Bad Rats: The Rats' Revenge (2009)
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.
How long did I play? - 1.8 hours
Did I finish it? - No
Would I finish it? - No
