The Collection Chamber: RAPID ASSAULT

It's your only chance for freedom, but is it worth it?
The United World Council will release you from prison but, there's a catch. You have to track down Spectre, a ruthless criminal who's massing an arsenal of weapons to overthrow the government. The risks are high but it's your only way.

Rapid Assault puts you in the cockpit
To accomplish your mission, choose from a fleet of four high-tech Rapid Assault Vehicles, armed with the most advanced weaponry available. Each vehicle has its own special features, letting you experiment with different strategies as you hunt down Spectre. If you succeed, you win your freedom. If you fail, no one's coming to help you.

The are 20 missions and multiple game scenarios to provide endless playing opportunities. Startling 3D graphics. 16 viewing angles, digitized sound effects and music add to the realism and suspense in this fast-paced combat environment.

Cockpit displays indicate your objectives and help manage your arsenal of high-tech weapons as you pursue Spectre through 20 missions in eight combat scenarios.

Pick you Rapid Assault Vehicle to help you survive your mission:
Gladiator - Slow, tracked vehicle is tough with its level III armor
Dart - Fast skimmer vehicle with high acceleration but less armor to protect you
Sprint - Lightly armored wheeled unit features a good mix of speed and acceleration
Dodgem - Quick hovercraft with great manoeuvrability

~ from the back of the box

International Business Machines Corporation, or simply IBM, is synonymous with the mechanical side of computing. That broken three-lettered logo was emblazoned on many a desktop computer, but for a short stint it also features on a series of computer game boxes too. Rapid Assault arrived in 1995 when the company was going all-in on publishing more than just supplementary educational titles. It was developed by UK-based company Synthetic Dimensions (Chronicles of the Sword) with technical help from GTE Vantage and rode on the coattails of the first-person-shooter offering futuristic vehicular combat spread across twenty missions (or "Tasks"). Back then, the market wasn't short of such games, but Rapid Assault tried do something beyond simply shooting things.

Technically, Rapid Assault was surprisingly accommodating for its day. This was not a game that demanded bleeding-edge hardware just to be playable. It could run on an aging 386 which was almost a decade old by this point, and it didn't sacrifice the visuals to do so. It used ray-traced graphics in much the same way as Wolfenstein 3D or Doom, but the visuals are chucky with pixelation and geographically uncomplex. Levels take place in flat, open arenas with simple boxes that represent buildings to provide cover. This simplicity in design didn't exactly wow reviewers at the time, if they paid attention to it in the first place. I've only managed to find one review in an old issue of PC Zone that was only a couple of paragraphs long. They scored it 52%, which, in my opinion, deserves at least 10 percentage points more.

Choose your vehicles carefully. They each control very differently (left).

Play the "practice" levels in Arena. There are 3 in total (right).

Gameplay is where Rapid Assault tries to be interesting. Rather than treating every level as a shooting gallery, each mission or Task is defined with an objective and a time limit. Early jobs are simple enough - reach the exit flag, destroy a quota of enemies, that sort of thing - but later stages become far more involved. One mission asks you to shove a generator out of a protected dockside security zone by bumping into it, then neutralise a force field at a reactor compound and then race to the exit flag for extraction before the punishing time limit expires. Others involve locating radar installations, protecting targets, destroying specialist enemy units or navigating increasingly hostile terrain. It gives the campaign a sense of escalation that other first-person-shooters simply didn't have at the time. Can you imaging doing anything other than fragging in Doom II?

Controls come in three options; keyboard, mouse and joystick. Unlike many DOS action games, none of these feel unresponsive or poorly programmed. Mouse control is surprisingly usable allowing for precise aiming, joystick offers the smoothest movement that can easily be mapped to a modern controller, and the keyboard offers precision in orthogonal movement that would otherwise feel a little slippery otherwise. The problem is less the inputs and more the vehicles themselves. Everything in Rapid Assault has a tendency to slide or bounce as if permanently travelling across polished ice. It gives the game a distinctive sensation of momentum that is perhaps suitable for the hover vehicles its trying to represent, but it also means precision tasks can become infuriating. You are constantly correcting, overshooting and wrestling to keep your machine pointed where you intended. That generator bumping task is frustratingly annoying as a result, and the swarm of enemies knocking you around with each hit does not help. There's a learning curve, and even after mastering it there are moments where you'll be wrestling with the controls more than the enemies.

