Rampage Knights | A Review
Hello everyone, I am the riotous and rampaging G.E.M.Simov, a fellow so miffed and violent that I am as wanted by the ICC as Bibi Netinyahu, and I am here to tell you about the game “Rampage Knights”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Rampage Knights is a 2.5D game. That means it is terrible by default, but let us not be that cruel to it. A game being 2.5D means that it tries to present itself as a 3D game - that means allowing movement along 3 axis, rather than the 2 that a 2D game would allow - but without actually having 3D elements, which always leads to bad stuff.
A 2.5D game, such as Rampage Knights, features a zone or area, within which zone the action takes place. That zone has vertical and horizontal dimensions, meaning that it allows for movement to the west, east, south and north. In addition, it also has a 3rd dimension, allowing for movement upwards and downwards.
Thus, Rampage Knights features movement in the four cardinal directions via the Arrow Keys (left, right, down, up) as well as jumping via the Spacebar. That is problematic, because unlike the areas in Rampage Knights, which have volume, the characters in Rampage Knights do not have volume. They are 2D sprites - they have height and width, but do not have thickness. They are cardboard cut-outs that do not occupy three dimensional space, they occupy two dimensional space.
What does that entail? It entails incredible problems, due to the fact that a game such as Rampage Knights requires precision. It is a combat focused experience, in which the Player controls a character, along with a few other Players, and has to run around the areas of the game, killing enemies. However, since neither the Player’s Character (PC) nor the enemies have 3 dimensions, but the space they occupy works as though they do, there are always visual discrepancies that affect Gameplay in an exceptionally negative manner.
Example - the PC walks up to an enemy and swings their weapon. However, due to the fact that the enemy is 3 units of distance downwards from the PC, the weapon (even though it bears an animation indicating a sweeping, cleaving attack that would strike more than just the target directly in front of the PC) does not connect with the enemy, thus dealing no damage. However, enemies have more breathing room, allowing for strikes that connect even though the equivalent, when performed by the PC, would not connect.
Every single one of these games has that issue and it renders them nearly unplayable. A game needs to have an obtuse amount of good in it for it to actually somehow outweigh the tremendously awful state that it puts itself in by going for this style.
So, what does Rampage Knights have? A lot of stuff that relies on just combat, which is rendered terrible by default by the system in place - that being the 2.5D game field and 2D characters on it - and a silly lockpicking mini-game.
The Player is tasked with entering a dungeon and getting to its end, where a boss enemy awaits. Every time that the PC dies twice (because of a life system allowing for more than one death per run in some situations) the ‘run’ is concluded, all the items and gold collected by the PC disappear and the PC is deposited back at the start of the dungeon. Thus - Rampage Knights is a roguelike.
Aside from being able to run around, the PC can also fight - that happens by pressing the D key, allowing for a swing. Pressing the D key repeatedly yields great results sometimes, but there are other options. Jumping and pressing the D key while in the air produces an attack that does a bit more damage than normal and breaks enemy shields (something just pressing D does not accomplish).
Additionally, the Player can make use of ‘combos’, which do not work well at all, but are in the game. By attacking with the D key and holding down either the Up Arrow or the Down Arrow, the PC will perform a special type of attack - if, of course, using the movement keys does not make them walk out of the infinitesimally small line that they need to be on (along with the desired enemy) so that their attacks can hit enemies. These are clunky, do not work more than half of the time and are ineffectual against most enemies that would require using special means of dealing with them, thus rendering the utterly pointless in most cases.
There are other peculiarities - the Player can hold down the D key, which, by itself, produces a stronger attack. If a directional button is pressed (either the Right or Left Arrow) the PC will perform a dashing attack that can break shields and does a decent amount of damage. This is the one reliable ‘combo’ move that the Player can perform, as the others are clunky at best.
The PC will also perform a kick whenever an enemy is very close to them (and, of course, whenever said enemy can be kicked, but only sometimes, and then some enemies can be kicked but are immune to being made prone) which sends the enemy flying rearwards, rendering them prone for a bit. The PC can, when right on top of a prone enemy, stomp on them for double the base weapon’s damage (which means this does barely any damage later in the game or on higher difficulties) by pressing the D key. Notice that prone enemies can only be damaged by already in effect damage over time effects, explosions OR stomping attacks, because the game takes into account height (but only for the PC’s attacks).
That means that the Player can attack an enemy and miss - because said enemy is not close enough for the PC to perform a stomp, but is also prone and is thus immune to normal attacks. An issue with prone enemies arises from the fact that, visually, the weapon’s sprite overlaps with the enemy’s sprite whenever one makes an attack, but the attack does not land.
