There was a particular flavour to the Flash games era of the 2000s. Sites like Newgrounds overflowed with weird and wonderful experiments, hacking together new styles and genres. Some found ways to survive and live on in modern gaming, but most simply withered away, too strongly tied to that time and place.
War Rats could not feel more like a lost child of that era.
So what genre is it? Uhh… I guess it’s a 2D side-scrolling shooter RTS? Battling against an invading army of rat cyborgs, you have to blast away at the enemy while also managing the war effort by ordering in different troop types and constructing a small selection of buildings at fixed points.
The result is a sort of tug-of-war, with allied and enemy forces automatically marching along towards each other while you scamper around trying to find ways to push the war front further and further right. Get one of your lowly engineers into the enemy base all the way at the end, and you’ve struck another blow for rat-kind.
The charm of War Rats is in how… well, ratty it is. It commits to the bit to an admirable degree, squeezing all sorts of absurdity into its oddly realistic art style and never passing up the opportunity to crowbar ‘rat’ into a word or phrase.
There’s not a hint of subtlety to any of it—from weapons like the “ratzooka” and “double-barreled ratgun”, to battles at “Rattingrad” and “Mount Killaratjaro”, to a roster of units that includes “Rocket Rats” and “Tophat Toprats”.
But the things that make me really laugh are the little details. Soldiers slain in battle explode into surprisingly gruesome gore, and then get enthusiastically cleaned up by little swarms of rats. Before every mission, you get a montage of your character gearing up, which inexplicably ends with a close-up of their big, furry nutsack. The section in your base where you choose skins for your character is literally a room full of loose skin. A bit juvenile, perhaps, but I like that there’s always some weird new gag happening somewhere on screen.
Ok, so it’s funny, but is it actually fun? Well… it’s not the simplest question to answer. Like those Flash games of old, it’s very unapologetically its own thing, full of idiosyncratic choices you’d never see in a big budget modern game.
Take friendly fire, for example. If you hit one of your own men or turrets with a stray bullet, you’ll hurt them—ok, that makes sense. Except the game plays out entirely on a 2D plane, making it impossible to fire past your own men at all. Getting involved in a battle means either finding a rare elevated position, or just throwing yourself forward past your own battle lines so you can blast away freely before inevitably retreating back from the hail of enemy fire.
On the one hand, that forces you to be an action hero, always diving into the thick of things to take out key targets rather than hanging back safely behind your troops. Cool! On the other, I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many times I’ve accidentally blown up one of my own turrets trying to take down enemy UFOs, or caught half my advancing force in a grenade blast. That can be frustrating.
The overall strategy of battles isn’t the easiest to wrap your head around, either. New troop types unlock over time, but with no explanation of their strengths and weaknesses, and all the buildings are just dumped on you from the start in an intimidating list. Tying it all together into a coherent strategy can be tough.
How many slots should I dedicate to resource production? How important are shrines, which buff friendly troops who walk past them? What engagements are the creepy psychic Rat Flayers suited for versus the fast but squishy Rat Hounds? Where should I place my teleporters, and why aren’t my troops using them?
There’s some fun to be had in the trial-and-error learning, but the tug-of-war nature of the missions lends itself to stalemates, and when you’re struggling to work out how to close out a battle, it can just end up dragging on and on without clear progress.
But… hey, maybe that’s just war? It certainly does feel like a true meatgrinder when you’re just throwing more and more rats futilely into the breach, and there’s a tangible relief when you finally do break through. So maybe those periods of frustration and stalemate are just War Rats doing its thing, revelling in the horror of rat-on-rat combat?
Certainly, far be it from me to tell developer Wootusart Industries to do things any differently. Like those old Flash games, there’s a real vision here, even if it’s weird, rough around the edges, and worryingly rodent-obsessed, and you’ve got to respect that. Rats off to them.
If you’re as Newgrounds nostalgic as me, you can pick up War Rats on Steam at 30% off right now, running until December 4.
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