Power-ups are represented by red dots on the radar. You don't know what you're gonna get until your there (left).

Select "Bonuses" from the main menu for a run down on each of them (right).

Sometimes, you can just blame the tools. Or in this case, the vehicles. There are four to choose from, and each play very differently making each one more suitable for different situations. Before beginning each Task, it's perhaps worth heading back to the main menu to consider your options. The Dart is the nimble skimmer with quick acceleration, excellent handling and the unique ability to adjust altitude, making it ideal for evading enemies and attacking the ones that fly. It is the most vulnerable thanks to its paper-thin armour, and its inability to reverse is more of a hindrance than one might think. The Dodgem is the more balanced hovercraft, lacking the Dart's vertical movement but retaining the advantage of gliding across water without losing speed. Wheel-based vehicles may slow down depending on the terrain, but they are generally the more balanced vehicle. The Sprint is the speed demon while the slower Gladiator has the best armour of them all - great for surviving an enemy onslaught. None are universally superior, and later Tasks reward choosing the right machine rather than defaulting to favourites. That generator stage I keep referring to... choose the Dodgem so it can be bumped further which each hit.

Your weapons roster follows the same philosophy - each are suited for different roles. The machine gun is unlimited and fires rapidly, though its damage output is weak and it only shoots directly in front of you. Mortars hit dramatically harder and are thrown in a arch which can threaten airborne enemies, but require manual adjustment of your mortar cannon to use it effectively. Lasers are devastating at close range and have the handy bonus of destroying designated breakable walls to uncover hidden power-ups, but the premium option are the homing missiles. These are powerful, one-hit kills that target the nearest enemy in front of you, but given the slidey-nature of your vehicles are alarmingly easy to waste. You only get a small splattering of each one depending on the stage and will automatically switch to an alternatives when you've run out. You can collect more stock via collectible power-ups but they're few and far between.

Press F8 to access the map. It will show a small portion of the current map, but not anything that's on it (left).

Homing Missiles are the best weapon in the game, but they're in short supply (right).

Thankfully, you have a Radar to help you find them. Somewhere on the HUD for each vehicle is a black square with coloured dots to represent what's near you. Red dots mark bonuses such as ammo or heath. Yellow indicates ground enemies, green are airborne ones and orange highlights mission-critical targets such as that aforementioned generator. White points to the exit flag, which can be a mission in and of itself to find. Bonuses range from Extra Time to complete the mission, Score boosts for a better high score, Freeze to temporarily paralyse enemies and Nuke to wipe out everything within radar range in a spectacularly explosive fashion. My only gripe is that there's not many on any given stage and given how fast the difficulty ramps up, they're needed.

Viewed today, Rapid Assault feels like a game that deserved more discussion than it received. Contemporary reception was lukewarm with little surviving online. The lowest critic score I found was from the German publication PC Joker giving it a fairly brutal 37%. That's a lot harsher than the game deserves. Its objective-driven structure was more inventive than the usual "destroy everything" template, and some later Tasks remain impressively ambitious. But the difficulty is savage. Enemies swarm, objectives stack up, and the floaty physics can turn an already demanding scenarios into exhausting wars of attrition. That constant feeling of being overwhelmed undermines what might otherwise have been a cult classic. Rapid Assault isn't a lost treasure waiting to be rediscovered, but neither is it the disaster its almost non-existent reputation suggests.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox to bring the game to modern systems. Manual included. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 11.

File Size: 63.0 Mb. Install Size: 194 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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