The Vietnam Vet Gets Put in a Dungeon Crawl

First Blood was a massive hit for studio Carolco, and its sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, was an even more successful film, making nearly double what the first film did in theaters (topping out at just over $300 Mil during its run). Carolco had a massive franchise on its hands and, despite the films being tense, taught, adult-oriented fare, the movies also had crossover appeal. Adults liked the character, but they were letting their kids watch the films, too (despite the violence on screen), and Rambo suddenly became an icon for kids and adults.

It’s no surprise, then, that among all the merchandise that suddenly flooded out in the wake of the success of Rambo: First Blood Part II, that a video game quickly followed along as well. Rambo’s second adventure hit the big screen in May of 1985, and seven months later, that December, his first game followed suit. Based on the sequel (as many games would be, since First Blood doesn’t exactly lend itself well to video adaptation), this was a fairly straight adaptation of the core events of the film, shrunk down and made playable on computer consoles of the time (the MSX, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64).

The game itself is pretty simple: you control Rambo who is stuck deep in the jungles of Vietnam. Armed with only a knife at the start, you have to prowl through the land while enemies lurk around every turn. Killing them will sometimes drop gear you need, and some of that gear can be used to destroy terrain to reveal more gear and items you need. Taking out the enemies is essential to reaching your goal: a captured POW waiting for rescue. Save him, and get him to a helicopter to fly him to freedom, and you’ll complete your mission and go home a hero.

So yes, all the nuance of the second film (what little there was as Rambo blasted his way through the close act of the film) is missing in this game. That’s to be expected, of course, as computers and consoles of the mid-1980s couldn’t really do complex storytelling, especially not in an action exploration game that had to be playable on a variety of (frankly rudimentary) hardware implementations. Something had to give, and that something was all the nuance that made the early Rambo films into something more than just action-oriented slaughter-fests.

At its core, 1985’s Rambo is really just a simple action RPG along the likes of Hydlide and Dragon Slayer. You control the character, knife in hand, and explore around the top down world of Vietnam, represented here by a handful of screens. Exploration involves moving through the loose hallways of the game, killing enemies and moving to the edge of the screen where the next section of the dungeon is presented. And, really, it is all just one large dungeon, multiple screens interconnected with items to collect and someone to save at the end. Do it right and you get through; do it wrong and you die.

Like in those other games, Rambo’s basic attack is barely even an attack. Your character holds their knife up by default, and you bump into enemies to do damage. Damage them more than they damage you and they die. You can sit and rest for a bit, with your food meter slowly draining but your health going up, and then move on to kill more enemies after. There are other weapons you can get, too, from arrows to grenades, a machine gun and a rocket launcher. Some of these are better on enemies, killing them from afar. Others you’ll want to conserve so you can use their explosive properties to blow up objects and, hopefully, reveal more items you need to continue your quest.

That quest is, in fact, pretty easy once you know what you’re doing. The map itself is small, at just 25 total screens (five screens-by-five screens square layout) and not too hard to memorize. You’ll spend a lot of time exploring around, seeing where enemies spawn, what they drop, what you can collect. You’ll have to test what objects are worth blowing up to get items you need or to continue your quest. With food (keeping you alive) and ammo (filling your weapons) at a premium, finding the optimal route through the game will take more of your effort.

But then, once you know the path, it’s smooth sailing. While it could take an hour or more to explore the game and figure out where everything is, subsequent playthroughs of the game can be done in ten minutes or less. That’s both a bonus and a detriment. On the one hand, it is nice to have a game like that isn’t exceedingly hard, punishing players for not doing everything right in a massive world. At the same time, though, the game lacks depth of design and replayability. Once you know what you can do, and how to do it, you can breeze through the game, which is the same every time. Eventually (and really, fairly quickly) it’ll get boring.

It’s not helped that everything in the game is very basic. While Rambo followed the construction of Hydlide and other titles of its type, games were quickly becoming more interesting to look at, with deeper exploration and more to do. The first The Legend of Zelda, which was also clearly inspired by the top down action RPGs of the era, came out only a few months after Rambo and it featured a much bigger world, much deeper action and adventure, much more to do, and just in general a more desirable game to play.

Sure, maybe it isn’t fair to compare a game made by a tiny team forced by Ocean to work on a crappy, licensed game up against Nintendo and one of their early NES opuses, but that is the game market in general. Why buy this title when Nintendo shortly had a much better game in the genre out? It’s tough to compare the two side-by-side and see any reason to pick up this cheap game when Nintendo’s awesome experience was just around the corner. Different consoles, different markets, justify it as you will, but Ocean’s game is just inferior.

Rambo plays fine, looks okay, sounds marginal, but all in all it’s a short, simple game that would quickly get dwarfed by other titles of the era. It’s neither a foundational title, nor a good representation of where the genre was at, drawing inspiration from other games that did it better. In a bubble, Rambo is playable enough, but games aren’t released in a bubble and Rambo just isn’t good enough when compared to everything else around it.