Title: WAR RATS: The Rat em Up
Developer: wootusart Industries
Publisher: wootusart Industries
Release Date: April 22nd, 2025
Platforms: PC via Steam
Price: $11.99 (USD)

How do you look back on the golden age of Flash games? Do you fondly remember their creative ambition, or do you mostly remember the amateurish jank of the experience? How you answer that question will determine how you feel about WAR RATS: The Rat em Up.

WAR RATS feels like it was plucked right out of mid-2000’s Newgrounds. As a millennial who wasted much of my formative years playing far-too-violent Flash games on the public library computer, I am primed for the type of nostalgia WAR RATS evoked.

However, it evokes both the good and bad that came from the Flash era. Certainly, WAR RATS proudly bears the tradition of creativity and raw fun that was so inherent to the Flash era, but it also comes with a noticeable lack of polish, and trends towards the juvenile humour that permeated the majority of Newgrounds-era Flash titles, which could be off-putting to some. Even if it feels like one, WAR RATS is not a free Flash game, and I’m not entirely sure it justifies the cost, as it stands.

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Early Access: This game is currently in early access, and as such, is subject to change. By the time you read this review, some of the information in this review may no longer be accurate. Please refer to the developer’s road map, which can be found here.

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The Ratpocalypse

You are a general in the Great Rat War. Your enemy? The vile TechnoRats, foul fusions of technology and biology leading to disgusting rat cyborgs. This is done via a mix of side-scrolling, tower defense, and real-time strategy elements, that come together to form an enjoyable gameplay core. You will fight your way through a campaign that sees you push the TechnoRat filth back from whence they hail, as well as participate in a skirmish if you are simply looking for some quick rat-slaying action.

There is a lot to like about WAR RATS. The core gameplay experience is enjoyable and addictive, complimented with some excellent art direction. However, it is a core experience that is often let down by basically everything surrounding it, as balancing and progression need improvement, and the content on offer is fairly minimal. There is enough here to chew on, but perhaps not enough to justify jumping in at this stage of early access, at least at the current price.

Story

Take a seat for what I’m about to tell you.

WAR RATS: The Rat em Up is, in fact, about rats at war.

Particularly, the Grand Rat Army, in conflict with the TechnoRats, a faction of biologically enhanced rats that are as fierce as they are unsettling. There is no peace to be found, and unless we want all of rat-kind to fall to the machinations of the TechnoRats, we have no choice but to repel them back to their lands, which are to be conquered once and for all!

Narrative in WAR RATS is scant, but the world building is genuinely compelling. The TechnoRats make for frightening villains. They seem harmless enough in the opening missions, with the occasional grunt kitted out with some tech. But, as you push further into their territory, stronger and more grotesque units begin to arrive at the front lines. By the time you reach the home base of the TechnoRats, you will encounter some truly monstrous experimentation. It gives a compelling reason to fight, you do not want your poor rats to end up like those freaks. Kudos to the developers for a well-designed enemy faction.

The narrative itself is not much to write home about, but nor is that really expected in this type of game. It is delivered primarily through mission briefings, which can become surprisingly dense, as the current wartime situation is explained. There are no big plot twists and no character development, it is a fairly straightforward affair as you push your way to their base and defeat them. The story is unambitious, but completely serviceable.

The mission briefings are also where the game showcases its sense of humor, which is possibly the most direct tie to the Newgrounds era of Flash games. WAR RATS is immensely juvenile, and is chock full of rat puns, memes, and potty humor. The mission briefings are stuffed with references to internet memes and relentless silliness. Yet, no better place is this juvenility displayed than via the deployment cutscene that plays at the start of every mission. The rats ready their weapons and prepare their equipment, which includes a focused shot right on their testicles. Lovely.

Your reaction to that sentence will determine how you accept the humour promoted by WAR RATS. Did you grimace or roll your eyes? This game might not be for you. Did you giggle? Then you’re in luck!

I don’t mind referential humor, and I smirked the first handful of times a “rat sack” dropped onto the screen. Unfortunately I can’t say that seeing a rat’s reproductive organs at the start of every single battle is my idea of a good time, and it eventually led to me skipping the cutscene entirely. Likewise, I eventually began simply skimming through the mission briefings. However I am sure there are many to which the humour will never wear off.

War Rats is not a narratively-oriented game, and the unambitious experience doesn’t particularly harm the experience. Indeed, I think the simple story gives the game freedom to spend more time fleshing out the world building and humor. The former is genuinely compelling, and your mileage may vary with the latter.

