly large array of enhancements to the core game. For a start there are 25 different monsters to unlock, each with a range of power-up abilities you earn by achieving different goals set on each level. Secondly, the threat level has been upped considerably with bullets flying at you from all sides and far more military hardware on-screen causing bother. Finally, the game has made its way into the third dimension, with a limited amount of depth to the gameplay arena that essentially boils down to having additional rows of buildings to bring down before the curtain falls on each level.

Unfortunately, the basics haven't changed since it first debuted in arcades in 1986. Bringing a building down is all about climbing it, bashing it, watching it fall down, then moving onto the next... then the next... and the next. Sure, powering-up your monster makes the job easier but the relentless pounding grows tiring within 15 minutes, no matter what power-ups the game may have, or what additional enemies are despatched to bring you down. It's all extremely monotonous - distressing so, I'd imagine, if you'd paid GBP 20 for the game.

The fact that Total Destruction is essentially a GameCube port doesn't help matters either. It has a supremely basic control system that takes next to no advantage of the Wiimote short of the odd swipe or smash here and there, and graphically it's all very backward with no progressive scan or widescreen support.