Rocket Rats is the perfect New Year’s snack

I had big plans to finish Metaphor: ReFantazio over the holiday break. A little unstructured time between Christmas and New Year’s? Perfect for pushing a long game over the finish line. Unless, of course, you make the rookie mistake of going on Steam and seeing some random game you’ve never heard of before with a cute name and positive reviews. That’s how you go from (maybe) finishing an 80+ hour RPG to getting sucked into Rocket Rats, the perfect snack-sized game to get you going in 2025.

Created by solo dev Gagonfe, Rocket Rats is the kind of game where what you expect is what you get. It’s a Vampire Survivors-like, or bullet heaven if you prefer, in which you play as a rat in space on a tiny moon besieged by cheese-themed enemies. Compared to Vampire Survivors, the playable space is small, confined to a small moon instead of a larger map. As such, each escalating wave becomes an exercise in confinement, a pure measurement of power creep against the cheesy stars, moons, and planets that float in from the outskirts with the intent of, I guess, killing you?

Listen, I’ll admit it doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense, but it really doesn’t have to. What’s presented in Rocket Rats is a distilled, snack-sized version of what makes these kinds of games pleasurable: creating a build so powerful that you don’t even need to move to win. Which is exactly what happened when I got a good lightning run going.

Every run is composed of 30 waves of enemies, and between each wave you’re awarded a choice of upgrades. Like other games in this ilk, your attacks auto-fire. Here, upgrades can add things like poison, lightning strikes, or homing arrows to complement your basic projectile attacks. You can also pick up upgrades for things like attack reload speed, total ammo, and movement speed. Every upgrade has its own succession of tiers, with every tier of lightning, for example, adding things like area of effect, the possibility to deal critical damage, and making it so that the auto-aim targets the closest enemies. A good lightning build might also spec into shot speed, as the lightning has a chance of striking every time you fire a standard shot. If you’re a synergy sicko, you’ll be well-pleased.

Buildcrafting discussion out of the way, if you go with a lightning build, what this basically boils down to is a shit ton of lightning bolts blanketing the screen by wave 20. My best run, which involved a synergy with another powerup that I won’t spoil, pushed me through wave 65 in the endless mode that triggers after wave 30. It looked like this:

In case you can’t tell, that vaguely rat-looking part at the center of the white-hot center of the lightning storm is, in fact, my rocket rat. The joy I felt seeing my little guy engulfed by cheese-moons while an apocalyptic weather event occurred all around him was astronomical. And, because the game is so condensed, it only takes about eight or nine minutes to get to this level of mayhem. (Also, whether I was playing on Steam Deck or my PC, the way the frame rate started to churn into the single digits when I reached this stage was funny every single time.)

These are all, of course, the base pleasures of this genre, which leads me to admit that Rocket Rats has a short tail in terms of how long you can expect to play the game. It took me about six hours to see almost everything the game has to offer, content-wise, and only about four to unlock every skill tree upgrade for the six playable rats. There’s some amount of depth here in dreaming up gonzo builds that play to each rat’s strengths, and there are some secret synergies between the various upgrade types, but beyond that, you’ll find yourself hitting a wall of engagement probably around the same time I did.

But you know what? After a year as jam-packed as 2024 with gigantic releases, Rocket Rats was just the snack I didn’t know I was looking for. Maybe it isn’t a full-course meal, but still: You won’t regret a single bite.