This Rat-obsessed Strategy Shooter Makes You Look At A Pair Of...

Playing War Rats feels like unearthing some forgotten Flash game of the Newgrounds era.

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.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

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.

Source: PC Gamer