Project Motor Racing Review A Bland Sci-Fi Blend of Roguelite and Platforming Just when you thought that roguelites fusing with other genres had reached its peak, there comes another one. This time, roguelite has been fused with a platformer, and with just a sprinkling of Vampire Survivors style gameplay thrown in, can the resulting blend be anything other than a dog’s dinner? Well, with Adrenaline Rampage from Midhard Games and Games Harbor, I just know that I’m going to be hard pushed to meet the minimum word count for a review, especially as the blurb on the Xbox Store page is exactly 39 words long, two of which are the game’s name! But come with me to a “dark sci-fi world” and let’s see what is on offer this time… Is this an adrenaline-fuelled rampage? Budget DoomGuy and Forgettable Aesthetics We’ll kick off with the way the game looks, which with the best will in the world, can be summed up by the phrase “not bad”. Adrenaline Rampage is set in a series of side scrolling platform levels, with some verticality built in, and the world is very much on the industrial end of the scale: concrete stairs, disappearing platforms (in what dark sci-fi it would be thought useful to have a platform vanish once you stood on it I do not know) and of course, hordes of enemies. Our character is a budget Master Chief/DoomGuy cross, complete with the armour, even if he needs to hit the gym a bit more. The enemies are described as “techno zombies”, and I can report that I have yet to see one throwing shapes to a thumping beat. No, they have a fine line in running and jumping, and as contact with the techno zombies hurts, we’re advised to keep moving. And that is it for the look of the game, aside from the need to progress through a run, work various weapons and enjoy the differing types of zombies that appear. It is all very basic. Sound is slightly better, with a nice line in gunfire noises to report, if you’ll pardon the pun. The techno zombies expire without a whimper, we give off a manly grunt when we are injured, and the music is there but immediately forgettable. You know how the right music at the right time can heighten tension and draw you into the game? Yeah, there’s none of that here. Tutorial Troubles and Teleporting Terrors Gameplay is an odd thing to describe and things don’t start well with the tutorial. You’d expect this to tell you how to play Adrenaline Rampage and get into it, but we’re given four instructions – how to move, how to jump, how to dash and how to toggle auto aim and fire on and off – but the latter two instructions are wrong. You see, Adrenaline Rampage will tell you to press RB to dash, but this is jump. RT is the dash button. And we are also supposed to click the right stick in to toggle the auto shoot, but this does nothing at all. So yeah, not brilliant. Jump jump! A run is almost embarrassingly simple. This can work for certain games, the mighty Vampire Survivors among them, but here it just leads to boredom. You see, when you start a run, your gun is so weedy and underpowered that the enemies can close to your position faster than you can kill them. There are no safe spaces in the levels, given that the techno zombies can not only jump, but have also mastered the art of teleportation: they can – and will – appear around you just when you think you are in the clear. The Wall-Jumping Exploit So, since the dash move (which does give a little bit of immunity) has a limited amount of times it can be used simultaneously, the only other option we have is to jump over the crowds. And here I discovered a bit of a flaw in the game’s AI. If you are jumping against a wall, you can action multiple jumps, staying in the air for a long period of time. When you are in the air, the techno zombies seem to lose interest, and stop rushing you. Therefore, you can kill most of the foes in the area around you, land on the ground to attract the next batch, then rinse and repeat. There is literally no skill involved in this approach, but I’d argue that the runs I did before I discovered this didn’t involve skill either, just bouncing around like a toddler full of Monster. Frankly, that is the sum total of the gameplay on offer in Adrenaline Rampage. Level-Up Ambiguity Actually, that isn’t strictly true, as completion of a level and success in getting to the portal to escape, allows the opportunity to level up. As we run around, the enemies drop crystals of some kind, and I assume the mount we collect relates to the number of upgrades we can have. I say ‘I assume’ as this mechanism is not explained at all in the game! Still, being able to level up a gun and even evolve it, or to add new weapons like a rocket swarm, or have defensive things like a shield, makes us able to survive longer. Whether that is a good thing, seeing as that will then increase play time, is another matter. Fails to excite Not Much Of A Rampage It means that Adrenaline Rampage fails to provide any appreciable adrenaline hit. It isn’t particularly rampage-y either. Unfortunately, Adrenaline Jump-and-shoot-a-bit doesn’t have the same ring. There is a small bit of fun to be had, and the price is reasonably appealing, but the old adage of “You get what you pay for” is extremely apt. Important Links Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/adrenaline-rampage/9NQ925RV0476/0010 2 Source: https://www.thexboxhub.com/adrenaline-rampage-review/