Battle Ram (2023)
Battle Ram is a 2023 bullet hell game, (or what Steam calls a 'spectacle fighter').You play as a little ram, perhaps the eponymous 'Battle Ram' himself, and you're tasked with fighting off waves upon waves of ever increasing numbers of robots set upon you by a set of unknown scientists, with nothing but your horns and a bit of force.
Despite its bleak undertones and its seeming indulgence in the unethical treatment of sheep, it's a rather cutesy-looking affair. The game aesthetically looks and feels almost 15 years out of time, clearly taking heavy inspiration from the greats of the golden age of Adobe/Macromedia Flash, with its thick outlines and squiggle animation and whatnot. In fact, I'd be willing to say that the aesthetics are achieved so well that you could almost mistake it for a lost Edmund McMillen game fell from the skies and into my Steam library.
Gameplay-wise, our little ram romp unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired. Since this game appears to be a solo-developed affair, I'll sing its praises first before shearing it clean.
I enjoy the game's movement quite a lot. It's a little clunky, but it's incredibly fluid and works well in the game's playing field. It's very momentum-based, and you need to watch when repeatedly headbutting robots, lest you rubberband a million miles out of bounds. Fortunately, you won't be alone in your robot-destroying endeavours, as they can damage each other! This leads to later levels where you can sit and watch a whole battalion of robots wipe themselves out in their own bullet-infused carpet bombing. All of this is complimented by some pretty basic but fitting electronic music.
Alas, for every little thing that this game does right, there's a little flaw that at best is just a little annoyance, but at worst completely takes me out of it.
The most major complaint I have with Battle Ram is that, for a game that seems to be going for a guns blazing, bullet hell gameplay loop, it's very inconsistent in the collision and hitboxes of its entities. Generally, in most major bullet hell releases, the player has a notably small hitbox, letting them weave in and out of enemy fire (Fans of the Touhou Project, you'll recognise this pretty clearly). Yet, in Battle Ram, our beloved little titular ram can't seem to make his little mind up as where his hitbox begins and ends.
When trying to graze by enemy fire, it's not uncommon to be wiped out by bullets that weren't even touching the ram. On the flip side, don't even try to attack robots from head on. It's almost like the sheep's hitbox on the Z axis is paper thin, so almost every single time you try to ram into a robot from either the direct left or right, you'll just end up going straight past them, ending up either in front of or behind them.
On a much less experience-ruining note, something that certainly destroyed the flow of gameplay for me was when you die, the music stops and you're sent back to the main menu, where you can then press play and continue where you left off. This is in contrast to completing a level, which immediately takes you to the next wave and continues the music from there, creating an excellent gameplay flow, keeping you in the zone. This unfortunately means that dying can ultimately kill your flow, and make it harder to jump back into the game. This can get especially annoying in the later levels that rely much more on pattern memorisation.
Final Verdict All in all, Battle Ram is a perfectly solid bullet hell romp. It's by no means perfect, and certainly isn't an all that ewe-nique experience, but it's certainly not a baaaad time. If you ever need to kill an hour of time with some sheepy goodness, there's certainly worse ways to do it. Baaaaaa~! 🐑✨
5 SHEEP OUT OF 10 🐑🐑🐑🐑🐑
"Meeeeeeeeh~"
Buy it on Steam!