Presentation

Part of the reason I am constantly comparing WAR RATS to the golden age of Flash games, is because it looks and feels like one. I absolutely do believe that if you were to stick WAR RATS on the front page of 2004 Miniclips or Kongregate, it would not feel out of place whatsoever. Some of my best gaming memories relate to Flash games, so this is not an inherently bad thing, but it does have perks and quirks.

Visuals

The “cartoony hyperrealism” style was very much in vogue with many popular late-2000’s Flash titles, and when I first saw WAR RATS, that is immediately what came to mind. I have a lot of nostalgic affection for this artistic style, so I was visually drawn to WAR RATS, and I find it quite pleasing in action. An artistic comparison to the golden age of Flash games is far from a pejorative.

It is certainly not for the faint of heart, however. WAR RATS depicts the warfront viscerally, with rats that quickly become gore piles after being hit with a rocket, complete with flying limbs and corpses. The rats face this chaos with an art style that conveys a fierce and commanding grace, and a lot of attention is paid to making the individual rat units look and feel distinct. You have everything from regular grunts, to dueling GentleRats in top hats, and even psychic rats that float upon the earth.

The TechnoRats on the other hand are lacking the heroic splendor of the Grand Rat Army, rather they are deeply unsettling. Each new TechoRat unit is creepier than the last, and the artists did a great job of conveying the horror of these experimental units, while staying within the bounds of the game’s lighthearted tone. Genuinely, the art direction is fantastic. 

Audio

The audio is a more mixed experience, though generally still fine. What music is present is decent, there just isn’t a huge variety of it. The menu music is good, the battle music is good, and there are a handful of other tracks, but not much.

The sound effects are quite nice, I think they did a good job of making the battlefield feel alive, and the sound of artillery and explosions is suitably chaotic.

The audio in WAR RATS serves the purpose. In that regard, I equate it similarly to the story. Whereas the art direction is genuinely quite ambitious and impressive, the audio experience is just okay. Nothing is annoying or sticks out for bad reasons, but also nothing stood out to me at all.

U.I.

Nothing sticks out about the U.I., which is a compliment when talking about early access indie games. It is a smooth experience, which is important considering how big of a role it plays gameplay. There is a frequent need to navigate through menus, be it to recruit more soldiers or pick a building to construct. Everything was legible and clear, and none of the menus were tough to navigate.

I did have a repeated issue with the loading screen, however. It seems as though pressing certain buttons would prevent the ability to advance through it, and on a few occasions I had to reboot the game. It doesn’t seem to be a widely reported issue, so I’m leaving room for user error here.

WAR RATS is nice to look at, and isn’t unpleasant to listen to. Much like how I feel about the gameplay, the presentation is ambitious in some areas, and plays it too safe in others. Visually the game is great, going toe to toe with some of my fondest memories of stylized Flash games, and with the fantastically creepy TechnoRats being a particular highlight. It might not be winning “indie soundtrack of the year” for me, but the audio experience is at least not distracting in any way. The U.I. is clean and easy to navigate. Overall, the presentation of WAR RATS is perfectly pleasant.

Gameplay

The conceit of WAR RATS is an interesting one. It bills itself as a “Sidescrolling shooter meets tower defense with a sprinkle of RPG elements,” and a “side-scrolling looter-shooter moba-lite 2D gore-fest.” Both are a fair way to put it.

The gameplay is straightforward: You are a rat armed with a pistol, on a side-scrolling battlefield. Your base is on one side, and the enemy’s base is on the other. Waves of rat troops come pouring out of both bases at set intervals. Between the two bases is a range of build locations, some vacant and others occupied with enemy defenses.

The object is to push the front line, and escort your rats into the enemy base. You do this by recruiting waves of unique rat infantry, using the vacant spots to build defensive structures and unique facilities to improve your odds, and taking matters into your own hands by directly slinging lead into TechnoRat hides. In this way, WAR RATS is an RTS, a tower defense game, and an action game, all in one. 

There are four pillars of gameplay. The action-based combat, the real-time strategy layer, the base building, and the progression. Each leads into one another, and it is impossible to engage with one without acknowledging the rest.

Action-Based Combat

The moment to moment gameplay is done through a combination of mouse and keyboard, as your rat aims his gun towards your cursor (something intimately familar to those of us who grew up playing Flash games like Madness Interactive.) The player enters the battlefield with a 2-weapon loadout, and attacks towers and enemy rats as you look to take control of the battlefield. You are not just master and commander, but also a battlefield warrior. Throw grenades, bunnyhop over canonfire, bob and weave in and out of combat, and watch your soldiers eventually become a gore pile on the ground.