Additionally, this compounds on itself when enemies can go into funky states that require a stomp to kill the enemy, and they are inexplicably immune to almost all other forms of attack, but are also able to attack, thus creating situations that leave the Player pressing the D key, trying to get a stomp, but because their character is not exactly positioned they do not get a stomp and thus take damage.
This keeps happening with every other aspect of the game. The Player has another tool up their sleeve - the dodge roll, which they perform by pressing the Shift key while moving in a certain direction, which will have the PC dodge roll, rendering them immune to attacks while rolling (which works in a wonky manner, because the PC stops moving for a bit after concluding a roll, opening itself up for attacks). Unfortunately, this one is not fleshed out and sucks to use, because it can be performed with all 4 arrow keys, but is exceptionally inefficient when performed with the Up or Down arrows, as the PC always goes left or right, but when using these two arrow keys it covers barely any distance and ultimately neither repositions the PC nor really evades attacks all that successfully.
Another set of things that the Player has in their arsenal are items they can pick up. The buttons 1, 2, 3 and 4 are used to select a given item, with each button denoting a particular type of item (those being spells, thrown items, scrolls and potions). When an item type is selected with one of those four number keys, the Player can then press the S key to use said item. Spells (those in type [and slot] 1) do not get consumed when used, but they drain the PC’s mana to do something.
These spells can be projectiles, buffs, attacks - useful things. Unfortunately, the projectile part of them is lacking in a certain regard, and I will explain in more detail once I also get to type [slot] 2 - thrown items. These are exactly what they sound like, with the exception of bombs which get lobbed, stick to the ground and then explode, dealing massive damage to everything in the vicinity (including the PC).
Thrown items and projectile based spells suck, because they work exactly like ordinary weapon attacks - meaning that the PC needs to be perfectly aligned with the enemy they want to damage, otherwise the thrown item is wasted and the spell goes wide. This is made that much sweeter by the fact that enemies, whenever using the equivalent spells or thrown items, have their projectiles aim at the PC, making them infinitely more useful than those the PC has access to.
This is, again, the fact that the game is 2.5D and simulates having 3D but at the expense of an otherwise good combat system that would work wonders if it was not bogged down by the horrible attempt at having one’s cake and eating it WHILE keeping it. You know, dear reader, having a cake and eating it too.
The other two options - scrolls and potions - are used and have an effect, potions either beneficial or detrimental, scrolls - mainly beneficial. Using any of the number key items requires that the PC stand still and use them, some longer (such as scrolls and potions) others for a shorter amount of time (such as thrown items). Spells have a number of exceptions, meaning they are a bit better designed than the rest of those.
Lastly, the tools that the Player has at their disposal include items. These provide passive bonuses to their Character, such as increased attack, increased health, more mana, more money, more survivability - that sort of thing. Some items are neat - those that just get picked up. Others are not so neat - such as those that get picked up but replace another item, such as boots and belts, which all have greatly beneficial effects but are mutually exclusive. These are just exceptionally bothersome, because… Well, it’s not nice to be forced to pick which bonus to keep when one knows they could have gotten another bonus that’s not a ‘you lose that benefit to get that benefit’.
Another strange option that is interesting on paper, but in action is terrible, are armors. The Player can find armors, and they provide a number of blocks - which negate damage altogether. When the PC takes damage as many times as a piece of armor provides blocks, the piece of armor breaks and it’s gone. Some armors actually persist via block rejuvenation, but others do not. And they are very neat for the one room the Player manages to have them, not only making them harder to kill but also giving them some other bonus… Before breaking and disappearing.
Roguelikes already screw the Player over in enough ways. Some items literally halve the PC’s health or have the potential to turn the PC’s health into a value so low that any attack kills them immediately. There are numerous mechanics revolving around doing damage to the PC. Thus, among the few rewards and boosts that the Player gets (which are almost necessary for success, though there is some skill expression in this game allowing for runs that depend on very few items, if any at all), having ones that are so short lived just feels… Bad.
And the means through which the Player gets these items - oh, chests. Chests in this game are ALL locked. All, except boss chests, which appear after the Player beats a boss (all of whom are rather challenging, and not just because of the default badness of a 2.5D game) and are not locked. Locked chests must first be picked, which brings about the lockpicking mini-game.
