Steel Rats™

Interesting setting, excellent presentation. Sound and graphics are great. Good performance on my old laptop, and haven't seen any bugs. Feels polished. You ride a bike in some sort of diesal punk apocalype. You can ride the bike on a near and far "lane". Switching between lanes to run into or get around obstacles, as well as doing quick turns, jumps and riding up walls is the core of the gameplay. You fight enemies using a charge attack and unlock upgrades and different characters. The control of the bike is subtle, and will take time to get to grips with, and that's the core fun of the game. You spend a lot of time trying to pick up speed in this game, and the camera handles it very well so you can see where you're going, although you should still expect to run into things until you know what you are doing and learn to pay attention better. Recommended!

At 10€ it isn't a bad purchase. However, the problems are there. At the beginning the levels aren't very intuitive. The skill tree is trivial, when you have points use them. With the characters something similar happens, in the end there isn't a big difference when you play as one or the other character in the same level. Many enemies that pretend to be bosses (or little bosses) can be defeated by pressing 2 keys all time... When you finish you stay with a correct game, but nothing else.

To put in all this work for what could be a fun game - instead they get to the finish line and neglect to integrate controller support for a game described as "arcade style". LOL They totally dropped the ball.

..... from inept "indie" developers. This is EXCREMENT. It is why this was also another of "GOG"s free "shit in bag" offers. Pay the full £9 for this and you've been seriously conned my friend! It CTD'd on me within TWO SECONDS of the initial intro video sequence. No errors given or anything. I tried again, it CTD'd AGAIN with TWO SECONDS of me actually starting the game. Looking at the other reviews about it's controls maybe this actually saved me from a lot of needless anguish and frustration!

Not sure why it's getting railed so hard in the reviews. Controls are pretty complex, but can be gotten used to pretty quickly. Finished without issues on a keyboard (sans bugs, see below). You get a 2.5D game, riding on a bike, going through levels, platforming, fighting enemies etc. You can switch between up to 4 characters and there is a storyline too (with voice acting). Upgrades/skins to unlock/purchase and secrets to find. Some things are questionable though. - Points challenges are pointless, because you can just stack max multiplier by doing stationary spin jumps before doing anything, making them trivial. - Levels also have challenges to complete, but often require you to do dumb stuff for basically no benefit (other than a checkmark on the map screen and marginal currency reward). - Most of the story is hidden behind secrets, so if you don't go after them, you won't get to know that much about the world. - The game operates on 3 "lanes" and targeting anything in-between them can be pretty rough. What is annoying though is the physics bound to frame rate and bugs. Vertical riding specifically, in where you hold a key to stick to pipes so you can ride on walls/ceilings is completely screwed up at 240 FPS. You can't go over bends in the pipes without boosting, it will often launch you randomly or just crash your bike outright because it sticks to the pipes too fast due to the high frame rate. Next very annoying bug is using ultimate abilities. On left CTRL, there are 3!!! actions. Pressing it turns your bike 180 degrees. Holding it spins you constantly. Double tapping it does a spin attack and supposedly, holding it for 3 seconds is supposed to release your ultimate. This however, does not work at all. Whether it's due to frame rate or outright bugged, I can't say, but you will not be able to use the ultimate at all. Respawning after death can also occasionally bug out but not that frequent. Overall, a 7/10. Pretty unique, but rough around the edges.