Though it has some areas of needed improvement, for the most part, controlling your rat on the battlefield is a blast. The gunplay feels really good, the guns themselves feel impactful and there is a comfortable range of them. It is very satisfying to land the perfect shot with a rocket launcher, or jump-dodge turret fire while single-handedly taking it down with a dozen pumps from your shotgun. It feels very good to be a one-man wrecking machine, and be capable of individually turning the tide of the battle. It evokes similar feelings to that of the original Star Wars: Battlefront games, the satisfaction of winning battles singlehandedly.

There are a few weakness that, while small, have an outsized effect in detracting from the experience. For example, I found that hitboxes can be pretty funky. There have been a number of instances in which I see my bullet clearly collide with a rat, but they are seemingly unaffected. It was also noticeable with friendly fire, and watching bullets get absorbed by a rat or my own turret, because the barrel of my gun is a few pixels short of the clearance required. In fact it is a bizarre feeling altogether, to be visibly in front of the turret, but still hitting it when shooting.

Throwing grenades is another troublesome spot. WAR RATS uses a momentum-based system to propel the grenade, so pressing the grenade button while stationary will cause the grenade to drop at your feet, and pressing it while moving will send it flying towards your cursor. The idea is good in theory, but it is immensely finicky in practice. There have also been a number of times where the grenade simply deployed at my feet despite my momentum, causing damage to myself and my allies. The existence of a separately-selectable tutorial specifically for grenade-throwing makes me believe the developer is aware of this finicky design.

Overall though, while there are definitely some sore spots, the moment to moment action is kinetic, frantic, and highly enjoyable.

Wave-Based Strategy

As you shoot your way through the battlefield, you will be accompanied by waves of rat soldiers who will push the front line. While it can often feel easy to forget about these guys, they are of vital importance, as escorting them into the TechnoRat base is the victory condition for the game. A trio of the lowest tier of soldiers will spawn on their own every few minutes, and traverse the battlefield, destined to die to canonnfire or the TechnoRat’s own auto-spawning soldiers. It is an autonomous system, and will continue independent of the player.

However at any time, the player is a button press away from a recruitment menu where they can spend “CHz” points (dropped from broken crates and dead soldiers) to recruit more soldiers. There is a wide assortment of unit types, more-or-less increasingly powerful, and gradually costing more CHz. From this menu, the player can summon an army of rats to storm the battlefield.

The unit variety on display is fantastic, promoted by the aforementioned excellent art direction. It is genuinely a joy to see a swarm of top hat-wearing R\rats with dueling pistols, pressing the frontline. It is also a very snappy and intuitive system, I found the menu to be simple to access even in the heat of battle.

The downside is primarily that the recruitment system is largely optional, and sometimes feels like a money sink. The units often feel too flimsy to be worth the investment. When you spend half your CHz on a few units of powerful rats, only for them to be evaporated within 30 seconds of reaching the front line, it begins to feel like a Sisyphean endeavor.

There is the opportunity to level up your soldiers in the upgrade menu, but that has a separate set of issues we will get into later on. Especially at the later levels, I often felt like it was a better use of my CHz to just forego recruiting powerful units entirely, focusing on a constant stream of grunts and maintaining enough CHz to alwaysbe able to rebuild a tier-3 tower.

The unit recruitment system is fun and intuitive, it is just a shame that it feels as though the game quickly outpaces the capabilities of your soldiers.

Base Building

Along the battlefield are a number of plots where players can erect a building, at a cost of CHz. There is a variety of options, such as a camp to heal and reload, a factory that produces CHz, shrines to passively improve soldiers, or massive defensive turrets to annihilate oncoming soldiers. The player starts with an empty field to build in their image, whereas the enemy has pre-built defenses. When an enemy building is wiped out, that plot becomes available for players to utilize. 

This initially suggest a lot of creativity and choice in how you approach battles, but realistically players will quickly realize it is optimal to build one camp, one of each shrine, one turret at the very front, and fill all other spaces up with CHz factories.

When an enemy’s plot is conquered, there is almost no reason to do anything other than build your own tower, allowing you to continually push the front line back to their base. Replace previous towers with CHz factories as the frontline continues to be pushed, and eventually you will likely have a tower erected in the closest spot to the enemy base, firing upon their recruits as soon as they are spawned. The strategy is clear and obvious.

