Review: Ambush

Overview Let's face it: Ambush is a horribly shameless marketing attempt for a FOX TV show. It’s masked as an iPhone “game” based on the Terminator TV series, but the app does next to nothing and is almost offensive in its ad-centric purpose. This is a laughable product and a waste of time, even for Terminator fans.

Gameplay The game works like this: press the “send location” button. That’s it. Oh yeah, almost forgot. If someone else has set a “trap” in the next location that you report to the online system, you’ll be terminated (I know, I expected more too). But before you can “play” Ambush, users need a username and password. Unfortunately there is no way to create an account directly through the app and the game’s website is an Adobe Flash hellhole, meaning that it’s inaccessible through the iPhone’s Safari browser. Awesome.

After logging on, creating an account and choosing to be either a human or a terminator, you can begin the process of hitting the “send location” button on your iPhone (to be fair, there is also a “use counter trap” button). Why this app doesn’t just track your location, instead of requiring you to repeatedly send it, is beyond me. There is no way to see a representation of where you are, where you’re setting traps, where others are or really anything at all. The entire “game” occurs on one static screen. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a way of setting traps from your iPhone, even when using a terminator username (as opposed to a human one). Oh, and did I mention that there’s an ad for the TV show?

Review Let’s face it, this is quite possibly the most pathetic waste of space for the iPhone to date, especially since it’s being published under the FOX Broadcasting company name. But despite its apparent existence as a shameless, uninspired marketing effort, I did my best to get what I could out of the “game”. Since I couldn’t get much entertainment out of repeatedly pressing the “send location” button from the comfort of my home, hoping that someone would somehow walk past my house to plant a trap, I decided to go out on the town and see if I could find any action. Unfortunately there was no way to see where said “action” might be, so I drove to the gas station—repeatedly sending my location along the way—assuming that it might be a prime trapping hotspot. Alas, there was nothing to be found but the same old “send location” screen. So I set out for the pharmacy, maybe terminators like to go there, right? No, they don’t. Terminators don’t need prescriptions or Satin floss by Oral B (unfortunately it was sold out). Then it hit me, if there was a place that iPhone terminators might congregate, it had to be the Apple store. I went. I sent. I failed. But maybe the game was too new and no one had really started to play it yet. Rather than putting my rep on the line to ask an iPhone user to download the app and create an account so they could “trap” me, I stepped up to a vacant iMac and created a new username… to use for playing against myself. Of course, on the computer, you can see a pretty abstract map with locations of humans and terminators (I’m assuming that they don’t want to use a real map so that you’re not actually running down terminators in the streets of LA) and I was able to see that my prior excursion had entirely taken place within only a short stretch of pixels on this map. After making a terminator account this time, I placed a trap for myself, switched accounts and sent a location from my iPhone, then found myself terminated. It wasn’t very exciting, but at least the screen changed. Summary This is a waste of time, money and space. The hired FOX developers should be ashamed and FOX should spend more than $20 on creating its next horrible iPhone marketing tool (it’s not actually clear how much was spent on making this app, but it is clear that it sucks).

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