Steel Rats Event Preview

Indie games often bring forward very niche styles, which helps them stand out. Steel Rats is one such game, bringing biker gangs and rockabilly music together for an action side-scrolling bike combat arcade game - and I was given the opportunity to see this style up close.

Tate Multimedia invited us down to an American biker-styled bar in London for a look at Steel Rats and an exclusive concert by The 5.6.7.8s, a Japanese Rockabilly band known for appearing in Kill Bill. They have written a song especially for Steel Rats, and we got the opportunity to hear it performed live for the first time. The bar was vaguely styled in Steel Rats memorabilia, but in general they all share a similar style.

Steel Rats takes place in an alternate past where robots roam the ruined streets. You play as the members of a biker gang, and in the early parts I have played your primary mission is to locate the other members of your gang. This takes the form of travelling around the levels, solving small puzzles and defeating enemies until you reach the end. There’s certainly some momentum-based gameplay, as some of the jumps require significant run-ups. A section also requires multiple precision jumps, and not having enough momentum would put you back to the beginning.

The combat is mostly running things down or shooting them. Each bike also has the ability to turn its front wheel into a molten buzz saw, which is an activatable ability that has the bonus of slightly increasing speed and allowing you to climb pipes. I didn’t really understand why this wasn’t just always on - it didn’t seem to use any resources, and after just holding the button down for an entire level my hand started to hurt! Past that, the combat plays very similarly to a brawler with enemies existing in 3D space but all the combat taking place in 2D planes.

Steel Rats calls on tag-team fighters, allowing you to switch out characters when one has taken damage. Each has different skills, and each has a different upgrade tree. That does force the player to focus on collecting the in-game currency so as to keep each of the party equally useful - nobody wants to be caught using their least powerful character at the end boss. It’s somewhat of a shame that you don’t level up the characters just by playing them to further encourage replaying previous levels.

Steel Rats is due to be released before the end of 2018, and will be available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.