The Player is brought to a User Interface (UI) Element that features a lockpick and things under that lockpick. The lockpick moves to the end of the UI Element and back to the start, repeatedly. It moves rather quickly, but not quickly enough to be too fast. The goal is to press either A or Spacebar whenever the lockpick’s point is over a golden thing, which will make the golden thing sink down, and to do so for all the golden things, twice. There are issues, however - for starters, the mini–game needs a failstate, so a third of the things are not golden, but, rather, pale gray. Hitting one of those will boot the Player out of the mini-game.
Additionally, there are dark gray things, which, when hit by the lockpick, deal 10 damage (on normal difficulty, going up considerably as the difficulty increases) to the PC. 10 Damage is, for some characters, more than a fourth of their entire health bar. This damage can kill the PC and end a run. Now, this by itself would not be an issue - after all, risk and reward, friction, that sort of thing - but it is coupled with the mechanic just being broken. The lockpick’s tip always goes down a bit further forward than wherever it is shown to be at the time of the Player pressing the button. It does not correspond to the position it occupies and it should have occupied. It’s just messed up.
On top of that, the fact that the Player can’t break these chests with their funky weapons, but can break stone statues and other wooden objects, is quite annoying… AND THEN there’s a debuff that gets applied to the PC if they fail too many times in a row, which makes it EVEN more difficult to get things right because the UI element shakes. That’s… That’s not good. When something is hard and the Player is having difficulties with it, the better choice is to make that thing slightly easier, or maybe not alter its difficulty at all, rather than making it hard and adding a snarky bit of text.
That’s the second half of Rampage Knights’ issues. The game is annoying. The Player is dropped into the starter zone, they pick a class out of those unlocked, then waltz on in and start making their way through. Enemies spawn, and some can be avoided, others cannot. Killing enemies is never worth it, unless they can not be passed by, because it is a very rare occurrence that the Player kills an enemy and something worthwhile pops up. The combat itself is bothersome on account of the 2.5D misery, but also because enemies take between 5 and 10 hits to kill (if the PC is not rocking an exceptionally good combination of items), and when there are upwards of 6 or 7 enemies in an area at a time, the whole thing becomes a slog.
Then there are the issues of items not working right or being a mess - such as spells not benefiting from spell damage increases or weapons that stun not stunning. There are also other unpleasantries, such as there being many pits that kill the PC instantly, there being traps all over, there being countless effects that appear as UI elements but there is never any explanation of how these mechanics function, nor is there a way to access information about them while in the game (which is more of a Presentation issue but it affects the Gameplay).
The previously mentioned life system is very unimpressive, on account of the fact that it relies on the difficulty the Player picks at the start of a run, with the casual difficulty having infinite lives, the normal one sporting 1 extra death per dying, while the other two are relegated to being harder because the enemies are even healthier and deal even more damage (which is lazy difficulty), with the most difficult one just being a terrible experience to go through overall, stacking debuffs on the PC just for the sake of it.
Now, bosses - bosses suck, especially the warlock boss, because fighting him features a phase that negates everything the Player has done up until this point (no spells or usable items, half the items the Player has collected do not mean anything in it) AND it is also an entirely different genre, which features unreachable item drops (that should be reachable but break and are not reachable). It’s just a mess.
There are more things that are such, though. Navigating the game’s options and altering certain things is unreasonably obtuse - as an example, when the Player attempts to alter the audio volume, they are only allowed to click a button, by clicking which they add 5% to the volume of either the game’s sound or music. If they want to reduce the volume, they need to click until the volume reaches 100%, after which it goes down to 0%, and then they need to click more until they get to a satisfying level. That is exceptionally bothersome, especially considering the Presentation issue of the game being TOO LOUD. Like, it is dreadfully loud.
Does Rampage Knights have anything redeeming to its Gameplay? Well… There are systems in place. Poisons, diseases, curses - which affect the PC in certain ways and can be dealt with in other ways via other items. There are funky little events that occur whenever, but they are far too minor and far too uninteresting in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, the game has one truly redeeming quality, and that is the potential to play with friends. Multiplayer makes every game a lot better, even if said game is not good. Unfortunately, due to the fact that Rampage Knights is so thoroughly lacking… Even its Multiplayer does not save it.
1/3
Presentation
Rampage Knights is one of those games, on account of being a 2.5D game. It has many issues with its Gameplay caused by that approach to Presentation, but in regards to its Presentation itself it does not suffer from being 2.5D. It does, however, employ a particular cartoon style that makes every character look purposefully unseemly. There is just something about it, perhaps a caricaturesque approach with reasoning behind it that evades me, but the game is a mixture of ugly and decently reasonable to look at.
