Rat Attack!

‘Eraticate’ rodents in mad cat combat! A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... hang on, wrong intro. A long time ago, there was an arcade game called Qix. The object of the game was to guide a small blob round a black screen, drawing a line to make a square and thus turn everything inside it a specific colour whilst avoiding the pursuing Qix. Simple but fun.

Now, many years on, a new game emerges. In Rat Attack the craft has become a cartoon cat, the black screen has become a furniture-filled room, instead of drawing a line you stretch a square and the Qix is replaced by a whole bunch of cartoon rats. Not quite so simple, but just as fun!

The storyline to the game is that that you’re a cat in charge of guarding a room against marauding rats. The rats emerge from holes in the wall and proceed to set about destroying all the furniture they can get their stinky little mitts on. To stop them, you need to drag your ‘eraticator’ (that’s the stretchy square thing) around the rats to trap them, then haul ass to a Ghostbusters-style holding device which you must then jump on to ‘eraticate’ them for good.

The game offers a choice of a number of different cats with differing abilities. Some of them are particularly fast, but to balance that they only have small eraticators (and we all know how embarrassing that can be). Other cats are slower but have large eraticators and so can trap rats over larger area.

Initially the rooms you must protect are situated in a house, so you can expect to find the usual sort of household items – chairs, baths, televisions, lava lamps and the like, but as you progress through the levels, which include a factory, a funhouse, a haunted house and a museum, your surroundings and the furniture you must protect become a lot more unusual.

At first the only rats you have to deal with are ordinary ones. However, things soon change as you encounter mutant rats who can transform into hideous super-powered rodents that rapidly destroy the furniture you’re protecting. These rats are themed to the level, so you get a vampire rat on the haunted house level, and a ‘brain’ rat on the factory level who can destroy furniture with just the power of his mind (eat your heart out Uri Geller!)

Where Rat Attack is likely to really come into its own, though, is in multiplayer mode. Up to four players take control of a cat each, the objective being to be the first to capture a set number of colour-coded rats while encouraging the rats of the other players to trash the joint. What this comes down to is a frenetic, fast-paced action game with every player trying to outwit the others within a tightly confiend area. The result could only be described as ‘chaotic’, and promises to be incredibly addictive. A game for cat-lovers and rat-haters alike! Oh, and there’s a dog in it somewhere too...

Rats. Squeaking vermin for the most part, and when their leaders have become super-intelligent as a result of being blasted into space as part of an experiment, they're really bad news! An army of supercharged rodents is running riot and destroying everything in sight – the only way the world will be saved is with the help of the Scratch Cats, feline superheroes whose stock-in-trade is rat extermination.

A very long time in the making, Rat Attack is one of the N64's surprisingly small number of arcade-style games. If you want to compare it to something, the nearest would be a cross between the arcade oldies Robotron and Qix. The Robotron side of things comes from the game's format – you're trapped in a small arena with a large number of enemies and have to destroy them to escape. The Qix connection comes from how you destroy them – rather than use sensible options like traps, shotguns or poison gas, the Scratch Cats use a high-tech forcefield called the Eraticator. This covers a rectangular area behind each cat, expanding as they move once it's been activated, and any rat caught in the field is trapped. The challenge in the game is that it doesn't end there – once trapped, the rats then have to be taken to a second device called the Destructor. Reach the Destructor unmolested and any trapped rats are exterminated forever, but if another rat hits you while the Eraticator has occupants, they escape!

Rat Attack's arenas spread over several different worlds, starting in a curiously Seventies-style house and moving to areas as varied as ancient temples and haunted houses. The rats also come in many types, thanks to the alien influence of the leaders. Some rats can mutate into other forms like vampires, devils and even the all-teeth mouth rat!

Rat Attack is a game that relies on speed, and it's certainly one of the more frantic N64 titles around. Even the early levels don't let you hang about, and you very soon reach stages where there are literally dozens of rats, and their more dangerous mutant counterparts, rushing around the place smashing the furniture to bits. Part of the speed is kept up by some rather hefty borders, an effect that had more or less disappeared from the N64 recently. The smaller rats are also represented by sprites rather than polygons, which again boosts the speed, but it does mean that the camera never moves in too close. In fact, for most of the game the camera pulls back too far – it might give you a better view of where the rats are, but it also means that everything is so tiny that it's far too easy to hit a rat and lose one of your nine lives.

