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Ratropolis (PC) Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along I started playing this game on Monday 12 February, 2024 // I stopped playing this game on: Sunday 7 April, 2024
Current opinion of this game
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February 19, 2024 10:44:17 AM
I'm 12 hours in, have played 11 or games games, and I'm ready to hang my hat. Not bad! I'm playing this one as part of the critical game design seminar (deckbuilding games!) And...this game is pretty interesting! First, it's made by a small team in Korea. AND, I think it was originally a group of students? This might have even been a student game originally? As a game, it's pretty interesting for: a. It's a mashup of tower defense with deckbuilding. You run Ratropolis and get attacked by enemies in waves from either the left or the right (or both). To defend yourself you need to buy cards and play them. BUT, you need money to pay for cards! Building cards get placed in your city (and disappear from the deck), while other cards either result in troops or "jobs" (tasks on a timer that result in some benefit) and there are some other direct action cards. Anyways, your troop count is limited by your ratizen limit, and you get money from tax (or killing enemies) and there's lots of randomness - ala Slay the Spire. BUT... b. Your ability to redraw your hand is on a timer! But you can pay ever-increasing amounts of gold to redraw sooner. I though this was pretty interesting for deckbuilding, since the game does want you to cycle through your cards quickly, but you're also often running up against the citizen limit...and gold accrues rather slowly as well. c. Buying cards seems pretty frequent and common. Perhaps I'm not playing most effectively? There are 30 waves and you "win" at the end of that, BUT you can also continue for 60 waves - and I've been unable to clear those. I did get decently close...but I was in an unrecoverable deathspiral at that point (which new/later waves running into older waves...so it was just me trying to hold off until the end, barely hanging on on one side of my city while things collapsed on the other side). d. There are different leaders (at least 6!) which determine what kinds of troop cards you'll see, and they each have different abilities and stuff. So, there's quite a lot to learn here and, if I'm being honest it's all a bit overwhelming! e. Also, you can get advisors - which are sort of like artifacts. But you see them walking around your city. Ha! The game feels like it collapses a bit under it's own complexity in terms of being able to play it. It becomes tedious to scroll back and forth both ends of the city (a quick tab to the end of each would be nice, perhaps via minimap?) and you often have buildings that "produce" something you need to click on...and again, the longer you play the larger the city and the more annoying it is to scroll around. There is a hotkey (tab) that goes to the last event - these scroll up on the right side of the screen, but it still felt a bit inefficient.. All this being said, I did have fun playing! And, I think the deckbuilding is interesting enough in the game that I'm glad we played it.

Ratropolis (PC)