Rat Busters review

For those of you who are icked out over the thought of rodents (likely most of you) and giant rats (likely all of you), Strategic Design Lab has released an iPhone app called Rat Busters. In this game app, you are a special agent who is given a mission to save the Gotham City by exterminating genetically mutated rats that are as big as you are (ick). Your sidekick? A cat, of course.

You can choose between three different characters: Luke, Hans, and Mia (whose names are not indicative of certain characters from a certain famous movie at all), each with different strengths and weaknesses. And it’s off you go to battle the giant rodents. Tilt the iPhone to move the character from left to right, and tap the left button on the bottom to jump over obstacles and the right button to fire. There are three different weapons that you can pick up while in battle (don’t jump over them). Watch out for your health meter on the top left. There are three Themes, each with three stages. Once you complete those, you enter the Ending Stage to battle the Boss Rat (who is the evil scientist responsible for this nastiness in the first place).

There is a vague storyline as you’re battling through the stages, but all you need to know is when to jump and when to fire, so the controls are pretty intuitive and arcade-style. Thank goodness there is no limit on firepower, because pressing that button is fun; the physics are great, and very responsive. Having the cats as sidekicks is a cute idea, but they don’t really do much except hang around and look pretty. As for the graphics, they’re colorful but not exactly the best, but the fun is in shooting and dodging, not looking at the rats. The dying rat sound effects get a little annoying after a while, but those can be turned off. All in all aside from the rampant borrowing of classic superhero nomenclature, Rat Busters is a very fun little app that you should pick up if you’re looking for a simple shooter game.

Here is a video demo of the Rat Busters app on the iPhone

AppSafari review of Rat Busters was written by Julie Guan on January 5th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Fun, Games. Page viewed 6537 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.