Review NaN of 1
, from Phoenix
Price Paid:
$10.00
from EB's Summary:
I have seen this title on the shelves at local dealers for a good long while. I went into the store looking for nothing in particular and saw the ultra low price on this game so I thought I'd take a gamble. I am always looking for a new puzzle game for the little Nintendo handheld and I took the bait.
From the box art and from the description on the back of the package, Rampage Puzzle Attack sure does look like another Tetris variation, probably made for kids, or at the very least, a not-too-distant derivative.
It most assuredly is not. It is quite unique. Although the basic premise of pieces falling from above is similar, the gameplay is so radically different from any other GBA puzzle title that it almost deserves it's own sub-category.
In fact, this game had several surprises in store, and not all of them were pleasant. But the most important fact is this. This is a great puzzle game...for the gamer with a longish attention span and a lot of patience. You see, the big major glaring difference between Rampage Puzzle Attack and Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter, Puyo Pop and other GBA puzzlers is the pace of gameplay. The emphasis is on puzzle solving, not puzzle action. Rampage Puzzle Attack's gameplay is more akin to Mah Jong or a difficult crossword puzzle, in terms of pacing. You are not under the gun timewise. You can take as long as you want to solve the game's puzzles. And when you fail to solve one, it makes a you-are-a-dummy noise and then it happily lets you retry that same puzzle, as often as you need to beat it, or as long as you can handle it before giving up in frustration. More about this in the Gameplay section below.
However, the puzzles presented do increase in difficulty via levels, and this leads to the game's biggest fault. There is NO battery save. Instead, every time you solve a puzzle you are presented with a (get this) ten character password. If you want to pick up where you left off later on, you'll need to have written this password down and then manually enter it when you start up the game again. If you do not, you have to replay all the same puzzles again to get back to the point where you quit earlier. This would not be entirely bad, since you also earn points for solving puzzles more quickly than before. But since there is no battery save, these scores are not saved internally. So, if you want to beat a previous score, you'll have to have written that down as well.
This is a huge problem, especially with this type of game. It is an unbelievably stupid design flaw. So basically, for only $10, you get a very good puzzler that is a PITA to level up with.
Another surprise was how quickly the puzzle difficulty rises. The box states that there are more than 200 puzzles, and I can attest that they can get hard very quickly. I found that by the time I got to the twenty-fifth puzzle or so, I was doing a lot of retrying. And although the pace is like Mah Jong, unlike most of the electronic versions of that game, there is no help facility, nor can you take back a move.
Rampage Puzzle Attack is a Euro game. It originated in Finland. Although the Rampage monsters in it have been seen in other games on other platforms, in this title they serve as little more than decoration. They are entertaining at first, but I found the noise they made to be distracting and ended up turning the GBA sound down. For the most part, they just hang around on the playfield borders, showing disgust when you lose, etc.
The bottom line is, if you like logic-puzzle games that take time, brainwork and a few tries to solve, then this game is well worth having, warts and all. There is nothing else remotely like it on the GBA, save for some of the traditional games in Ultimate Brain Games or maybe one of the chess games available. In other words, if you have the patience to play a slow paced puzzler like this, then the necessity of writing down your save/reload codes may not seem like such a big deal.
Rampage Puzzle Attack is for one or two players. I did not play any of the two player versions. Most GBA gamers will want something that moves a bit faster, and the idea of two people having the patience to wait through each others' gameplay in something that requires so much concentration and time is almost hilarious to contemplate. The manual states, however, that only one cart is needed for head to head play.
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