The 1997 sequel to Rampage is as good – if not better – than the original. Rampage World Tour features Ralph, George and Lizzie returning to monster duties in more of the same, excellent, city-smashing, three-player action.

The graphics look like a mixture of SG-rendered characters and hand-drawn art, and the new style fits the game well.

There are more people to eat than in the previous game, and you can lunge down at crowds to grab a snack – sending them screaming! Which is hilarious. In fact, there’s more of pretty much everything in this sequel – more attacking aircraft and army/cops; more weird bonuses in windows; and a wider variety of buildings.

If you climb to the top of a building you can now jump up and down on it. If it’s a wide building it might even act like a trampoline, before collapsing. Also: you can stand on the roof of a tall, narrow building and repeatedly punch down and that will usually result in the building’s eventual collapse, from the top down.

Occasionally you’ll get the air force launch an airstrike on you, and – I think – that if you’re off the ground they will often cancel and not drop their bombs. At the end of round, though, you are always greeted by an airstrike that destroys everything around you.

The monsters are constantly being damaged, and you can pump more coins into the machine to keep boosting their health (which is what Midway obviously wanted you to do). You can also keep your health up by eating people, although that doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. Pretty much every round you’ll probably eat something that’ll make your monster puke, and the vomit animation is hilarious and gross.

Rampage World Tour is full of nice little details, like the variety of power-ups you can find by smashing holes in buildings; the surprise vomit, and that you even get to go to The Moon, as part of the ‘world’ tour… 😀

Rampage World Tour is a worthy sequel and a fun and playable ‘reverse horror’ classic.

Midway also released conversions for the original PlayStation, the Sega Saturn, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and for Windows.

More: Rampage World Tour on Wikipedia