There have been some truly disastrous video games (like the James Bond game that remade classic missions with Daniel Craig), but 2014’s “Rambo: The Video Game” was a true blunder. By the time it arrived, there had been multiple other games based on the franchise, none of which involved Sylvester Stallone in any capacity beyond the Rambo likeness. “Rambo: The Video Game” was slightly different in that regard. While “Demolition Man” had shot footage with Sly specifically for the game, Teyon actually went to StudioCanal and acquired official audio from the movies for use in its adaptation. As such, Stallone did technically lend his voice to the game, as did Richard Crenna (who played Rambo’s former commanding officer Colonel Trautman).
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Sadly, the presence of these actors wasn’t enough to save the game from itself. “Rambo: The Video Game” was somewhat hampered by its rail shooter mechanic, which didn’t allow players to venture off a set path, but there was so much more holding it back. Players could take part in various game styles including stealth, demolition, and combat, while a cover system added an extra dynamic to the gameplay. Of course, this was a “Rambo” game, so Teyon did at least have the sense to include destructible terrain. Between missions, players could increase various attributes from weapon handling skills to endurance, as well as the capacity of the “wrath” meter (which enabled a kind of Rambo god mode, allowing the hero to regenerate health and highlighting enemies to make them easier to hit).
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Sadly, all of this amounted to what GamingBolt dubbed “one of the worst licensed video games of recent memory.” Indeed, the game was a critical failure, with reviewers highlighting the poor gameplay and graphics — so, basically, the whole game. The IGN review surmised that “the idea of slogging through an entirely scripted, arcade rail-shooter with a mouse or a joypad feels like an unmitigated waste of time for everybody involved.” Destructoid, meanwhile, claimed the visuals felt “mostly unfinished” and the game certainly looks a bit shoddy, even considering the fact it’s now more than a decade old.
There’s a trend that’s emerged in recent years whereby amateur game designers take a modern video game and “demake” it. That is, rather than a remake of an old game that attempts to upgrade its graphical fidelity, a “demake” will take a modern game and try to make it look like the low-poly, pixelated games of previous decades. But this nostalgia for low-fi graphics of the past could be single-handedly abolished by “Rambo: The Video Game. All it would take would be a quick look at Rambo’s visage grotesquely rendered in the heart of the uncanny valley via PS3-era graphics to immediately eviscerate everyone’s nostalgia for the video games of yesteryear.
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