“Rusty Rabbit needed a tune-up, but there’s still some treasure to find in its scraps.”
Pros
Wacky worldbuilding
Surprisingly sharp satire
Great drilling idea
Cons
Movement feels off
Weak fight
Dull stage design
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
A rabbit’s world
Surface-level platforming
Some video games are finely-tuned sports activities automobiles. Others are complete lemons. Rusty Rabbit is neither; it’s a pile of scraps.
See, scrap ain’t good or unhealthy. That’s what the gruff, but furry hero of NetEase’s 2D platformer believes, anyhow. It’s impartial metallic whose worth totally will depend on the way it’s put collectively and the ability of the mechanic behind the wrench. If you wheel it into some hack’s storage, you possibly can find yourself behind the wheel of a rust bucket. Give it to somebody who is aware of what they’re doing and, nicely, that’s an entire different story. Scrap is unrealized potential, simply ready for the proper individual to assemble all of it into one thing particular.
Rusty Rabbit doesn’t fairly make it out of the junkyard, however all the proper items are there. It has an creative world stuffed with junk-loving rabbit, a heartfelt story about parenting, and a central journey hook that wipes the mud off of Drill Dozer. It’s all simply let down by a defective engine, as its core motion, crafting hook, and fight are all in want of a tune-up from a succesful mechanic.
A rabbit’s world
Based on a narrative idea from Gen Urobuchi, Rusty Rabbit is ready in a dystopian future through which humanity has lengthy disappeared from Earth. In their absence, rabbits have inherited the world and have developed to imagine they’re the planet’s dominant species. They have interpreted the trash and remnants left behind by people to bend to that narrative, believing that Peter Rabbit is, in reality, the phrase of God. Religious establishments have arisen, archeology has turn out to be a cult, and roving gangs of junksters scour the Smokestack Mountain for valuable metals. It’s a implausible elevator pitch that makes Rusty Rabbit simple to fall in love with on sight, particularly when you lay eyes on its fuzzy, grumpy rabbits.
Chief amongst them is Stamp, a middle-aged auto mechanic who likes to stay among the many junk greater than his fellow bunnies. The loner finds himself on a quest to search out his long-lost daughter, who has seemingly left behind a path of information logs in Smokestack Mountain. It all sounds foolish at first, however the story has some surprising heft to it. For one, it’s a narrative of a dad or mum who has struggled to grasp his child’s world, making a generational division between them. It’s legitimately shifting at instances and feels just like the product of actual dad and mom placing their very own insecurities right into a deceptively cute online game.
It’s a biting work of atheistic satire …
More shocking is how Rusty Rabbit deconstructs faith within the context of its personal world the place the Bible is sort of actually a made up storybook taken too actually. It takes spiritual establishments to activity for utilizing unprovable textual content to construct a basis for a brand new world order. In one stage, I study that archelogy has been mutated into a faith all its personal, the place zealots attempt to declare biomes as holy websites by pointing to a bit of trash they’ve uncovered and interpreted as an object of God. It’s a biting work of atheistic satire that’s typically hilarious.
Sometimes Rusty Rabbit transcends its wacky elevator pitch, however different instances it’s simply caught feeling like a one-note bit. For occasion, the funniest meta-joke in your entire sport is that Stamp is voiced by Takaya Kuroda in Japanese and Yong Yea in English, Kazuma Kiryu’s respective voice actors within the Like a Dragon sequence. It’s impressed stunt casting that instantly communicates precisely the sort of man Stamp is. The buck stops there (no less than within the English dub), as Yea delivers each line in an aching gradual drawl that provides the journey’s dialogue-heavy opening a grueling tempo. The remainder of the voice solid suffers the identical downside, dragging out each line learn previous the purpose of humorous novelty.
NetEase
Tonal troubles like that persist all through your entire sport, as its presentation is all throughout the board. It goals to be an unexpectedly mature sport carrying a fuzzy pelt, nevertheless it doesn’t totally decide to the bit. Sure, the rabbits drop some mild cuss phrases right here and there, nevertheless it nonetheless seems like a child’s sport with preschool music that sounds prefer it crawled out of a Rugrats episode. The distinction isn’t stark sufficient to take Rusty Rabbit into full-on Adult Swim irreverence, neither is it appropriate as a child’s sport. It’s caught in the identical awkward teenage part that Detective Pikachu Returns discovered itself in a couple of years in the past, struggling to inform a narrative for anxious dad and mom or their angsty kids.
