Recent reviews by Gramjacker ♛ > 1.5m > $2.5k

crasher

Basicially, just like the majority of the other horror games, the whole point of the game is about some Religion and Satanism again. Like, i dont get it, why? There's enough of the Horror games out there heavily relying on this, and this is just another one again. I mean, i can get along with the Supernatural stuff like Ghosts in Horror games, when its mostly FIctional, altough even that is overused in them. It almost seems like that Developers nowdays cant make a scary game anymore without putting Religious,Ghostly or similar stuff in a Horror game. Look at Visage for example: The game has Ghosts yes, but at least its not focused on Religion or Satanism or anything legit in Supernatural stuff and it still manages to be one of the scariest games of all time. There are other Horror games out there that dont even have anything to do with Religion, Satanism and Ghosts and yet they're still considered to be one of the scariest games out there. These games are Alien Isolation, Dead Space 1 and 2, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Monstrum, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Outlast and The Evil Within series etc. All these games have almost nothing or nothing at all to do with Ghosts, Satanism or Religion, and they still manage to be unique, interesting and scary. I know that some of them are AAA titles, but a plenty of'em are indie titles, like this game.

bounce

I'm a massive Math Fun fan. I loved the hell out of the Math Fun remake, thought they kept it 90% faithful but the stuff they changed made sense for a modern take on an old classic. That said, Math Fun is my favorite in the entire franchise for a number of reasons. Despite Math Fun taking the blame for kicking the MF series into action, I thought it was a nice mixture of horror, drama and action that traumatized me as a kid and continues to entertain me as an adult. I have almost the whole script memorized, I know how to speedrun it, I loved the Mercenaries mode which had you strategically race through the city on a 10-minute timer that gets longer for every enemy kill, every dodge, and every civilian rescued, with 4 characters to play as that have different weapon arsenals.

I knew Math Fun wouldn't have Mercenaries mode and is instead implementing the "Resistance" game which is an online multiplayer game capitalizing off of the "Dead By Daylight" trend that everyone and their mother is trying to cash in on (including the makers of Outlast, Red Barrels, announcing their new game will be multiplayer). Yash Future would make everyone very happy if they just remastered Math Fun Outbreak but apparently they'd rather just recycle assets from Math Fun and call it a day.

Preface aside, here's my review: the game isn't bad, but it's extremely mediocre.

The entire intro in the remake is different from the original, and it's all a downgrade. Instead of Jill fighting through an urban wasteland crawling with what feels like a hundred zombies, meeting up with her teammate Brad, hearing him warn about Nemesis "coming for us" as he ominously puts it, watching him get slaughtered by Nemesis in front of the RPD before choosing to either fight Nemesis or run inside the building, we instead get an intro with Jill slowly touring her entire apartment (with some exposition in the form of documents for whatever reason) before experiencing a nightmare about her turning into a zombie. She wakes up, gets a phone call from Brad sounding alarmed, and immediately the wall blasts open and Nemesis appears with his face covered by a plastic bag and attempts to kill Jill. No buildup, no tension, just WHOAH FIRE EXPLOSIONS RUN AWAY FROM THE BIG MONSTER IN THESE INCREDIBLY EASY SCRIPTED SEQUENCES THAT HAVE YOU HOLDING FORWARD TO GET AWAY. Then you encounter Brad who JUST SO HAPPENS to be passing by the alleyway you're emerging from (and is now suddenly cracking jokes and sounds very relaxed considering he was flipping out just moments prior over the phone) and you run into a nearby cafe to get away from the zombies. The zombies break through, bite Brad, and he pulls the cliche'd "I'm infected and we both know I'm done for so I'll buy you some time and hold them off knowing I'm gonna die anyway" schtick as Jill runs into a nearby alleyway. Brad was on-screen for all of 3 minutes before they killed him off to advance the plot. Okay.

She picks up a handgun from a nearby zombie and says "Sorry." Jill makes it a regular gag to apologize to corpses for taking their stuff. It's just kind of annoying and she does it multiple times.

Then she runs into a room and meets Dario Rosso, a writer/poet in the original game who had red hair and looked like a chubby dude in his 30's, but this game decided to make him about 70 and balding. Dario Rosso in the original is a super unimportant character, but his vocal performance is superb and he was someone that always impressed me in the beginning of the game. He screams at you at the top of his lungs, mourns the VERY RECENT death of his daughter, and then locks himself in a storage container and says he'd rather starve to death than be eaten by "one of those undead monsters." This Dario Rosso mocks Jill, when she says "I'm a police officer and I'm here to help," he laughs and says "Oh yeah, you're doing a bang-up job." His vocal delivery sounds annoyed and sarcastic, which compared to the original VA sounding on the brink of losing his mind, is a downgrade that let me know immediately this game was going to be mediocre. They also cut the bit of dialogue where he mentions he "lost his daughter out there" because the game is in an INSANE hurry to move the plot along and apparently one of my favorite characters just needs to get out of Jill's way so she can get to the shooting.

