Steel Rats, em uma primeira perspectiva, parece até a de um jogo legal e atrativo que chama a atenção pela interessante ideia de ser um Indie inteiramente focado em uma moto, onde você tem quatro protagonistas de uma gangue de motoqueiros em que cada um deles tem seu estilo único de habilidades que faz com que você possa escolher com qual deles você irá querer jogar na maior parte do tempo ou pelo recomendado do próprio jogo ficar sempre os alternando com um simples apertar de um botão. As "cutscenes" do jogo são tão lindas que fazem com que você pense que de fato você não esteja jogando um Jogo Indie afinal de contas pela sua qualidade e seu estilo artístico que se baseia a de um "noir", mas infelizmente o jogo só fica nisso, pois todo o resto é tão problemático que faz com que você se canse rápido de toda a experiência que ele traz sempre dando aquela terrível sensação de exaustão ao jogá-lo por muito tempo.

A mecânica do jogo é confusa e demora para você se acostumar, o jogo está repleto de bugs, trouxeram a terrível ideia de mesmo que você tenha passado por um "checkpoint" se você morrer com todos os quatro personagens do jogo (o que não é difícil de acontecer pela mecânica do mesmo ser quebrada e tenebrosa) você irá voltar para todo o início da fase que você já tinha praticamente passado, e sem falar na sua trama e nos seus personagens que resumindo se passa em uma invasão de "robôs alienígenas" que só estão no nosso mundo por causa da nossa sucata, o que só de falar já da para entender o porque esse jogo não funcionou, que nem seus protagonistas salvam o mesmo já que nem isso se desenvolve bem ou sequer convencem de existirem nesse desastre que foi Steel Rats, por isso, mesmo na melhor promoção eu recomendaria você passar adiante.

Originally review published on Flickering Myth: https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2018/11/video-game-review-steel-rats/

After Battletoads debuted in the 90s, I thought I had seen everything. I mean honestly, what could possibly top putting anthropomorphized amphibians in a fantasy, beat-em-up setting? But as the indie market has continued to show well into 2018, creativity seeps everywhere the imagination dares to explore.

Steel Rats, developed and published by Tate Multimedia, seeks to join that field of game creation by combining vehicular combat with evil robots. Does this biker game’s steampunk craziness live up to its potential, or does it falter under the weight of over-ambitiousness? The short answer is it carves its own path, but some repetition holds it back. For the long answer, read on.

Readers who track the motorcycle subgenre of racing video games may recognize Tate Multimedia from their subsidiary Tate Interactive, which was behind the stunt bike series Urban Trial, the latest entry of which, Urban Trial Playgrounds, was released on the Nintendo Switch. Thus, it’s not surprising to see the company use that motocross template for Steel Rats. Set in the urban world of Coast City where technological innovation is brewing under the surface, Steel Rats follows a biker gang of the same name as they face a massive invasion of robotic drones.

Compared to most indie games that focus on gameplay, there is an actual attempt here at telling a story. As you traverse through the game’s five areas, the four characters realistically comment on the nature of what is happening, how things got to be this way, and their proposed solutions for resolving the matter, all of which I enjoyed. Too often fictional projects throw their protagonists into ridiculous scenarios and have them instantly accept their circumstances without a moments thought (looking at you Inuyasha). That being said, Steel Rats isn’t too heavy on dialogue, striking a nice balance between story direction and game direction.

Most of the narrative backstory is, instead, stored in two areas: a single cutscene at the beginning of each chapter and an archive tab in the in-game menu. The cutscenes are rendered in an old-school black-and-white aesthetic, more than likely intended as a homage to the ’50s era of sci-fi B-movies. They were short and cool to watch, but I always experienced a choppy frame rate whenever they played (and I don’t believe that was intentional). The archive tab, however, was where the real meat of the game’s lore was. Much like the city stories in Batman: Arkham City, these newspaper-esque publications feature explanations for the many questions regarding the setting of the game and its inhabitants, like why Coast City is full of convenient steel railways for the player to ride-on. These stories are unlocked through collecting secret tokens hidden in every level, and feature their own narration for those who don’t like to read through texts.

Overall, I’ll give Tate Multimedia credit for trying to create something larger than a cliche robot-takeover tale. It was entertaining and came with a surprising amount of background information. And while not deep, it certainly wasn’t shallow either.

