Battle Ram takes up only 6.2mb of your hard drive and costs only 89p to buy and yet it provides a lot more than you’d initially expect. My initial description of Battle Ram would be bomb sumo. It’s a single-screen, wave-based action game where you’ll need to ram your enemies to death whilst avoiding their bombs and traps. It’s a simple idea that will give you a challenge.
The game is played only with a mouse and the ram chases your mouse cursor around the screen. Each wave of enemies will either have a collection of robots to ram with a mouse click and/or a mixture of rockets and lasers to avoid. Robots take several hits to be taken care of and then they turn a bright colour and explode. These explosions, like the bombs being thrown around, need to be avoided too. The other interesting thing to note is that your circular arena is the only space you can stay inside. Cross the dashed perimeter and it’s game over. Enemies will dive in and out of the arena and so you’ll need to choose your attack timing wisely.
It takes a minute or two to adjust to the controls of Battle Ram as chasing your cursor is intuitive but a bit elastic. This does cause a few deaths because you can never have 100% accuracy in your movements. That said, it is only the final third of the game that really requires heavy tactical movement. The earlier levels introduce patterns of robots and whilst you’ll still die, you won’t get stuck on a level for too long. Although Battle Ram is tricky, I enjoyed the difficulty progression. Early levels introduce one type of threat and then the game starts to combine multiple combinations of threats before making those enemies require more hits to be disposed of. It also meant that instead of ramming everything in sight, I’d sometimes take a backseat as enemy fire can hurt other enemies and so the path can be cleared for you. It’s also worth noting that a huge ram will also bring a huge return bounce back and this accounted for probably a third of all my deaths so I found smaller mini rams were better.
At 89p, Battle Ram is a steal. Whilst the sound effects are loud and distorted (mute them) and the lack of replayability does hurt its longevity, I still had a good time with it. This is exactly how bite-sized gaming should be. Would have loved a survival or score-based variation though. Bring me a leaderboard!
Review copy provided by Developer. Battle Ram is out on Steam.
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