Review: Impulse Buy 2: Rampart
A few days ago, I was looking around the PlayStation Store and I decided to purchase Go! Sports Ski and Rampart to round out the sale. I was a huge fan of the original trackball arcade game, and have been toying around with the idea of downloading the title for a heavy dose of nostalgia and online four player versus matches. It provides all of that, but the experience is just about completely ruined by shoddy controls.
The original was known for pin point precision controls, hence the trackball, which the game was built around. The game is split into two separate phases where you are building tetris-like walls around your castle and placing turrets. In order to advance to the next phase, you must completely surround your castle with a wall, to fill in the space within the walls. The second phase is where you defend your castle by blasting incoming boats and other castles with your cannons.
Each phase is timed, so there is a great sense of urgency to all of your actions. You need to be able to quickly and accurately whip your crosshair around the screen for every phase of gameplay, but the analog stick control is too slow to allow for accurate movement which destroys the overall experience. The degree of movement with the stick should directly correlate to how gentle, or strong you push the stick. The movement of the piece is too laggy, and seems built upon the digital movement of the directional pad. Completely unacceptable for a game that was built off of trackball technology. The analog movement should be fluid and feel second nature.
There is some great online support for this title, with up to four-player online matches that is really enjoyable. So I would only recommend this title to the most masochistic original Rampart players who desperately want to relive their golden days of trackball glory.
Toots
Posted to Reviews, Video Games on 11 October 2007
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