Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (PS1)
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| Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue (PS1) | ||||||||||||||||||
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 Bad show, even worse game (technically, this port is not worst).
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Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue is a video game based on the 8th season of the TV show of the same name. Four very different games were produced for the Game Boy Color, personal computers with Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems, Nintendo 64, and PlayStation by various developers and publishers. This page will only focus on the Playstation version.
Gameplay
The game is a beat'em up. It features the main five Rangers as playable characters with the Titanium Ranger as an extra unlockable character. The game can be played as one or two player mode and also features voice clips by the actual Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue actors and actresses. Once chosen, the player/players stay as the chosen ranger/rangers for the whole game. For the Megazord Battle, the player on controller one can use the Supertrain Megazord. For the final stage, it's replaced with the Omega Megazord. Special cheat codes can give the rangers infinite health, lives, continues and powered up attacks, as well as access to an art and picture gallery, the option to begin the game on any of the first six of the seven levels and the Titanium Ranger.
Bad Qualities
- It's quite short, it only has 7 levels and the game can be finished in an hour like the N64 incarnation.
- Your Ranger can punch, kick, block, jump and do some form of special attack when the power bar has increased. There is no real skill involved, it’s just a matter of mashing the buttons until the enemy’s health is depleted. Even blocking only really has any use with certain bosses, often the games only real challenge. The lack of moves is really disappointing and makes fights really repetitive and generic, made all the worse as the game has just one non-boss enemy type.
- The objective section's are not clear if you don't rescue the civilians who are actually in danger, fighting off the enemies in the area and completing one of other objective she'll be blocked from proceeding in the game which the game doesn't specify what you need to finish the section you're in.
- Repetitive and linear level design consisting of only spamming attack buttons to lower your enemy's health, it’s very simple stuff and thanks to the game refusing to let you progress past a certain point without having completed everything in the previous area, easy to navigate. Although, it’s hard to really get lost or anything as levels are very linear. Plus, it contains almost impossible or frustrating jump sections due to it control (more on that below).
- At best, you might struggle to find a specific thing purely because of the camera that just always seems to be one step behind the Ranger’s movements.
- In the fourth level, Go Volcanic, there is a point where you need to climb up to some roofs. This involves climbing a broken pylon, jumping up to a small vent then, in theory, on to the roof. The issue is that once on the vent, you can’t jump any higher. It’s as though there is a roof above the Ranger. No matter how much you try and how many different angles you come from, it’s just not possible. With nowhere else to go and no way to progress, the game’s lack of sparkling quality so far will hardly extend to the effort required to work out just how the game wants you to make this jump. To do it, you need to go back to the pylon and jump across from there. A jump that should be impossible but if you hammer the jump button, the Ranger will make the jump through a combination of floating and landing on some invisible block.
- If you don't fulfill certain conditions, and also if you have cheats codes enabled, and you're not playing on hard you can't reach the final stage. Instead, you just get a Game Over screen after finishing the Aquabase stage, also, The Final stage of the game can only be accessed if the player saves the game on the PlayStation Memory Card after completing the penultimate one.
- The camera positioning, especially in the multiplayer is really inconvenient, the camera while not horribly placed, the most part there are parts when it's somewhere undesirable or there'd be platforms way below the screen where you can't quite see it sometime it has its bad moments, plus you can't center it by making the jump sections more frustrating due to poor camera positioning.
- Dying doesn’t come easy but chances are you’ll die the most by the dodgy hit detection and having to jump. The latter is a real problem for a game that also has camera issues. Because there are several sections where you can't see a good view of the platforms makes you have to make jumps of faith that often end cheap deaths due to the little momentum of the jump. Later levels, specifically the final level is downright torturous for sections with frustrating jumps you have to do to be able to advance to the level.
- Multiplayer mode has some problems:
- The radius of how far the players can be from each other is not very far and this also gets one or both players killed because they get blocked off the path during platform.
- Its very easy to pick-up power-ups making it easy for the other player to accidentally steal them which does not help when you need help.
- It sounds weird but when playing two players and you're both attacking the same enemies only one of you is doing damage while the other one is just punching the air.
- The jump is terrible, it has little momentum, besides that it can get stuck and you can float in the air, the worst thing is that the game is also a 3D platformer, so you will lose many lives because of this, Besides what there are several sections of heavy silverforming, so jumping feels really uncomfortable and most of the time these sections are mandatory to pass the level.
- You can enter cheat codes in the game, but there are few codes, with a total of 7 cheat codes, so this option it is very limited, although the codes are functional.
- The soundtrack is quite poor and extremely forgettable, especially for a Power Rangers game, although it's not as bad as the soundtrack from the Nintendo 64 version.
Good Qualities
- Decent graphics.
- Hitting enemies can sometimes be fun.
- At least there's a multiplayer mode despite all its problems.
- The game moves in a fairly acceptable 3D environment, with very fluid movements, although there are slowdowns in the game, when for example 10 or 15 enemies appear on the screen, but it is understandable, the scenarios are quite good, very careful with a good atmosphere and a large number of details, although some are somewhat repetitive.
- Battles with the Megazord are really fun and fix what had been seen in the Nintendo 64 version.
- The soundtrack, although not so good, is nice to listen to at times.
- The story follows and takes aspects from the shows.
- At least you can enter cheat codes, although as previously said there is little variety.
- It's still better than the very awful game that was Power Rangers Time Force on PS1.
Reception
The PlayStation version received mixed reception from critics and has a 5.5 (Mediocre) in Vandal, while the Game Boy Color version also has mixed reception from critics.
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