Being easy to pick up and play but hard to master is a very good thing in the gaming world, and that describes ram brawler Ramageddon perfectly. Your only real controls are two little arrows at the edges of the screen, and that’s all you need to inflict wanton destruction on other players. Fans of Katamari Damacy should actually feel right at home.
The game boils down to ramming your enemies off cliffs, but there are three modes to keep things fresh. You can also use coins you’ve won or collected in the game to customize your ram, with options for horn style, color scheme, and different faces. There are also customizable taunts, to make sure other players know what you’re thinking as you headbutt them into oblivion.
Background: The controls are extremely simple on the surface, and play to the game’s advanced physics. Your ram has a definitive weight and handling style to it, and you’l have to master that to successfully navigate the arena. You hold one of the arrows to turn, or bot hto pick up speed and get into ramming stance. That’s really it.
Within the bounds of that deceptively simple control scheme, there is a wealth of options. You can do all sorts of cool things by picking up speed and varying how long you hold down the arrows. From drifting to burning out in circles to simply charging your opponent head-on in a straight line, there are moves to suit just about every play style here.
The three game modes all involve ramming other players off the edge of the map, but they have their variations. One mode has you ramming players in a fixed map to rack up kills for three minutes. Another is a true battle royale, with a shrinking map and no respawning. The third and final mode is a training match with bots.
Impact: The core gameplay is extremely simple, but can easily become addictive. This is a growing trend in the mobile world, and it’s great for players with time to burn. That isn’t really the biggest way that this game is probably going to make waves, though.
Ramageddon is a free game with purely cosmetic in-app purchases and barely any ads. Ads are very seldom shown, and in most cases, they’re rewarded. Watching a video before a match, for instance, will make you respawn twice as fast for the duration of the match, if it’s not in battle royale.
Offering a premium experience, or even a more casual, but highly-tuned one, with minimal or no ads and no entry fee is becoming an increasingly popular move in the mobile gaming space, and it seems to be a win-win for both developers and players.
It’s not hard to imagine that advertisers would pay more for ads that users choose to see and are forced to sit through in order to get their reward, and in many free games without ads, in-app purchases are not necessary to compete at high levels, but do grant unique benefits.
In this game, in-app purchases are almost entirely irrelevant. They’re entirely cosmetic, and simply grant you in-game coins that you would be winning on your own over time anyway. This game’s monetization strategy is bold indeed, and if it pans out, expect to see it pop up a lot more often.
