Robot Rampage!, a polished survival side-scroller from Origin8, is now available from the app store. Playing as a gigantic robot in a B-movie setting, it’s your job to advance as far as possible while destroying everything in your path.
Robot Rampage! Pros:
- Refined presentation and crisp graphics
- Animations are terrific and a joy to watch
- Techni-cool sound effects
- Randomly generated content brings unique experience every play
- OpenFeint integration
Robot Rampage! Cons:
- No in-game music
- Finger taps indending one thing often cause another
Robot Rampage! contains a single endless mode, indicating your overall progress by identifying street numbers in increasing numerical order. Equipped with a nasty laser atop your head, you must destroy all buildings and military personnel on each block before advancing to the next. Tanks, ground troops, and even air support will do everything they can to stop you. Take too much fire and you’ll be headed to the scrap heap. There isn’t much to the game other than that. There is no time limit, no point totals, no additional weapons, and just a single power-up to snag. Every 10 blocks, a health booster is dropped at the intersection, though it doesn’t fully refill your health meter. In fact, it only recovers a small portion, which should allow you to take 3 or 4 hits before you’re back to where you were before picking it up.
Graphically, the game has a nice presentation and crisp graphics. Animations are terrific and a joy to watch. The screen is pretty unobstructed, with a health meter in the upper left corner and an atomic meter in the upper right. Background music plays while viewing menus, but is absent during the game. There are plenty of great sound effects while playing, however. Robot Rampage! does offer support for playing music from your own library. Personal note: Metallica’s For Whom The Bell Tolls was great as a background tune. The controls are all touch-based and simple to use. Tap the side of the screen that you want the robot to move to. Hold your finger on the screen to fire his head-mounted laser, sliding your finger to wipe out large areas of real estate. There is a small circle that denotes the aiming point. Tapping either shoulder of the robot will cause him to punch in the appropriate direction. Tapping his feet will cause him to stomp. Holding your finger on the robot will initiate an atomic blast, if you have any available. Unfortunately, because of the similar inputs for different actions, the game often gets confused and the robot shoots when you want him to walk or accidentally detonates an atomic attack when you mean to shoot your laser behind the robot. Tapping the left shoulder of the right-facing robot (or the right-shoulder of the left-facing robot) can be somewhat cumbersome, too. It’s certainly not a gamebreaker, but it feels like it could be improved.
Replay value is decent, as buildings and objects are randomly generated for a unique experience each time you play. OpenFeint integration allows for global leaderboards to track your farthest rampages. An achievement system also offers a few goals to work toward, such as punching a helicopter or flattening 50 blocks. Though it can get a bit boring, it’s a lot of fun as a quick pickup timewaster in short bursts. At $1.99, it seems a touch overpriced for what it offers, but fans of these types of games shouldn’t have too many qualms about picking it up. Robot Rampage! is an enjoyable, 4-Dimple parade of destruction.