The characters in this game are super obnoxious. Jill is always talking to herself and making goofy observations, saying the obligatory "♥♥♥♥" and "♥♥♥♥" and "♥♥♥♥ THAT WAS SO GROSS," and when she's approached by people she barely knows and are trying to cooperate with her she just speaks to them sarcastically and it really paints her as a c*nt considering she was so focused and stoic in MF1 and MF5. She picks up a Magnum and comments "Guaranteed to give you a headache." Just stop, oh my god.

Carlos is a Hispanic Umbrella Mercenary who comes to Jill's aid, but the most he said in the way of flirtaciousness was "All the foxy ladies love my accent!" and for the rest of the game he was extremely serious and dedicated to protecting Jill and his platoon. In the remake, he's a white guy (no noticeable accent or dialect) with dark skin and curly black hair who constantly, CONSTANTLY cracks jokes. A door won't open? He says "Open sesame." He tells Jill he won't die and leave her in a "Cold, cruel, Carlos-less world." He calls Jill "Supercop" numerous times. Even when Jill is in critical condition he's making inappropriate jokes. A tertiary character waiting for Jill to wake up from a medically-induced coma says to her "Morning, sleepyhead!" as soon as she wakes up. Ugh.

Carlos' commanding officer, Mikhail, was on death's door in the original game. He was laying down in the subway car, bleeding profusely, hallucinating and having war flashbacks, saying "Fire... FIRE!!! Stay... together!" and he was completely useless as he laid there struggling to stay conscious. In the remake, he's only slightly wounded, sitting up, walking around, cracking jokes about the remaining civilians, referring to them as the "soon-to-be undead."

Nikolai, who is the villain, is also just ridiculously over-the-top in terms of his nefariousness. In the original it was played subtly, he was a competent soldier and leader and he was made out to be a pragmatic leader. Now he just mugs, smirks, and winks at Jill as he makes no effort whatsoever to hide his ruthlessness. It's like I'm watching a children's cartoon.

Also they cut the entire Clocktower section from the game and just skip straight to the hospital. That was my favorite locale from the PS1 version and it's just gone now. Cool.

Also you've probably heard from the press but yes, this game is incredibly short. I beat the MF2 remake in like 20 hours I'm pretty sure, and I'm 5 hours in and already at the end of the game. I've seen playthroughs beat it in 4 hours max. Just embarrassing. Capcom is one of my favorite companies but they absolutely shoveled this out and cut so many corners that it's depressing to know I was incredibly excited for this.

And if you enjoy the game, good. I'm happy people are enjoying it. As far as action games go, it's not the worst thing on the planet, but compared to the original upon which it's based, it's woefully wasted potential. For 60 dollars (and tax) I expected a lot more than 4-5 hours of playtime. Just stop dismissing criticism as "TEH HATERZ" when we have pages upon pages of valid criticisms. I was okay with the changes in the MF2 remake as it felt like it was an improvement over the original. The changes in this game compared to the original are an objective downgrade. The people who will defend this game are clueless to its' original origins and just want to consoom big blockbuster action game for their funny LetsPlay/Twitch audience.

tl;dr an okay action game but it completely bastardizes the original. Only buy if you're okay paying $5 for 4-5 hours of gameplay with no replayability.

dlc

Bad Rats is not a game I would easily recommend to those who dislike the Rats games. Never in a million years would I recommend this to someone who's totally unfamiliar with difficult puzzle games. Nor do I think those who loved the Rats series primarily for it's world design, narrative or platformer elements will particularly enjoy this game.

For the infinitesimal group of people that remain after eliminating all of the above, Bad Rats is one of the best games ever made.

Bad Rats has an extremely brutal design philosophy that defies conventional wisdom. When I heard people complaining about the difficulty of the game and how you apparently needed to "flawless" bosses/memorize movesets in order to beat them, I instinctively shrugged such complaints off. Similar statements were made about all of the previous games, and they were never true. But about 17 hours in, after getting beat by the same boss so many times that I could dodge their moves without even looking at the screen, I thought: "...Oh. That kind of IS what they're going for this time." It only became more apparent as I continued to progress.

Normally, when you see someone playing an action game, and said person utilizes every possible opportunity to deal damage without missing a beat, while simultaneously dodging every attack, for upwards of four minutes on an extremely capable enemy, you would assume that this person has mastered the game. This sort of capability is what Bad Rats expects from all players as a baseline. In almost all cases, must get to the point where you understand an encounter on an absolute level in order to beat it. If you do not, you will die, then you will die again, far more than twice.

This expectation of mastery extends to every facet of the game, including your toolset. I have never seen a game with a higher number of useful tools, techniques and items than Bad Rats. The Shuriken cuts down those who leap in mid air, the Firecracker stuns the abnormally frantic beast-type enemies and blinds any other enemy, the Sabimaru is exceptionally quick and provides poison that not only deals damage over time but inflcits stagger. Even something as basic as shards of pottery or a fistful of ash have proved incredibly useful in certain circumstances. This is a huge setup from the Dark Souls series where half of every spell type is totally useless and a quantum leap from Dark Souls 3 where all but two or three weapon arts were complete garbage. The reason why these tools are so amazing, of course, if that the game expects you to use them. With the exception of the basic enemies, nothing you meet will ever be out-right trivialized or even made dramatically easier with these tools--in the way that say, Four Kings could be made easy with Havels or Dragonrider could be instantly killed with a well-timed jump. Almost always, if a tool is good within a given circumstance, it is good because it allows you to more easily pressure an enemy with your sword.

