Smash the Cat

“This game is a piece of pure fiction, actually we think all animals are great!”

It didn’t always used to be this way. There was a point in time where Steam had something resembling some measure of quality control — where 90% of the contents of their digital games store wasn’t low-effort asset flips and interchangeable RPG Maker anime boob simulators. There was a wonderful era where seeing half-baked releases on the service felt something like a novelty, rather than them comprising the vast majority. And for as much as I love so-called bad games, there’s no denying that browsing Steam in this day and age can be a bit disheartening, even for me.

Before all the three-cent trading cards and gambling for gun skins, Valve had to make their money mostly on the back of actual game sales. And before users had their choice of thousands of one-dollar games to gift to their friends as a “joke,” they may have had to spend a little more and pick from a much smaller selection. For many consumers, the bad game du jour ended up being 2009’s Bad Rats: the Rats’ Revenge — more commonly shortened as Bad Rats.

According to Steam’s own achievement tracking, only 12% of players have played the game long enough to unlock what should seem to be its most easily-attainable achievement (beating 10 of the game’s 44 levels). If we’re being generous here, it’s still very likely that less than 80% of players who own the game on Steam have ever even bothered launching it. Because Bad Ratsisn’t a game you’re meant to actually play: It is simply gifted and traded as a gag — an entry in your library that you can’t get rid of, and are meant to pass on to others like a plague.

… But what if you do play it? Could it really be all that bad? Is it fair for folk to judge this book by it’s cover? There’s a chance that Bad Rats may simply be a victim of circumstance — unfairly maligned based on its premise alone. There’s a very real possibility here that Bad Rats isn’t quite as bad as it’s made out to be. So, let’s try our best to clear our heads of preconceived notions, and give this game the benefit of the doubt it so rarely seems to receive.

Whoa First review and we are already pushing boundaries. Bad rats is a physics game where you take control of little rats in order to murder cats. whoa. EDGY! Lets start of with the graphics which are okay. for a dos game... i mean this was made in 2009! Super Mario galaxy was out for 2 years by then and that looked amazing! So graphic wise. this game is a no. what about story! (spoiler i couldn’t find a story) i’m guessing the story is just too torture cats which as long as the game is fun i’m okay with. some games don’t need story. i mean the game limbo starts off without one! and most fighting games outright don’t have a story. so you know what. ill let it slide. so game play wise? WOW! its hard to say. And a ton of people will disagree. But bad rats... is actually fun. like really fun! I can’t describe it. It’s as if it has control of my brain! the puzzles are actually confusing and fun! and once you microwave, stab, crush, explode, and torture that poor cat. IT FEELS AMAZING! Like i said a ton of people will dis-agree but its fun! its not something i would play for multiple hours though. I had this game for about a week and i only played it for about 2 hours. the graphics kinda pull you out. also the lack of a full screen option really angers me.

Over-all i give bad rats a 7/10

Pros: fun puzzles, entertaining, gifting to your friends and forcing them to suffer (not really)

Cons: bland graphics, not too engaging, no full screen option

Developer: Invent4 Genre: Puzzle Price: £3.49

COURT: Bad Rats, you stand here accused and tried for the following crimes;

1. That despite your status as a physics puzzler in the vein of 'The Incredible Machine', you provide a physics engine that is loose and unpredictable. Whilst it was Albert Einstein, the father of our modern understanding of physics who said that Insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results", you have provided the player with a physics system so unstable that sometimes the correct answer to a puzzle will only work after repeated re-activations of the 'play' button.

2. That you have the graphical appearance of a piece of high school 3DMax coursework, utilising a series of mostly identical low-polygon characters that follow slow, deliberate looking animations. That placing these awkward and unfortunate creatures onto the garishly decorated faux 'urban' levels is itself a chore due to the poor clipping rules between these creatures and the similarly low-poly environment that they fit onto. That, when these characters are affected by the game's physics, they topple like objects rather than living creatures, reacting with poor, jumpy, incomplete looking animations.

3. That you provide the player with a choice of either practically completing the game for them, or providing them with so little instruction that they cannot understand how the game works. That on multiple occasions you make no attempt to impart important details (such as how to flip or rotate a object or rat, or that some rats have a timer function) to the player outside of the help booklet. That you feel so unconfident that the player is capable of figuring out your puzzles, that your easy mode defaults to have instructions for completing each level superimposed onto the play area. That thanks to the fact that easy mode limits the player's tools to a select few whilst hard mode gives players access to the complete Bad Rats arsenal, Hard mode is rendered easier than easy mode when the instruction overlay is switched off.

4. That those instructions that are actually present in the game are often difficult or even impossible to parse thanks to a sub-par translation job. That you provide the player with tips like "The canon (sic) needs a good shot with angle and timer" or "Lung needs some timer to make a good job and all can be a question of right position". That this lack of skill in translation is rendered throughout the entire game, including the aforementioned help booklet.

5. That the game's audio consists in it's entirety of a small number of mildly annoying repeated stock music tracks that have little to no relation to the game whatsoever, a small pool of heavily used sound effects, and a short tutorial blatantly recorded in amateur conditions by one of the dev team.

And most egregiously, 6. That you think that you are funny, despite all the evidence, and act in an unbefitting manner because of this. That you believe that your cartoonishly awfully animated feline deaths are so brilliant that the player would see them as a satisfying reward for the completion of a level. That you think that dressing up cartoon rats in a series of silly hats constitutes good enough humour that no further effort on your part need be made to entertain or diversify. That you are so incredibly unfunny that you provide the player with not one, but two horrendously unfunny and racist Muslim stereotype suicide bombers (of the kind most famously seen in right-wing Danish newspapers or Jeff Dunham sketches) one of which literally gets down on it's knees and prays to Allah periodically.

Mr. Foreman, have the ladies and gentlemen of the Jury agreed upon a verdict?

FOREMAN: Yes, your Honor, we have. We unanimously find the defendant guilty of all charges. All of them. Every single one. I mean seriously how did this terrible piece of half-baked shovelware find it's way onto Steam in the fir-

COURT: Yes, yes, Mr. Foreman. We get the idea, that is enough. Bad Rats, you have been found guilty of all charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. Whilst you are neither the first nor certainly the last piece of half-baked badly-built nonsense to find it's way into my Steam collection, you are the most outrageous of your kind and therefore we feel constrained to commit you to the maximum penalty allowed for these offenses. You shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and from there be taken to a place of uninstallation. You shall be removed from the hard drive until the data is gone, and thereafter your title shall be left grey in the Steam Library list. May the lord have mercy upon your digital soul.