Based loosely on the 1989 film of the same name, Taito‘s Rambo III arcade game is a one or two-player third-person shooter, with relentless action through countless enemy-strewn landscapes.

Thankfully Taito made the look of the game comic book-style, and not realistic, so Rambo‘s actions might seem heroic in an unhinged, satirical way.

Stallone‘s mop of hair, tied with a bandana, is about as much as you see of Rambo during combat, since he’s always facing into the screen and you only see his back the majority of the time.

Rambo‘s mission is to rescue Colonel (Troutman) from a bunch of Russian-backed mercenaries, and the only way to do that in this game is to shoot everything in sight… And to not stop shooting until every single boss is nothing more than a big pile of metal shavings on the floor… Ammo doesn’t play an important role in the game, so you can just keep shooting pretty much non-stop…

Rambo III owes a great deal to Taito‘s previous classic shooter, Operation Wolf – in the way that the backgrounds look, and also the way the camera moves, which is ‘on-rails’ some of the time. About half the missions are not ‘on-rails’, though, and you can run in and out of the landscape and stop behind certain features to use them as cover. In some missions, like the motorbike ride, you’re actually compelled to move forward continually.

Ultimately, though, the levels in Rambo III are fairly generic in terms of shooting action. The environments are mostly sparse and uninteresting. The boss battles are ridiculously over-the-top, and not particularly interesting either. This is more of a ‘leave your brain at the door’ type of shooter, than anything requiring thought or skill.

The best thing about Rambo III is the two-player cooperative mode, but even then the shooting action may not be interesting enough to keep two people playing for more than ten minutes.

More: Rambo III on Wikipedia