Rats are cute. You can't change my mind on this. I have owned many rats as pets through the years. well, five or six rats, anyway.
But despite this, rats are almost always portrayed as the 'bad guy' or villains in movies. So when I saw a game called Ratropolis, I had to try it out. Despite the pun.
The story is simple, there was once an ancient massive city that held ratkind, but an experiment that ran out of control turned some rats into Plague rats, so, basically the zombie apocalypse happened to ratkind. You play as one of the leaders of rats trying to rebuild a city. There isn't a lot more then that to the story, but there's mention of a World Tree, which always gets me excited in terms of lore, and other multiple choice events that hint at a wider world.
I'll go on about the gameplay more, but first the artstyle of the game itself. It...it works, I'm not too fond of it but I don't really dislike it really, though the fact that some of the art assets use a 3D model on a mostly 2D game and art is cool. I really have only one complaint about it, is that the rats look like mice.
The actual gameplay is...odd. It's definitely a city builder or survival game, but it's also a card game, and a rogue lite. I describe it as a city defense game where you interact with the gameworld via cards from a deck, which I hope is accurate. But as said before, there are also multiple choice text events that give advantages or disadvantages to your city as you play. While unique, and I'm not a fan of cardgames, I do love it.
Anyway, there are three locations you can choose from to build your city, each with different enemies for all 30 waves, though they can be divided easily into plague rats, weasels, and reptile folk. Each location also has a small but different set of multiple choice text events, making each location feel a little different, which I like.
You can play as one of six leaders of ratkind, starting off with only one unlocked, the others unlocked through playing the game. While there are cards that all leaders have access to, most of the cards you will get in the game are specific to a single leader. While each leader has at least one unique gameplay mechanic in their decks, sometimes two or even more, the decks are more based a theme then a specific gameplay aspect.
The Merchants, Builder, and Army leaders are obvious to what theme they are. Shaman and Science leader are also equally obvious, but the Navigator one is tricky, it's based around the sea, ships, pirates, and other naval things. Personally, my favorite is the Science leader, because I like science. science good.
I picked up Ratropolis for only tenish dollars, but even if I paid the full fifteen bucks, I would say I've gotten more then fifteen dollars worth of entertainment out of it, with already more then 20 hours sunk into it. So if you like cards games, or defense, or rats, get this, as I did not regret it.
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