Review: Rodent Rage

3 Oct, 2010

At just 16MB and the price of a couple of cans of Coke Rodent Rage is Worms style puzzle game for the iPad with a few interesting challenges and fun gameplay.

The game is a Worms, Angry Birds, tanks kind of cross over which could be better described as Angry Rats. You play the role of Rodents in a grungy looking lab that have turned on their experimenters. Using a canon you need to fire at the humans in their white lab coats using timed explosives. Some of the lab techs have barricaded themselves in using various obstacles and your job is blow them up, while not killing your own Rodent friends who are also dotted around the level. This is made slightly more difficult in the nature of the explosives where their timings appear to be random.

The levels start off introducing you to the ‘aim here’ mechanics where similar to a golf game you set direction and power however even on the first level there is a tricky shot to do to get into a narrow space. This is a good opportunity to make you play with the power and angle to get just the right position.

The sound effects bring the game to life and these are some sweary little rats and people ! This is safely bleeped out which somehow adds to the humour of it. This coupled with the spurting blood and way the characters manage to spread their body parts around do work well together and I did find myself smiling when I managed to get a well placed bomb.

The physics do seem a bit slippery, by that I mean the bombs and environment are metal and things do seem to slide a bit further than perhaps you would expect but you soon get used to this and it can in itself be useful. A couple of issues that didn’t really detract from the gameplay, some additional indication about the bomb delay and a slight bug on Level 4 where I kept loosing the bomb off the top of the screen – which was easily rectified by using the reset option on screen to get the level back to the original setup.

The later levels is really where the fun takes off with RuBe-Goldberg style mechanics where your practice at bomb placement pays off

All in, its a fun and surprisingly challenging physics fun. With the developer promising additional features including mini-games it will help pass the time on journeys.

Rodent Rage is available for the iPad from the App Store.