Bad Rats Review

Bad Rats

Sewer Review

            Bad Rats is a puzzle game that released on steam; it has no story, and is not a game I would usually review.  In this case though, I was gifted the game and asked to review it.  I couldn't just say no - so here it is.

            This game is about a bunch of rats trying to kill a cat as the player helps guide the rats through the puzzle.  It seems as though the rats have a mind of their own, as they will often not do what the game told me they would do.  For example, one of the rats' job is to just move forward, although this is usually a problem as the smallest speck of dust will literally obliterate the rat.

            The first thing that I noticed about this game is that it is unpolished.  Bad Rats is not very well optimized and runs very poorly.  This is usually a problem for large scale games as they have a lot to load.  In Bad Rats, however, the screen is stationary and there are only five to ten objects on screen at any given time.  The writing must have gone unedited because throughout the game I noticed grammatical and spelling errors.  These oversights did not have a huge effect on the game, but these things build up.

            The tutorial was god-awful.  First of all, the voice over was horribly done and I could barely hear what he was saying (although I was able to read it).  I was walked through the first level and then left on my own to figure things out for myself.  Sometimes this can work - but in this case - I had no idea what was going on, even while playing the tutorial!

            In a game there are rules.  No matter what happens in a game these rules are what the player can always rely on.  Take for example the Dark Souls series, in which the player learns every single rule in the game during the tutorial, and then is left to fend for themselves. Throughout the entire game the rules are never broken.  In Bad Rats this is not the case.  The tutorial tries to lay out the rules, but they don’t always work.  For example, I set up a puzzle and just kept restarting the exact same setup until eventually the physics decided to work in my favor.  The player is given several objects to use to complete the level but most of those objects are ultimately useless because of the possibility of the game's physics breaking.

            Bad Rats is clearly unfinished as it doesn’t even have a roof to keep things from getting out of the puzzle.  In one case I lost the ball that is mandatory for killing the cat because it launched straight up and never came back down.  Not only this, but the graphics are insulting.  Graphics do not make a game, but as technology advances there become expectations.  A game that is released in 2014 should not look like a game that was released in 2010.  Bad Rats’ graphics just showcase how little time was put into this game.

            At times I feel like Bad Rats is trying to be funny, like the entire game is a joke.  It does have elements that could be funny if executed properly, but they aren’t.  A lot of the time they just become downright offensive to the player. There is such a thing as dark humour, and if executed properly is actually something I really enjoy.  Bad Rats, however, has absolutely no execution and actually just made me feel tired.

I’m ashamed to admit that this is the first game that I had to give up on.  With the physics being so unreliable, I could not justify sitting and playing it for any longer.  It would be more understandable if Bad Rats had been released for free.  Bad Rats wasn’t free though, and for that reason I feel like the developer was just trying to make a quick buck by pumping out a game as quick as possible.

1/10

Hey guys, sorry for the late review, and that there is no picture this time. School is fast approaching and with that my time is limited. I'm still going to try and keep to schedule, and keep drawing images, but i can't promise anything.

They may get shorter, although with a bunch of new releases coming up, i hope to get them all!
Yes, i will be reviewing Destiny. It should come out a week or two prior to the release!

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