A story’s visual presentation is important, so from there, we move onto the graphics. When it comes to 2.5D games, it’s always hard to properly analyze their graphical styles. Because models and environments are pushed into a strange middle area between the foreground and background, you can’t explore things as well as you want to compared to 2D and 3D titles. That being said, what I did see was mostly satisfying. I previously described Steel Rats as a child of the steampunk era, but perhaps steelpunk would be a better descriptor. Coast City is the epitome of industrialization, with rot iron constructs everywhere you look: pipelines, buttresses, platforms, rails, generators, desolate vehicles, and more occupy the game’s locales. Realism was definitely the end-goal here by the designers at Tate, but there’s also something inherently impressionist about the entire layout. With the exception of a couple of forestry sections, everything is rendered on the same color palette of grey, black, and tan. There’s an emphasis on showing different shades of illumination, and the characters look like regular joes you would see on the street.

Because the game is set at night, lighting is of particular importance here. While you do have some static sources like lanterns in the background, there is a dynamic aspect courtesy of your bike’s headlights and flame wheel, the latter of which made me feel like Ghost Rider. The luminosity isn’t anything to write home about like the flashlight was in The Beast Within, though I do attribute that more to the 2.5D display than any fault on Tate’s part. And it ultimately served its purpose(s), so no complaints here.

When talking about the graphical department as a whole, however, it’s important to note that the real gems were the mechanical menaces you face. Gone are the humanoid automatons championed by Isaac Asimov, instead replaced with machine beings crudely assembled from stannic junk (hence them being referred to as junkyard robots). Though there is possible influence from series like Metroid, Fallout, and Deus Ex, the craft that went into creating these enemies is astounding, and I was very pleased with every new variation that propped up as I progressed further.

Unfortunately, not everything was good with the graphics. The extensive use of shadows came off to me as an excuse by the developers to not put in as much as texture detail, which is something I would have liked to have seen. The surfaces were fine to look at, but lacked that extra sheen you see from the Unreal Engine. Most levels also had a thin mist over their entirety, and while you could claim that this was Tate incorporating air pollution into Coast City, something tells me that it was meant to aid the shadows above, much like the mist did to hide the PS2’s ugly geometry in Silent Hill 2. Overall, though, things looked and ran good. Minus the aforestated noir cutscenes, Steel Rats holds a steady FPS, no matter if you’re in full velocity or taking things slow.

Sound is the next big branch of gaming, and with Steel Rats the best way to describe its sound would be…adequate. I truly feel there was a missed opportunity here to immerse viewers in a world dominated by factory development, sort of like the way Assassin’s Creed II made you feel like you were in the heart of the Renaissance. I know it’s unfair to compare indie games to AAA projects, but my point is that there wasn’t much in the way of ambiance or background noise. For comparison, I think back to the first Donkey Kong Country’s fifth world Kremrock Industries, Inc. While not exactly a bastion of sonority, there was an attempt there at creating something with more atmosphere. Whether it was the hiss of oil barrels burning, the creaking of the mine cart, the grating of the conveyor platform, or the impact of Boss Dumb Drum, I got a sense of the manufacturing changes that were going on in this part of Donkey Kong Island.

Of course, what really helped, above all else, was David Wise, Eveline Fischer, and Robin Beanland’s synthesizer score. Steel Rats, for some reason, doesn’t have much music. There’s a song that’s sung during the menu screens, and some small tunes occasionally play during cutscenes and action beats, but there are no extensive musical compositions.

That’s not to say that Steel Rats is completely absent of sound. Your motorbike roars as it soars across the streets; character abilities have a distinct ring to them, and robot aliens crash as they burst onto the scene in a spark-filled heap. As I said, there’s enough of it that the game doesn’t feel like a silent film, but don’t go in expecting an Ori and the Blind Forest-type symphony of mesmerism.

Lastly, there’s the voice acting, which is good. I don’t think the ADR direction was as astute as it should have been, but the VAs did a good job with what they were given. They certainly didn’t phone in any performance.

Now, it’s the gameplay that people are going to be most concerned with, and with that my enthusiasm is nulled. Steel Rats is a game that the developers insist you need to play with a controller, and having done that I can say that it isn’t as intuitive as they planned. You accelerate by pressing the right trigger, like with most racing titles, but the turning is keyed to a different button while reverse and braking share the same. I don’t quite understand why Tate didn’t leave turning primarily to the joystick. I get that the levels are congested, but there was more than enough space to accomplish this. If their justification was that it would risk the player accidentally driving off course, my counter would be that that either happens because your character doesn’t drive in a straight line if you just hold the trigger- they are constantly fidgeting, like a natural person would, so you either way have to have constant control of the analog stick.