Surface-level platforming
That imbalance extends to Rusty Rabbit‘s gameplay loops, which seem similarly unsure of themselves. It’s an excellent premise in concept. Rusty Rabbit is a 2D action-platformer that performs a bit like Drill Dozer. Rusty hops into his trusty mech and hops into biomes crammed with grime blocks and crates he can dig by means of to search out stray scrap, which he can then take again to his residence on the town to craft new weapons and mech upgrades. It’s a sound concept that takes the satisfying hook of Mr. Driller or Steamworld Dig and spreads it right into a extra conventional platformer, with ranges crammed with secrets and techniques to unearth.
That sturdy thought by no means fairly finds the proper construction to assist it. It has Metroidvania DNA with traces of substances gated secrets and techniques, however the entire thing performs out in pretty linear trend that doesn’t go away an excessive amount of flexibility to poke round. It’s additionally tries to drop a stat-focused RPG on high of that, the place Stamp ranges up by drilling by means of blocks and enemies and makes use of the salvage he’s discovered to make new, stat-heavy weapons like axes and hammers. I discovered that I barely wanted to interact with that crafting system exterior of common weapon upgrades, saving me the trouble of searching round for additional elements. It needs you to try this, although, as there’s a kind of procedurally generated dungeon to discover again residence that’s meant to present gamers a spot to grind for dozens of bolts and screws. That’s the place Rusty Rabbit feels most in its factor as a roguelike crammed with risk-taking exploration, however none of these items right here click on collectively neatly.
The act of shifting simply feels off, which is the very last thing you need from a platformer.
What’s worse is that Rusty Rabbit struggles as a straight platformer resulting from irritating motion. Stamp’s bot is stiff, unable to maneuver a lot as soon as I’m within the air. He clings onto close by partitions when he will get near them, however that magnetism is over tuned. When I’m attempting to platform round biomes, I typically discover myself catching the lip of an edge and getting awkwardly caught there for a second earlier than sliding down as I run out of stamina. If you don’t land completely flat on a platform, good luck attempting to wall soar your option to security. Falling too far stuns Stamp for some time, kneecapping his skill to maneuver rapidly. A missed soar normally leads to a very good 20 seconds of ready for the standing to clear till gamers unlock some ability nodes that may scale back the timer. The act of shifting simply feels off, which is the very last thing you need from a platformer.
Those mobility points harm its already skinny fight, too. Stamp can drill, shoot, or slash his manner by means of rust beasts in one-button fight, however enemies have unfastened hit packing containers that always go away weapons passing proper by means of them. When I attempt to slash an enemy whereas grounded, Rusty inches ahead ever so barely every time, ultimately pushing me into my foe and damaging the mech. Stopping my assault combo to again up a bit, or simply leaping my enemy to dodge, means fumbling with clumsy motion that I don’t have a lot management over. In generic boss fights in opposition to large machines (like tractors which have been mistaken for giraffes), I simply wound up consuming some harm throughout my assault combo and topping myself off with therapeutic gadgets moderately than slowly resetting my place and dragging the combat out any longer than I needed to.
NetEase
I’d be slightly extra lenient if there have been some intelligent platforming concepts right here that made good use of the core drilling hook, however Rusty Rabbit hardly ever breaks under the floor. Most biomes simply have me drilling my manner by means of paths to discover a keycard, unlocking a gate, doing that once more a couple of instances, preventing a boss, and shifting on. It half-heartedly introduces some spatial reasoning puzzles, like heavy blocks that fall as soon as I dig out the area below them, nevertheless it doesn’t change up its exploration a lot till its remaining ranges.
All of that left me pissed off early on, feeling like I’d gotten behind the wheel of a shiny automobile with a sputtering engine, however I stored digging. And the extra I dug, the extra I discovered scraps within the heap that felt salvageable. I received extra invested on the earth as I went and felt a real connection to Rusty as shed extra of his cussed tendencies and accepted how out of contact he was together with his child. He learns that automobiles aren’t the one factor that want tuning up. We’re all piles of scrap able to turning into one thing extra as long as we take the care and energy to repair ourselves up. I hope that developer Nitro Plus can take that recommendation to coronary heart and use it to tighten the screws right here, whether or not that’s in some post-launch tinkering or a sequel rebuilt from the bottom up. Treasure solely turns into trash when you resolve to throw it away.
Rusty Rabbit was examined on Nintendo Switch OLED.