However just because there is an obvious optimal strategy, doesn’t mean the base building is not enjoyable. On the contrary, there is a good amount of joy to be found in gradually pushing the enemy back, slowly taking their side of the battlefield tower by tower. Occasionally doubling back to collect the immense number of CHz developed by your factories, and using it to supplement more waves of grunts, buy more ammo, and push for another plot. It is a satisfying gameplay loop. 

Thus, we have three of the pillars of WAR RATS. The action gameplay in which you control an individual rat on the battlefield, the real-time strategy gameplay in which you are managing waves of soldiers, and the base building mechanic which sees you building towers and building. All of these three tie together into the gameplay experience, and do a good job of working off one another. 

Progression System

It is all bound together by the fourth pillar, a progression system in which leftover CHz can be used to buy permanent upgrades. You can buy and improve new weapons, or raise the stats of either yourself of your soldiers. It gives some purpose to playing skirmishes, and it ensures that no level can stump the player for too long, as you can grind CHz and overpower the situation. It is a good system, although one that is easily exploitable.

I very quickly realized that it was quite easy to set up a skirmish map, find a difficulty modifier which ensured a stalemate, build a bunch of CHZ factories, and then put the controller down. Come back a half hour later, and an immense amount CHZ will be waiting for you. This is a bafflingly easy way to gain a ton of CHz in a quick amount of time, with almost no effort from the player. It isn’t like this is some secret exploit either, it immediately came to me the moment I realized I could set my own difficulty modifiers. 

Likewise, upgrades simply don’t feel well balanced. I put thousands of CHz into upgrading my soldiers, felt like it had almost no impact on the battlefield. Two simple upgrades on my rocket launcher, however, allowed to to easily overcome anything stopping me. Units across the board should get a huge buff, and upgrading weapons should probably be more expensive. Although again it hardly matters considering how easy it is to farm CHz. 

Nevertheless I still appreciate the existence of a progression system at all, and there is a lot of choice in how you upgrade, even if some options are blatantly better than others. 

A Flawed Conclusion

So how does the gameplay of WAR RATS all come together? Well, it definitely feels like an early access game.

The core gameplay here is great, the way that the action and strategy elements blend together is addicting and fun. It is everything around the core gameplay that needs a lot of work. The balancing makes hiring units feel pointless. The progression system is a great idea, but it is so imbalanced in favor of improving the weapons that upgrading anything else feels like handicapping yourself. It is extremely easy to exploit the system for easy CHz and render the entire thing moot. The heart of the gameplay is excellent, the trappings need a lot of work.

Final Score

I love the candor of the Flash era of games. From Madness Interactive to Halo Zero, Adventure Quest, and so many more, these games were unapologetic in being fun first, all else second. A comparison to War Rats is largely from a place of reverence.

The thing is, these games were flawed. They were made by amateur game developers, and were lacking a lot of polish you’d expect in a professional product. But it becomes a lot easier to overlook the flaws of these games when they are being uploaded onto websites like Newgrounds completely free. If I was reviewing Stick Arena as a professional product, I’d have a bevy of complaints, but I was playing it for free.

War Rats reminds me so much of these Flash games, both the good and the bad. However, it is not a free game uploaded onto the internet, rather it is an $11 Steam game. I can’t look over the flaws in the same way I would with a Flash game, because this costs money. It only costs a few bucks less than Stardew Valley, a game that is significantly larger in scope and more polished.

I’m not advocating for wootusart Industries to go free to play or anything like that, I’m not even suggesting a reduction in price. Absolutely charge what you think is fair. I’m simply saying that while War Rats: The Rat em Up has an enjoyable core experience, it is also bogged down by a lot of areas of deficiency, and a campaign that will only last a handful of hours. The gameplay is fun, but it isn’t fun enough to endlessly replay skirmish missions for hours to come. For the state that the game is in, and the price it is charging, I cannot recommend War Rats.

This very well may change! I look forward to re-reviewing War Rats when it leaves early access. Maybe by the end of its road map, enough new content will have been added, and enough gameplay elements will have been fixed, that I am able to heartily endorse it for the current price. As it stands though, I think War Rats is a game that does not live up to its inherent potential. For a project by a solo developer, this is pretty impressive. For a game being sold on storefronts, it has room for improvement.

If you have an immense amount of nostalgia for the heyday of Flash gaming like I do, maybe the buy-in will be worth it for you. But for the rest of us, I recommend giving this game more time to cook.

Featured Image: wootusart Industries

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