It’s not that I hated the insta-turn key (it was quite useful), but I would have liked to have had the option to turn naturally. Also, having the brake be associated with the reverse was dumb because you end up having to press it twice if you are in motion: once to stop, and the other to start moving backwards. I know it sounds like I’m nitpicking here, but understand that when you’re in the heat of a moment, these small annoyances can add up to frustration.

Steel Rats is less frustrating than it is more monotonous. I mentioned in the short summary that repetition holds it back, and that sadly holds true for the majority of the levels. Each area has you to do the same tasks over and over again, whether it’s jump-starting alternators to get an elevator running, destroying multiple enemies to drop energy barriers, escaping from some giant mechanism in a race against time, or combining magnetic tracks and calculated jumps in pseudo-platforming. Every single section included one or more of these templates, and it often lead to me putting down Steel Rats after just an hour of gaming because I was getting bored.

To its credit, the game does make the most out of its layout. And because there are no loading screens, you can cruise back and forth at your pleasure without worrying about screen tear, lagging, or unfair blocks. There was one exception to this fun factor, though, and that was any area that made you go on tiny platforms next to death drops. Because the bike didn’t control the best, there were many times where I found myself falling because my vehicle jerked or didn’t stop when I hit the brake. When you die, the person you’re playing as loses a health bar- lose everything and they are dead for the rest of the level. Lose all your characters, and you have to restart from the beginning, an aspect that I found understandable.

In addition to the secret token, each level contains three “badges” and three mini-goals. Getting the badges unlocks upgrades and skins for any of the four characters, allowing you to make them more powerful and/or customize them. To be fair, I was confused as to how to acquire these badges: whether it was through collecting something in-game, or doing a certain task, I’m not sure, and I would have liked to have seen that clarified. The mini-goals, on the other hand, worked just like the full-sync objectives from the Assassin’s Creed series wherein you have to do some assignment to hit the check box. One thing I really liked here was that, unlike with Assassin’s Creed III, if you finished one of these marks on an initial playthrough, you didn’t have to redo it upon replaying the level.

They, combined with the other two side aspects, add a significant amount of replay value to Steel Rats, though be warned that they do come with their own litany (the amount of times you’ll have to beat a place without using health stations or successfully doing a wheelie for 30 seconds gets dumb).

Outside of this, there were several other minor complaints I had with the gameplay as a whole. For starters, the health stations stated before were unevenly placed- there were some levels that were full of them, yet didn’t contain any significant dangers that would warrant you having to use them, whereas more dangerous places had few of them. If Tate’s intention was to make the game harder, then why put them in easy areas?

Secondly, the fact is you get way too much money. The currency in Steel Rats is junk, and, just like with rupees in The Legend of Zelda, you acquire it through destroying parts of the world around you, as well as enemies. After completing the first world alone, I already had enough junk to buy everyone’s upgrades.

And lastly, because there are bugs and because there are certain mini-goals reliant on you doing level-specific things (like avoiding damage), I would have liked to have had the option to restart at checkpoints. As it stands, your only restart option is to redo the entire area.

Despite my complaints, I did like Steel Rats’s gameplay, if only because of the combat. Boy, was it well done! You have a multitude of tools at your disposal, from a fiery buzzsaw to a flamethrower to a grappling hook to a charge beam to even a reprogrammed drone. Fights against tougher robots were particularly thrilling because of the quick maneuverability and numerous attack options, though the final boss was a disappointment due to you having to rely on guns rather than these powers you have spent time and money enhancing.

With all this taken into consideration, the question is, is Steel Rats worth buying? At $20.00, it needed to offer at least 10 hours worth of content per my cost:playtime ratio, and it took me about 6-7 hours to beat the main campaign. However, if you were to add up the side content, it would more than likely tip the scale over 10 hours, making it technically acceptable.

However, keep in mind my previous reservations. The game does get repetitive, and while I did like the plethora of extra information about the setting, I understand not many gamers want to spend their free-time reading. But I did have fun with the sessions I played, and it is cathartic to take out life’s frustrations on crazy robots. With all that said, make the decision on your own.

Pros:
+Fleshed out setting
+Graphics = Realism and Impressionism merged into one
+Combat

Cons:
-Soundscape isn’t the best it could have been
-Disappointing final boss
-Repetitive gameplay