Rush'N Attack: Ex-Patriot

In the past few years a lot of developers have been taking their games from the vault, dusting them off, and breathing new life into them. We’ve seen games like Bionic Commando, Yars Revenge, and Secrets of Monkey Island brought back from the past. Part of what makes these games fun to play is nostalgia, but what really makes a great remake/reboot is when they take what made the older games fun and mix them with newer concepts and gameplay mechanics that weren’t around back in the day to make a new experience that stands up to modern games but still pulls on those nostalgia strings in your heart. I’ll go into more depth of course, but let’s skip the formalities and say Rush’N Attack: Ex-Patriot doesn’t do anything I said above.

True the original Rush’N Attack that came out in 1985 is considered a “classic” to some people, but just about every game is considered a “classic” by somebody. The truth is that the original was an OK game with a simple and amusing core mechanic that was fun for that day and age. The new R’NA takes the originals gameplay of stabbing dudes with a knife and occasionally having them drop weapons that you can use for a few shots and ads almost nothing new to the mix. Well that’s not true, but everything they do add actually makes the game worse.

The story is corny and flimsy so I won’t delve too far into it. Basically you and a team of army specialists are sent into Russia and you all get captured, your character Morrow gets busted out of prison and continue your mission. Also the Russians have powerful space rocks… Yeah. The story isn’t really a big deal here and in fact gets in the way of the “fun” more often than you’d want. The dialog is dumb, the cut scenes look like silent films (where they make weird over emphatic gestures silently then it goes to text for dialog), and the graphics are just terrible.

The combat is simplistic, X button for quick attacks and Y for heavy attacks. You can also stealth your way through the levels as well, instantly killing enemies by sneaking behind then or by hiding behind doors or under floors and waiting for your pray to cross your path. But none of the stealth matters because Morrow will also learn different attack combos at seemingly random times in the game and one of the first combos I got was the run forward and press X then Y attack. Once you learn that move the game is over because with that move you can run up to any enemy in the game and throw them on the ground, which will either kill them right off the bat or incapacitate them so you can insta-kill them on the ground. So at that point all stealth is pointless.

One thing that made me hopeful about the game when I first started was that both the side-scrolling ledge grabbing gameplay and the map of the level make this game look like a Metroid-vania style game. In fact if you just look at screen shots of the game you might think it looks a little like the game Shadow Complex that came out in 2009. But you would be horribly wrong as Rush’N Attack is nothing more than a liner action platformer. The game does have some short cuts via ventilation shafts (and only ventilation shafts) but these are almost all pointless as they usually only ever do one of two things, either give you an item that you most likely don’t need or very slowly creep you past a few enemies that you could have just torn through anyway.

It’s sad to say, but Rush’N Attack only does one thing right and even then they fail to make that fun for more than a few moments. When you do pick up some of the weapons, they actually are kind of fun to use, but they only last for a few shots each before you throw them away. There are so many more little things to complain about, but I just don’t want to take the time to write any more about this game. There is no reason to beat a dead horse as they say. This would be a forgettable PS1 game, but it’s not. It’s a downright bad game. No wonder the Russians hate us.