Recent reviews by Buck

city builder for the artistically inclined

mine fields

loveable sort ahead

made me an incredible drive-by shooter

Bad Rats Show is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that Bad Rats brought to the table seven years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humor and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through ingenious puzzles.

It is one of the very best video games ever made.

Virtually everything in that review stands true of the 2016 version on PC. This is the same 30-plus minutes of action-heavy story missions with the same satirical protagonists, and nearly limitless potential for sneezing, shooting, meditating, or dancing around. Just a smattering of minor new side quests, different types of wildlife (from cats to rats), and collectibles top off its already enormous pile of content.

The key difference between Bad rats and Bad Rats Show is that developer Invent4 Entertainment has done an outstanding job of updating this still-amazing game so that it feels right at home on this platform. Everything looks strikingly better running at full 1080p resolution, with dramatically enhanced textures, lighting effects, and detail in general. A greatly increased draw distance makes the vistas of the Bad Rats Show extremely impressive, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an in-game cat gore-storm as convincing as this. With this revamp, bad Rats Show has reestablished itself as the high bar for what a puzzle game can be in terms of scale, graphical quality, and density of things to do.

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