Disappointing New Game From IconFactory: Ramp Champ

When I first heard about Ramp Champ, I was excited about the idea of IconFactory doing a “Skee-Ball” type game. The ones that are currently out there are OK, but they have their problems. When I heard that it had been released in the AppStore for $1.99, I immediately purchased it.

Update: Just minutes after I posted this review, I found this article from one of the developers of Ramp Champ: Designing Ramp Champ. Check it out, it’s a great read!

The graphics I see are top notch, I expected nothing less from IconFactory. They have some great applications, both Mac and iPhone and some outstanding Icons and Desktop wallpaper.

The User Interface for the game is also very smooth and well designed. The game comes with 4 “ramps” to play in. You can also purchase two other ramps for the game in the In-App store, $0.99 each.

Unfortunately, this is where the happiness ends. Unlike the other Skee-Ball games I have played, this one doesn’t appear to use 3D or any kind of physics engine. It’s more like Paper Toss, in that you flick your finger on the ramp, and depending on how fast your finger moves across the surface, the ball animates up the screen to a variety of targets. The targets are more like carnival rifle range games than Skee-Ball, but that’s nothing to be unhappy about.

Nope, the part that makes “me” unhappy, is the actual “flick” part. In most Skee-Ball games, the apparent range is, lets say, 1 to 100. In Ramp Champ, its’ more like 1 to 10. It’s very difficult to hit the first tier of targets (the 4 clowns in the first screen shot here). It’s much easier to hit the third tier targets (bottles and circle targets).

I actually got quite frustrated the first couple of attempts I played. I put it down and walked away for a while. I decided to give it another chance and found I was able to achieve the first “Goal” in Clown Town. To knock down all the clowns. So it is possible to get the targets, but you might get pretty frustrated at first.

There are 3 goals to achieve in each ramp. Knock down a first set of targets. Knock down a second set of targets that appear after the first are knocked down, and achieve more than a set number of points.

Then, the big problem hit me. The game started getting very sluggish then finally crashed. I had heard others complaining about this, but figured it was just a memory issue. It usually is with most people. The old “turn off your device, then back on” is the usual cure. However, with those symptoms hit me, I immediately jumped over to iStat to check the memory situation out. Not only was there enough memory, I had have the iPhones 256MB’s of memory free. That’s unheard of. There is usually something taking up a good chunk of the devices memory.

The only thing that would leave the iphone is a state of low memory usage, is if the application prior to running iStat had used up a bunch of memory, then freed it. This way, when you look at the current state of the devices memory, it looks like there is a bunch of free memory. The devices Springboard app (the devices “desktop” for lack of a better description) was also very sluggish. This is because the OS’s memory management system is taking the memory that it had Paged Out earlier for Ramp Champ and was Paging it back in.

My guess here is that either Ramp Champ has a memory leak problem that fills up all the available memory to the point that the game appears to crash, but in reality simply shuts down because of a low-memory condition (part of the iPhone SDK), or it uses so much memory that it’s on the cusp of the low-memory condition, and something pushes it over the edge.

Either way, it’s a 1.0 game that when IconFactory and DS Media Labs comes out with it’s first update, I’m sure the game will be much better and probably won’t crash anymore.

Over all, I would suggest waiting till the first update on this one. It’s worth playing, it’s not really a Skee-Ball simulator, but its still a fun carnival type game that will keep you entertained for a short while once the kinks are ironed out.