War Rats

Written by Jason Dailey on 5/2/2025 for PC  

Rats get a bad rap in the real world, but on-screen, be it big or small, rats have done a lot when you stop and think about it. Some rats are chefs, some are father figures to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, while some rats just want to blow stuff up.

War Rats is that last one, inviting you to blast your fellow rats to smithereens in a 2D side-scrolling, single-lane MOBA. Think Kingdom: New Lands meets Future Cop: LAPD’s precinct assault mode, which is considered as one of the first (if not the first) MOBAs, and is also one of War Rats’ primary inspirations.

At first glance, there’s not a lot happening with War Rats, but diving deeper, there is a surprising amount of tactical depth to its gameplay that kept me on my toes. As a Steam Early Access title, the game includes a campaign mode that will take you around six-ish hours to complete, depending on how skilled you are, as well as a skirmish mode that lets you create your own scenarios and start blasting away. The objective is simple: get one of your Ratineers into the enemy’s base and blow it up while simultaneously defending your own.

You command this rat tug-of-war by scrolling back and forth across the battlefield, shooting enemies, calling in units, and placing turrets at specified nodes. You place turrets and buy friendly units first and foremost, moving to engage directly if you need to bust through the enemy lines, though it is not a shoot ‘em up, per se.

With that said, it relies on the player to shoot often enough that the controls on Steam Deck are a little unwieldy, with aiming needing some work before full release. My biggest issue with it is that the cursor will not show up on screen unless you tap the touchscreen to shoot, which in turn makes it difficult to see the rest of the battlefield and effectively manage what is going on.

No matter how you do it, spilling rat blood drops CHz balls, which is the currency you need to buy and place turrets, as well as recruit units to march towards the enemy base. For the first half of the campaign there was a perfect amount of tension when deciding whether to spend my CHz on defending my own base with turrets, or spamming grunts to assault the opposing stronghold.

But then the game hit a major difficulty spike – even on the standard difficulty – which felt quite unfair. Several enemy units I had never encountered before were all introduced on one map, causing me to get splattered across the battlefield over and over. Speaking of difficulty, there are three options: Cheasy, Ratgular, and Hairy Rat Balls. I played on Ratgular and can assure you that I want absolutely no part of Hairy Rat Balls.

Up to that difficulty spike, however, War Rats offers a straightforward yet delightful blend of its various inspirations. There are several types of turrets, as well as multiple weapons for your rat, including pistols, shotguns, grenade launchers, and flamethrowers. The more you play and lay waste to rat scum, you unlock new unit types, new weapons, and upgrades for your rat.

And when I say lay waste, I do mean lay waste. War Rats turns the gore up to 11, with guts flying everywhere, in addition to the heavy metal soundtrack that features some gnarly guitar riffs that propel you through wave after wave of varmints.

I would be remiss to not also mention the awesome art direction and character design of War Rats, which all looks hand drawn. I also loved the writing for the mission briefings, which are full of rat puns such as “Ratinator,” “another day in the Squeak,” and, of course, “rat bastard.” These got me thinking – the War Rats movie should totally be called “Rata-shootie.”

Having just hit Early Access, War Rats is just getting started in life, but these rats have guts. And good bones. I’d like to see the control issues for gamepad and Steam Deck cleaned up, as it’s practically unplayable if you try to play docked on Deck, and there also needs to be a balancing pass done from a difficulty standpoint.

That said, for the price of lunch, War Rats already offers a fun gateway to the MOBA and tower defense genres in a way that is easy to pick up and understand, but deep enough to require tactical thinking. I don’t know where soldiering falls on the Mount Rushmore of rat occupations compared to chef and raising super heroes, but I’ll certainly be watching how this varmint war plays out over time.