Rampage Puzzle Attack

Overview

Join up with your favorite characters from the classic Midway action game Rampage on a romp through various block-clearing puzzles.

Gameplay, Controls, Interface

Rampage: Puzzle Attack is a very basic block clearing style puzzle game. You get your familiar rectangle shaped playing area with colored blocks arrayed in various patterns inside it. You can choose to play modes where you either simply aim to clear all the blocks, clear all the blocks within a certain time limit or clear the blocks off the top of a monster cage in order to 'rescue' one of the Rampage characters.

You are presented with various colored blocks and you manipulate a top row of blocks with the aim of dropping certain blocks that can clear all adjoining blocks of the same color into the appropriate place to clear off all the blocks on the screen.

The only role that the Rampage license plays is that there's a Rampage character standing around on the outside of the playfield and in the cages for the rescue mode.

Graphics

The backgrounds and Rampage characters are colorful and interesting. The little news scenes between stages in the Rescue mode are cute. They did about as good a job as you can of making colored blocks look interesting. My one complaint would be that in some instances it's hard to tell the green blocks from the blue blocks.

Audio

I had to get the system back out in order to remember what the audio sounded like, so I guess I can safely say it wasn't very memorable either way. It's basically typical Game Boy style music and sound effects and doesn't take advantage of the Game Boy Advance's more sophisticated sound capabilities.

Bottom Line

Rampage: Puzzle Attack is not a horrible puzzle game, but unless you don't already have a Tetris or Dr. Mario clone type game, I really couldn't recommend this one. The early levels are way too easy and time consuming and the gameplay is just too unoriginal and uninteresting.

The Rescue mode was the most fun, but more for the little between-stage stories than for the actual gameplay. The game offers plenty of stages, but not enough real variety to be truly interesting or challenging.