I had massive plans to complete Metaphor: ReFantazio over the vacation break. A bit unstructured time between Christmas and New 12 months’s? Good for pushing an extended sport over the end line. Until, in fact, you make the rookie mistake of occurring Steam and seeing some random sport you’ve by no means heard of earlier than with a cute identify and optimistic evaluations. That’s the way you go from (possibly) ending an 80+ hour RPG to getting sucked into Rocket Rats, the proper snack-sized sport to get you moving into 2025.
Created by solo dev Gagonfe, Rocket Rats is the form of sport the place what you count on is what you get. It’s a Vampire Survivors-like, or bullet heaven should you favor, through which you play as a rat in area on a tiny moon besieged by cheese-themed enemies. In comparison with Vampire Survivors, the playable area is small, confined to a small moon as an alternative of a bigger map. As such, every escalating wave turns into an train in confinement, a pure measurement of energy creep in opposition to the tacky stars, moons, and planets that float in from the outskirts with the intent of, I assume, killing you?
Hear, I’ll admit it doesn’t make an amazing quantity of sense, however it actually doesn’t need to. What’s introduced in Rocket Rats is a distilled, snack-sized model of what makes these sorts of video games pleasurable: making a construct so highly effective that you simply don’t even want to maneuver to win. Which is precisely what occurred once I bought a great lightning run going.
Each run consists of 30 waves of enemies, and between every wave you’re awarded a alternative of upgrades. Like different video games on this ilk, your assaults auto-fire. Right here, upgrades can add issues like poison, lightning strikes, or homing arrows to enrich your fundamental projectile assaults. It’s also possible to choose up upgrades for issues like assault reload velocity, whole ammo, and motion velocity. Each improve has its personal succession of tiers, with each tier of lightning, for instance, including issues like space of impact, the likelihood to deal vital harm, and making it in order that the auto-aim targets the closest enemies. An excellent lightning construct may additionally spec into shot velocity, because the lightning has an opportunity of hanging each time you hearth an ordinary shot. In case you’re a synergy sicko, you’ll be well-pleased.
Buildcrafting dialogue out of the way in which, should you go along with a lightning construct, what this principally boils right down to is a shit ton of lightning bolts blanketing the display by wave 20. My greatest run, which concerned a synergy with one other powerup that I received’t spoil, pushed me by way of wave 65 within the infinite mode that triggers after wave 30. It appeared like this:
Picture: Gagonfe through Polygon
In case you’ll be able to’t inform, that vaguely rat-looking half on the middle of the white-hot middle of the lightning storm is, in actual fact, my rocket rat. The enjoyment I felt seeing my little man engulfed by cheese-moons whereas an apocalyptic climate occasion occurred throughout him was astronomical. And, as a result of the sport is so condensed, it solely takes about eight or 9 minutes to get to this stage of mayhem. (Additionally, whether or not I used to be enjoying on Steam Deck or my PC, the way in which the body fee began to churn into the one digits once I reached this stage was humorous each single time.)
These are all, in fact, the bottom pleasures of this style, which leads me to confess that Rocket Rats has a brief tail by way of how lengthy you’ll be able to count on to play the sport. It took me about six hours to see nearly the whole lot the sport has to supply, content-wise, and solely about 4 to unlock each ability tree improve for the six playable rats. There’s some quantity of depth right here in dreaming up gonzo builds that play to every rat’s strengths, and there are some secret synergies between the assorted improve sorts, however past that, you’ll end up hitting a wall of engagement most likely across the similar time I did.
However what? After a 12 months as jam-packed as 2024 with gigantic releases, Rocket Rats was simply the snack I didn’t know I used to be in search of. Perhaps it isn’t a full-course meal, however nonetheless: You received’t remorse a single chunk.