iPhone Review: Ramp Champ

Publisher/Developer: Iconfactory & DS Media Labs
Genre: Skee-ball
Price: $1.99
Verdict: This is the a beautiful game with questionable game play.
Pros: Icon Factory knows its Photoshop, littered with prizes and has in game additional level purchase when you get bored
Cons: Ball control too easy to master, the pretty pictures don’t move, no real challenge for anyone looking for one, more levels=more money

This game may be the video game equivalent of a ‘butterface’ girl, smoking hot body – but her face, damn!  Ramp Champ is generating a lot of heat and rightfully so, Icon Factory is no joke on the Photoshop CS4; this is a great example of what a game can look like when very talented graphic designers get involved with game development – but on the DS MediaLabs side of things…..not so much.

First and foremost, this is NOT a hardcore Skee-ball simulation along the lines of Skyworks’ “Arcade Bowling” or Graveck’s innuendo-laden “10balls7cups.”  Those games concentrate on a more traditional bowling simulator with over-the-top physics, psuedo or real 3D presentations, and extremely nuanced touch and accelerometer control.  Ramp Champ takes a different approach: here the ball is not affected by tilting the phone and the finger flick mechanism of throwing the ball has a very small degree of control differentiation.  The levels do not have any real depth to them, it doesn’t feel like you are rolling your ball into the screen.  The layout feels really flat – your ball can actually fall from a top row hit and take out targets below, almost like a Pachinko game (Hey! There’s a thought, I’d love to see that done by these devs).

When you launch the app, you are greeted to an ‘old-timey’ New Jersey boardwalk theme and can immediately pick a ramp to play on.  The game ships with 4 levels, and while it may seem like variety, they are basically skin variations, just very pretty skins.  Some levels have moving targets, others do not, and that is the end of the differences.  You know how sometimes a game review will say “these pictures don’t do the game justice” or “you have to see this game in motion to appreciate it”.  This is not that game review.  These screen-shots DO the game perfect justice and if you like what you see here, picture a silver ball gliding up the screen to knock the well drawn but flatly rendered targets down, and you know what this game plays like. The animations consist of horizontal movement and targets ducking down.  Some targets spin when hit, and that’s about it.  The real bright spot is the goals that were added, this is the real meat of the game.  3 different achievements are listed per board and it is up to you to accomplish the goals in one round with the balls allotted.  It works in a progressive mode and had the game had more of these, I think the weak gameplay could have been forgiven.  The overall scale of the game area is a bit off to me.  The ball is much larger than other Skee-ball games and so are the targets, so just sliding your finger casually up the screen almost guarantees a hit.  A bulk of the targets are large and stagnant and because the swipe to bowl mechanic feels like it has limited sensitivity it is very easy to get real good at taking the high point targets down.  Case in point, “the Icon Garden” level – with this easy ball rolling mechanic you can constantly spray the 1000 point pink flower and get a fat ticket dump.  On my second play, I nailed that top deck flower almost every shot, the hardest part was timing it so I didn’t roll before the flower popped back up to get laid down again.

Besides Play, the remaining options are Redeem, Loot, and Add-ons.  The game tracks your ticket wins which can be used to ‘buy’ fake prizes.  The developer really did their research, as the crap here is almost an exact match for the crap you would find at a Dave & Busters.  Under the Loot section you can view all of the tchotchkes you’ve hoarded, and for completionists I’m sure this will keep you busy (or aiming at that pink flower) for a while.  Each item is a fully realized virtual replica of its real-world-made-in-China-lead-paint-sweatshop-produced cousin with close-up views and ‘about’ screens you can read through.  Add-ons are exactly what you think they are, additional levels and goals that cost real money.  This makes the real game a bit more than $1.99, but for those who are really digging the additional goals, this will be a fair price.  I would have rather had more goals in the main app and then bought the ability to win more prizes so the lamer of the two becomes the option, but that is just me.  While the game’s website has a FAQ for dealing with the crashing and bugginess of the game (all of which involves ‘reboot the phone’ solutions) I never had a problem on my 3GS.

While this game may proclaim to be the ‘Ramp Champ’ (although it definitely wins the swim-suit competition), I can’t give it the title as the game play is not nearly as engaging as the other titles mentioned, those have a more ‘minutes to learn, days to master’ feel, this one is more ’seconds to learn, minutes to master’.  When you have met the goals challenges, which are a great deal of fun, it then becomes all about the ticket grind.  Ultimately, this game is about pretty icons that you can toss your big balls at.

Ramp Champ looks so nice, we had to review it twice.  This game is so polarizing it just begs for more opinions, and now, Carter:

Thanks for the segue, Mike. I was excited to play Ramp Champ, myself – the Twitterverse was abuzz about this one, and it certainly had a great sense of style to it, as The Iconfactory has shown. However, the direction the gameplay went is baffling – the lack of any depth of field means that you’re just watching the ball sprite go up the screen and maybe hit your targets, and the way it acts with being able to hit top and bottom targets is odd. The game just seems like it’s kind of off – it just never felt right to me, and in a game where there’s really just one thing to do, having your core game mechanic feel so weird is not a good thing, and I just never got to a point where I felt comfortable with the way the game played.

There’s certainly a lot to do here – the game has a lot more variety than 10balls7cups or Skyworks Arcade Bowling do, with the 4 boards and the challenges, and spending your accumulated tickets on quasi-tangible prizes is a fun aspect as well. Having additional tables available as a purchase off of the bat seems like kind of a cheap way to go about things, but at least at $0.99 for 2 tables it’s not gonna break the bank, but I can’t say that I had any interest in buying new tables for this game. Also, I had problems on my iPhone 3G with the game crashing on the first version.

I’m with Mike on this one – the gameplay is questionable, the rest of it is certainly well-done. Your enjoyment of this game is going to be entirely based on your enjoyment of the game mechanic, and I’m with Mike here – it’s just not that good. If you’re a skeeball addict tired of 10balls7cups and Arcade Bowling, you may find something here, but I think otherwise you have superior options on the platform.