Ranx: The Video Game

Ranx is a very strange cyberpunk action game starring you as an ugly cyborg named Ranx, who's big on muscles but very low on IQ. Your job is to help him escape his despicable life by earning enough cash to buy a plane ticket to New York, where he must deliver the X03 vaccine to cure the town of the terrible Fuchsia disease. Afterwards, it's off to find his true love Lubna in Rome....

Sounds mundane enough, right? Not until you play the game for a little bit, and all its weirdness will be apparent. The description of basic gameplay illustrates this: as a cyborg, Ranx needs electricity to feed his internal circuits. Now, you can use common things such as medicine to heal your wounds, but to get electricity you must kick a lamp post, then zap yourself with the exposed electrical parts of the pole (no, I'm not making this up). You can also get energy by breaking a power box, which is found throughout the city.

Despite the game's pretense at being an adventure game (there are standard icons such as TALK), it is really just a glorified platform game, because what other characters tell you are mostly tips to get more money or fight some enemies, and there is no inventory-based puzzle to solve. You'll spend 90% of your time slogging through wave after wave of dimwitted thugs, collecting the money they leave behind, and another 10% looking for the blasted energy source or the way out of the subway.

Overall, Ranx is a fine concept marred by confusing execution. If you are confident of your ability in guessing what the game wants or killing hundreds of thugs, this might be an interesting game to try. The rest of us will saunter off to replay Neuromancer instead.

Review By HOTUD