Aside from manufacturing teeth rotting beverages, the Scum Labs Corporation has developed a nice little sideline in gene-mutating chemicals. Enter some poor unsuspecting taste testers who sip chemical X rather than soda pop and are suddenly mutated into a host of B-movie monsters of gigantic proportions.

So begins Total Destruction, Midways latest update to the Rampage series which began 20 years ago (a fact that should make some of you feel very old indeed!). Although in this case the use of the word update is perhaps too generous. Rehash seems much more fitting. Don’t let the pseudo-3D visuals and the choice of over 25 playable monsters trick you. This is virtually the same game that Midway unleashed in the arcades all those years ago.

Selecting a monster, players can work their way through a city and flatten it to the ground. Except that, despite living in an age where free roaming cities are possible, the developers have decided to stick with levels that consist of little more than 8 – 10 buildings at a time and which only extend for any real length along the X and Y axis. This means that while you can still pound citizens under your feet and scale buildings to smash them up, it isn’t possible to fully move around or in between buildings in full-blown 3D. Buildings also now require multiple hits in the same location to damage them and all this means that the proceedings feel very restricted and repetitive as you scale one building, punch a section repeatedly, move to another section, punch repeatedly, ad infinitum. All this before you factor in the lack of variety from scaling one building, destroying it, scaling another building and so on, level after level.

Aside from destroying all the buildings within the time limit, each level requires you to perform certain tasks in order to earn upgrades or bonuses, but this usually consists of little more than eating a set number of item A or destroying a certain amount of vehicle B. Simplistic and very easy to achieve, these remove any real additional challenge.

Triggering upgrades introduces new moves for the monster being used at the time, such as stronger attacks or rudimentary combo’s. While there is a large selection of mutated species to use, the tedium is increased by them all feeling virtually identical to play, despite them supposedly having different stats in terms of speed, agility and strength. As the moves and upgrades for each monster are the same, there’s no real incentive to unlock them, let alone switch monsters (aside from your own personal preference as to what type of enraged beastie best depicts your inner self).

The stinging pain from the fact that each monster plays the same might have been dulled slightly if the controls were up to scratch. Unfortunately Total Destruction is as clunky as its heritage. Latching on to buildings can be a hit and miss affair even once you’ve mastered the controls, meaning moving above ground level always feels like a bit of a bind. While it is now possible to straddle the gaps between buildings, tiny additions like this hardly makes up for the massive shortcomings in terms of the overall lack of ability and responsiveness.

In previous games, enemies such as tanks and helicopters posed real problems when they arrived on screen, quickly sapping your life if left un-destroyed. Here, providing you concentrate on smashing the buildings and eating the numerous health restoring goodies inside, the majority of enemies are a nuisance rather than anything to be worried about. The only real challenge comes from the end-of-city bosses that attempt to stop you from finishing the level within the time limit, but success is often just a case of learning their simplistic attack patterns, and once again any sense of challenge is fleeting.

The animations are quite amusing, but ultimately the horrible demon god of repetitiveness rears it’s ugly head. Having giggled diminishingly a few times at kicking a police car off the screen, or tossing a hapless pedestrian into the air before munching them to bits, there really isn’t much left to see. In this respect, much of what the game has to offer can be encountered within the first two or three levels, meaning there is even less incentive to continue trudging through.

There are a few game modes featured in a desperate bid to try and vary things – two player mode does add a little variety to the proceedings from having two monsters on the screen at once and with it being possible to injure the other player. Sadly this novelty quickly wears off, since even when you don’t intend to attack your accomplice, the aforementioned controls often result in you unintentionally assaulting them.

Also bundled with the game are the original Rampage and the late 90’s Rampage World Tour. Given that World Tour was nothing to shout about, this leaves the original game which it’s sad to say has aged quite badly. A classic in its day, the fact that gameplay-wise the ‘up to date’ Total Rampage doesn’t differ that much from the aged original speaks volumes. For what it’s worth these bonus additions are pixel perfect recreations, however the fact that all three of them are essentially the same game with varying levels of graphical pizzazz, doesn’t curry much favour.

Instead of feeling old-school, Rampage Total Destruction is a game that ends up little more than a twenty year old game that’s been given a new glossy veneer and repacked. Even a budget price point can’t counteract the tedium that quickly sets in from the limited gameplay. While far from perfect, Sony’s War of the Monsters showed that a fully 3D monster masher was possible leaving no real excuse for Midway clinging on to the past and ageing game mechanics instead of properly progressing the series.