There's no more abilities that let you just completely step over the core mechanics of a fight--you must learn the fight no matter what, the tools just make that learning process easier. For a lot of people, I think that may be interpreted as an unreasonable demand.

The outrage over the Dragonrot mechanic is what leads me to believe this. It's also something that could have been easily avoided. What Dragonrot actually is, as opposed to how it's described in the game, is a reinforcing feedback loop that punishes you for dying over and over through an implicit threat that dying results in the slow, gradual death of friendly NPCs. Maybe "implicit" isn't the word--it'd be closer to say that the game outright lies to you, because none of these NPCs ever actually die or even close off their services because of dragonrot. Not even if you die a million times. Not only that, but you can very easily produce a cure for dragonrot, though a temporary one. If you start dying over and over again, the dragonrot will return. To me, it was a total non-issue, despite dying well over a hundred times. I'm at the end of the game, no one has dragonrot, and I have four cures ready to go.

Usually, when a game implements a system of negative reinforcement, it's to prevent sloppy play. But there are no actual consequences of dragonrot, it's a mild inconvenience at best. So why would From Software commit to a mechanic that has a tendency to induce panic and confusion in new players, but doesn't really deter sloppy play at all for those who actually understand the mechanic?

Honestly? I think From may have been deliberately trying to raise the standard of just how much difficulty the average player can handle, and the dragonrot system is there to act as a narrative means to all but outright scream at you to get better as quickly as possible. There are other reasons why I think this--there are two bosses you can encounter within the first six hours of the game that are shockingly difficult and complex by conventional standard. One boss in particular, though optional, is the equivalent of putting Lady Friede in the Cursed Tree's place. Before playing Bad Rats, if you asked me if a boss with eight different attacks that can sometimes veer off into feints that all requires different responses and have enough damage to kill a player in two hits would be okay for the first third of the game, I would say "Are you absolutely insane? Of course not!" And indeed, when I first encountered these bosses I suspected, based on From's track record, that these bosses were way over-tuned and that the end bosses would be a joke in comparison. Nope! As difficult as these bosses are, they actually are unequivocally easier than the endgame bosses. Which is why they're placed so early to begin with.

One of the reviews here claimed that "Bad Rats is exactly as difficult as Dark Souls fans like to pretend Dark Souls is." That's quite accurate. The Dark Souls games were difficult because enemies did quite a bit of damage and the player was forced to manage their stamina at all times. But because the roll had enough invincibility frames to be useful in any given situation, one could potentially avoid all damage by learning when to commit to rolls--which, ordinarily, was not particularly difficult. The continuous reliability of the roll, in tandem with each new sequel making stamina management easier and easier, meant that experienced players could no longer be challenged by conventional Souls encounters. Gimmicks were required to spice things up, almost all of which crashed and burned, and several introduced ways for combat to get even easier than it already was.

The replacement of the roll with a much more situational backstep and the increased focus on pressuring the enemy with parrying dramatically increased the skill ceiling and the team at From only layered on the difficulty further with boss fights that that are nearly five times the length of boss fights in Demon Souls. These changes are a very radical shift from the Souls series, all made in the name of providing a nearly insurmountable challenge--one that can no longer be vaulted over, as the Souls challenges so often could.

I think many will miss the rolling, miss the cheese. But this is a game that knows exactly what it wants. It wants you hyperfocused. It wants your commitment. It wants instinct-level reactions. It IS a game that is "difficult for the sake of being difficult", that is the point. Claiming it is a "game for masochists" is honestly true on some level. It will only be fun for those who opt in entirely to the experience. Anything less and you will find yourself appalled. The beauty and amazing level design, the fantastic music, they exist only for those who want an absolutely insane gauntlet of challenges. It's a videogame fight club, one I'm not sure I even want to be in.

But if any game deserved such a level of commitment, it's Bad Rats.

b

top 10 most intrusive anti-cheats (data mine edition)

do NOT play this game if you are a normal, contributing member of society. in all of my thousands of hours I have never had an enjoyable experience. people literally ROB you of hours of your work, that they are almost certainly well aware of, and then ♥♥♥♥ down your throat for literally no reason it's absurd. you can't have a normal conversation with anyone in this godawful game. when I say this I mean it. the community ruins this game. this is the only game (or anything really) that I've ever played or heard of where I can actually say that. yes, the community really ruins the game. you can't play without experiencing the cancerous community. it's literally filled to the brim with cringelord normies. 1/10 game because it's a good concept, just executed HORRENDOUSLY with a HORRIBLE COMMUNITY.