This effect is made worse in the multiplayer games. Obviously the screen has to accommodate up to four people at once, but unless you're playing on a really big TV, most of the time the end result is a number of coloured blobs being chased by other coloured blobs.

This is really Rat Attack's only major flaw, because it is an entertaining game when you look closely. Obviously it's no Zelda, but it was never meant to be – instead it's more like the old style of games that you can plug in and play for 20 minutes while waiting for a TV show to start, then switch off without any worries. The main multiplayer game isn't as good as it could be because it's a little too complex (you have to destroy rats of a certain colour while encouraging others to break things), especially with the tiny graphics, but on the whole Rat Attack does what it set out to do – provide an intense hit of arcade action that you can pick up and play any time. It's the hand-eye co-ordination equivalent of fast food, and, let's face it, there are times when you want nothing more than a nice juicy burger!

We reviewed the import version of this game way back in issue 32 and it was scheduled for release over here in December! Well there must have been a rodent in the works because Rat Attack has only just hit the shelves. Despite the delay this is still one of the most manic games on the N64 and it has been well worth the wait.

The storyline for Rat Attack is – to be frank – more basic than Duplo but as soon as this hectic game starts the story (or lack of it) is irrelevant. The gameplay is simple enough. Drag a square line called the eraticator around the rats to trap them and then jump on a floor witch to destroy them for good. Unfortunately, in practice things never go quite to plan and you really have to try and keep your head together as everything around you falls to pieces!

Roland Rat

The problem comes when you have to stop all the rats swarming across each of the themed rooms from destroying all the furniture. You see, you can only catch one rat at a time while there are usually more then several rats tearing the room apart. You can hold as many rats as you need to in your eraticator but if you get hit by another rat before you manage to kill them all, those you've caught are let loose again. Being a greedy cat doesn't always pay off!

Things get more complicated still when you throw in teleporters, rat multipliers, switches, fans, chests and even the odd cat-eating dog! Needless to say chaos reigns supreme in this game and you'll be throwing your pad down in frustration on some of the more fiendish levels. Especially when a rat multiplier pad conveniently happens to be situated in front of the hole that the rats use to enter the room! One of the most amusing things about this game is the genetically modified rat. As if there weren't enough normal rats for you to worry about already, you also have to keep your eye out for these flying, undead and fireball throwing rodents! Thankfully, there are also different cats to choose from. Each cat has a different sized eraticator, and varying speed and strength attributes.

Splinter

One of the major drawbacks to Rat Attack is that because so much is going on, the game can get a little too confusing. This all adds to the tension and excitement in the game but it would've been a bit better if you could alter the camera settings. When the camera is far out it can be difficult to judge your movements. On the other hand though, you can at least see the whole play area at once. Rat Attack is the type of game which is great for a short sharp burst of mad fun. Extended play in single-player can get a little repetitive if played for hours on end but you'll never tire of the immensely fun multiplayer. A very intense game well worth getting – go catch some rats!

Mindscape's returning to the PlayStation with Rat Attack, which injects a Tom & Jerry tlair into Bomberman-style multiplayer competition. Apparently, super-rats have taken over the world, and. as a true-blue cat, it's your duty to save the day. Playing from a top-down view, you capture manic rodents and carry them to a teleporter--or just thrust them into the microwave, the blender, etc., to end their misery. If you don't snuff out the rats before they munch your house, it's game over, man. Unique? Definitely. Fun? Well let you know...

Whilst we never thought that Rat Attack was going to be a blinding slice of videogame action, when the review copy rolled Into the office this month, we found a surprisingly fun little slice of frantic puzzling mayhem. Which is nice.

The aim of the game is to, urn, catch rats, and you're allowed to 'be' one of a number of, er, 'Scratch Cats' in order to eradicate them. Each cat has differing abilities - speed, strength, and most importantly, something that we'll call 'Box Trapness'. You see, catching rats is a case of pressing A, which allows you to drag the outline of a - yes - box trap across the floor, positioning it over the creatures you want to catch.

With the number of rats ever increasing, their attacks on furniture (if they eat enough, it's game over), dogs, monster rats and other annoyances popping up - including, believe it or not, bloodthirsty hoovers - Rat Attack quickly becomes a game of lightning reactions and sharp reflexes. It's by no means a classic but this is simple, hectic and enjoyable nonetheless.