What's this, a survival horror game on the Spectrum? Well not quite. Based on a book that I haven't read, The Rats sees you trying to defend London from an outbreak of the killer rodents. You're in charge of deploying forces across the city in an attempt to contain the outbreak.
When someone is attacked you take control of that person in an attempt to guide them to safety. Although it's more likely that they'll suffer a grisly death. But hopefully you'll have gained some info that will help you in the long run.
Part strategy, part adventure, The Rats is quite unlike anything else I've played on the Spectrum.
Beware the strange loader that decides at random which sections to load in and seemed to confuse my emulator!
Review 2:
The Rats feels like a horror/nature revenge/disaster movie like The Swarm [1978], with the difference that The Swarm was a mediocre movie, while The Rats is a nice strategy/adventure game. It's highly atmospheric and pleasantly disquieting, starting from the initial cinematographic sequence [well, in so far as the Spectrum can perform such a thing]. The game starts, and you're the chief at the headquarter, coordinating the deployment of resources in order to restrain the invasion of BIG, BLOODTHIRSTY RATS EQUIPPED WITH RAZOR BLADE TEETH. So, while you're checking the map of the town and deciding what to do there's a sudden interruption: you're now in the adventure game section, you're a common citizen minding your own business, when you start to hear sinister noises... You must save yourself, find shelter before it's too late, and it's all in real time, and things are happening fast, so it becomes amusingly frantic and charged-up, and, anyway, if you don't survive, if you can enjoy the description of your death, and here's where the source of the game, a novel, is more clear. The Rats manage to rip through the page/monitor and kill you.
Sweet. 4/5
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Review 1:
Great strategy game with horror adventure game interludes. The Rats are invading the town and killing everybody.
