Rush N' Attack

I have always had a soft spot for 3rd generation games. Unfortunately, they can sometimes be a challenge to write about.

I should back up a bit and admit that when I say 3rd generation, I am essentially talking about the NES. I had some familiarity with the Sega Master System, but most of my formative years were spent playing "Nintendo" as I am sure was the case for most kids who grew up in the United States. But the 3rd generation was still very much the frontier era of gaming. At the time, Sega and Nintendo were new to the market and there were so many gaming computers available it would make your head spin. Atari was still very much in the picture, though the 7800 wasn't exactly on par with other offerings of the era. It seems weird to think about now, but there were so many competitors to the big two (who weren't even the big two at this point) that it's hard to keep track, though not all of those consoles made it to the U.S. But this was also before the internet, so you pretty much learned about these consoles by word of mouth or random advertising, and the NES dominated in that regard. It also had a huge, varied library of games, many of which were ports of arcade or PC titles of the era. Rush N' Attack was one such title.

Originally released in arcades in 1985, Rush N' Attack made its way to the NES in 1987. Developed by Konami, it's a run and gun game that sees you moving right and taking out wave after wave of enemies. Its name is supposedly a play on the phrase "Russian Attack," which I guess makes sense considering when it was released. The story sees you tasked with going behind enemy lines to destroy a secret weapon, actually a change in the story from the arcade version where you were rescuing hostages. I'm honestly shocked there was a story at all, even if it was basically just something that was thrown in. As was common at the time, the NES version is graphically and auditorily inferior to the arcade version. However, it also added more content in the form of new levels and powerups. Some of the bosses are changed as well.

What you see is what you get with Rush N' Attack. As I said, you move to the right and take out enemies. It's both incredibly easy and punishingly difficult all at the same time...which isn't a good thing. First, why it's easy. Unless you have a powerup, you don't have a gun here. All you have to attack with is a knife, which you can swing rapid fire by tapping the B button. For the most part, enemies don't shoot, all they do is walk forward. Some will jump kick, others will duck, but they mostly just move towards you. As long as you are swinging your knife, they won't hit you, even the guys that are jumping.  Enemies come at you from both left and right, but once you get their timing down this usually isn’t a big deal.  In some stages, you can even avoid enemies entirely by climbing or dropping down from a platform. Occasionally, you will deal with enemies that can shoot or a few enemies together in a weird sequence, but not too often. So yeah, it’s pretty difficult to get hit. Add a decent collection of powerups, a rocket launcher, pistol and invincibility and it seems like you have an easy game.

Not so fast. It might not be easy to get hit, but if you do it’s a major problem. There are one hit deaths here, challenging but pretty common for the era, especially in arcade games. But the kicker is there are no continues. If you’re doing the math, that means all you have to do is get hit three times and its game over. You go back to the start, not of the level, not of a checkpoint, of the game. It’s stuff like that that makes NES games so difficult. Yeah, it’s not all that difficult in a vacuum, but you are down to get hit sooner or later. There is zero room for error and that leads to a frustrating, oppressive title that just doesn’t feel worth it. The controls don’t help, attacking is okay but movement is stiff and rigid. This is also one of those games where up is jump, which makes getting over ground obstructions a nightmare. Land mines probably killed me more than anything else, not because I didn’t see them coming but because jumping over them was such a pain.

Look, just because a game is hard doesn’t mean it’s bad. But Rush N’ Attack doesn’t offer enough to keep you playing. It isn’t particularly action packed, there are very few enemies ever on the screen at once. Contra has one hit deaths too, but it’s also filled with constant action and it’s so stimulating that even when you die over and over again, you just want to keep trying. It’s a run and gun game where you are actually running and gunning, whereas Rush N’ Attack feels more like all you are doing is standing and stabbing and hoping. Even Silver Surfer, which I played a while ago, has a certain draw to it, you want to keep going because of the crazy amounts of bullets and awesome graphics and great music. Those things are okay here, but not nearly good enough to carry a full game. I could go on and on here, Battletoads, Mega Man, Castlevania, you name it and there are tons of hard NES games out there that people have come to love. Those games find ways to make all the frustration worth it, while this one does not.

At the end of the day, Rush N’ Attack is a perfectly competent game that was most certainly a product of its time. Even then though, it fails to stack up to most of its contemporaries. In a way, the aforementioned Contra kind of makes it feel obsolete. When you are talking about another game on the same console making it feel obsolete, we have a problem. I’ve definitely played worse games, but Rush N’ Attack really isn’t worth checking out, at least not he NES version. Maybe give it a playthrough for curiosity’s sake, it’s not so bad that you will hate yourself for playing it. However, I think you could do much, much better, even when confined to just the NES library.

4/10