Unfortunately, this brings issues, though, again, they are more related to the Gameplay rather than the Presentation… Though they are present because of the Presentation. As an example, the characters all have big heads - far bigger than their bodies indicate they should be able to handle. These big heads are part of the bodies and can be hit… But then skeletons, when they do their funky ‘lose your legs’ move, can not have their heads hit, even if the Player’s weapon, while being swung, collides with their heads. The game makes it obvious that the weapon hits the enemy, it goes through the model/spirte/character, but the enemy takes no damage and does not get hit at all.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that enemies do not have any indication that they will do something. There is no consistent behavior either, and while there is hit-feedback, in the form of both sound and a visual of the enemy being pushed back, some enemies just ignore that and attack while being pushed back or staggered, which is counter-intuitive. These things mount continuously.
As an example, the environments and items spread around said environments look pretty good, but the characters are very unpleasant to behold. There’s a simplicity in the way things are drawn and depicted, but then there are a few slight issues here and there. Naturally, most of those stem from Gameplay related things - because this game loves making the Player have difficult controlling their Character, there are many things that make the screen shake nauseatingly or even zoom in and out with a bothersome irregularity that makes looking at the thing almost painful.
There’s also a certain amount of darkness that the game employs, which is more obtrusive than actually entertaining in regards to Gameplay, because enemies are always visible on account of there being health bars over their models. Lastly, some items can be difficult to see from behind bits of scenery - mainly tall grass.
Unfortunately, either the developers are near-illiterate or English is a second language for them, and they did not employ a proper translator to deal with translation, due to which fact the game suffers from humongous amounts of bad grammar. Words that are meant to refer to plurals instead refer to singulars, some words are just used wrongly, other words are wrongly spelled (poisenous), and, overall, it is dreadful. The fact that the opening cutscene features more than 3 major errors is indicative enough of something lacking and it really introduces great trouble in regards to getting into the game’s story, at least.
The tutorial this game presents is out of the way and the Player can actively miss it, even if they want to make use of it. When (and if) they do find it, it does a good enough job at introducing the game’s most basic mechanics to the Player. Unfortunately, that also introduces a number of issues with the game’s Presentation - as an example, the items the PC has equipped by default cannot be examined in any way whatsoever, and the statistical bonuses provided by them are similarly unknowable.
Additionally, the game does not deem it proper to introduce anything but the most basic movement and combat mechanics possible. Anything else, when encountered, is thoroughly inexplicable. Items that get collected are not explained to the Player, thus making it necessary for the Player to consult the game’s control scheme
As mentioned, the game is obscenely loud, and the majority of sound effects (especially in cutscenes) are played in such a pseudo-vacuum that they stick out like sore thumbs. They are not very good, either (though they are not bad), but the setting in which they are presented and the conditions of their presentation are not conducive to good audio. There are some ambient effects that are quite decent, and outside of cutscenes the sound effects do their job well enough. The music is nothing special either.
2/3
Story
Rampage Knights has no story. A pair of random goons have just done an adventure and have some treasure. They go to sleep, a warlock comes over, steals their treasures and then steals them as well. Then the goons go through the warlock’s dungeon and kill him, taking all of his treasure. That’s all. It’s not even interesting as a set-up, because the warlock is so immensely powerful that he can destroy the goons’ weapons when they first try to fight him, but then they somehow beat him without him doing that. It’s just a silly little premise that does not wind up endearing anyone to the game, on account of just how terribly delivered it is. Grammar, spelling… Language.
0/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the Legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? Obviously, the answer is a resounding NO, even though I could tell that the folks making the game had some fun with it. There are little things here and there, like the twig between the giant wooden fellow’s legs that’s clearly his little wiener, or the references to all sorts of things from Alien to Undertale, or even the way some items function.
There was a lot of heart put into this, but it simply wound up not being what it was hoped to be. Alternatively, it turned out exactly as desired - schlocky, campy, so bad it’s good - but, unfortunately, the sheer fact that it is a 2.5D game makes it nearly unplayable, and it does not do enough to redeem itself.
0/1
Conclusion
3/10. Rampage Knights is an effort that comes out short. It might be fun with friends, though only worth it when purchased on sale. Fans of 2.5D sidescrollers might wind up enjoying it, but it is such an unwieldy blend of genres that even then I would advise caution.
On the wall of shame I hang this game, as a lesson for all desirous of 2.5D - one needs exquisite performance if they want to succeed in that field.