This is a fun co-op Metroidvania. My wife and I enjoyed it a lot. It's a little annoying that you share a money pool, but that's fine. However, this game commits a major trophy sin. It punished me for engaging with the game. There's a trophy for just declining the quest at the start (which is fine to do later, because it is quick). There's a trophy for NOT fighting a particular boss before another particular boss in order to get a bad ending. There's a trophy for NOT turning in a bunch of collectibles in order to get a bad ending. The fact that I was punished for engaging with the game and wanting to explore is bad design.

Yeah... So... I want to be generous because this game feels like it has student project written all over it, but plain facts is that this game just sucks. You'd have to some insane level of furry in order to delude yourself into thinking that this game does anything but sucking.

Plus it's not a student project, but a game by a developer that usually does like Bratz shovelware, and you can really tell since everything here either kind of sucks or outright sucks. Level design is super boring and it's cumbersome to get around. Combat sucks with all four characters; from base attacks to jump attacks to special attacks. You can launch a screen-covering animation attack that eliminates like 1% of the boss HP bar. The dialogue sucks and sounds like it was written by and for children. The graphics and art style suck and nothing looks appealing. Boss fights are boring but thankfully also somewhat skippable thanks to healing spam.

Really, the only thing that doesn't suck is the pirate vibe with the shanty-like soundtrack and that's the only reason I stuck with this game for a few hours. Everything else sucks. I was going to stubbornly stick with it, since in only about 4 hours, I've got 75% map completion and I wanted to complete a short game today, but as the game crashes for the third time, I decided that I'm not going to spend any more of my limited time on this game. You probably shouldn't either.

I randomly bought this on release and finished it then (albeit one of the bad endings) but put it on the backburner to see how the game would mature with future patches. I was pleasantly surprised to see it had quite a bit in the ensuing three months or so. At launch, it had some questionable design decisions that were at odds with what one would expect from a metroidvania such as pitfalls that resulted in game over, attacks that overcommitted as you couldn't cancel the animation, and a bizarre decision to force backtracking in the endgame while permanently blocking certain routes. Thankfully, much of this has been addressed and the game feels quite at home in the genre now. There are still minor quibbles with character balancing, boss balancing, and so on but the devs seem committed enough that I'm certain the end product will be something they can be proud of and something that'll be quite fun for anyone picking this up. I figure I'll be back for more in the future between wrapping up achievements or simply finishing the game with the other two characters I hadn't used yet.

NOTE: The devs have been taking feedback and are continuing to make patches to address issues, so hopefully this soon-after-launch review will be outdated before too long, and the score will improve

Curse of the Sea Rats is a fairly underwhelming metroidvania with some questionable design decisions that is carried by its visuals. Clearly a lot of care went into the character animations, and they look wonderful. However, the cost of these animations is that the combat feels incredibly stiff and uncomfortable. I only ever played as the first character (there are 4 playable characters & supports multiplayer, which is cool), but swinging my sword brought be to a dead stop I was locked into for like a full second. Though at some point I stopped caring about taking damage because I had unlocked an ability to heal significantly when dealing damage, so it made it hard to die. That being said, there are a lot of cool bosses, but the control issues & this ability made the best approach just to face tank & damage race, which was very disappointing.

There are multiple NPCs scattered across the map with sidequests, primarily just fetch quests you forget about until you randomly stumble across an item & then don't remember where the NPC is because they aren't marked on the map, nor can you place your own markers. (This is something that can be fixed in a patch, but who knows if that will happen). All the NPCs & characters are fully voice acted, so that's fun, though I did notice at times the voice lines differed slightly from the textboxes. As a matter of fact, I noticed a few typos in textboxes throughout, though again, this is fixable.

Perhaps the most annoying decision the devs made is near the end of the game, you fight a boss & then have to travel across the entire map to get to the final area, but all your fast-travel points have been deactivated. Now, on its own, this is annoying, but not too bad, but for whatever reason they decided to randomly stick insurmountable walls throughout the map. If you were going through rooms & come across one, then tough beans, you have to turn around and find another way. This was probably more annoying to me than it otherwise would have been, because once this happens, it is permanent (with no warning before the boss fight that triggers it), & I had not yet gone for completion. Would not recommend trying to finish scouring the map when it's in this state.

Now, I've complained a lot, & I can complain some more about other dev decisions, like underwhelming metroidvania abilities, the item menu, some minor bugs around status ailments, but I don't really like to be very negative. The art as well as the variety of environments bumps this up a little for me & saves the game from a lower score. It took me about 9 hours to more or less complete (I left some sidequests unfinished), but you're better off watching a playthrough just to appreciate the visuals than actually playing the game. If you want a good looking furry combat/exploration focused metroidvania, play Dust: An Elysian Tail instead.

This game fucking sucks. I backed this game like 2 years ago because it was a "ratoidvania". I went "Ooo teehee I like rats and Metroidvanias, i will back it!" (This guy has no idea what he is doing).

It starts out alright (despite the fact the opening cinematic is in 480p for some reason), kind of cool to see 4 different characters with different skill trees. I only tried one of them, so I don't know how well made that part is but the one I played was fine. One of the earliest annoyances is this game damages you for walking into enemies. I guess its normal for the genre but it im still gonna babyrage about it.

It kind of just felt like a sauceless Metroidvania until the turning point. There were some dudes trapped in a cage guarded by a dog. I did some item fetching and got the keys from the dog. The dudes in the cage said they weren't pirates and I should free them. I did so, (of course they were pirates) and they fucking robbed me of ALL the money I had gained so far (2,100). As far as I know there is no way to get that back, it feels so fucking malicious and basically ruined my play through.

Fighting bosses can give you the normal genre power ups, double jumps, dashes, etc. Those two I listed are the only 2 I got. It's almost impossible to fuck up a double jump so it was what you expect. The dash however is the worst fucking dash ever. You would expect a dash to move you pretty far horizontally for exploration purposes. No, this thing barely moves you at all and seems more for combat??. You can attack out of the dash, and I did find out this can extend your time in the air, but still feels like shit. It also doesn't lead to any new paths to explore once you get it.

It also kind of just felt empty while exploring the map. Like im thinking about my favourite Metroidvania's, or even the ones I think are kind of mid, and they all swim circles around this game. I am simply just walking around a map and going room to room, why?, idk cause I guess thats what you do.

The point where I quit was when all the paths I couldn't go were literally locked doors I needed keys for. I couldn't see any treasure chests on my map that I missed and could collect at that moment. There is one fetch quest I think I could do that needed me to get wool for an old lady. A merchant at the beginning of the game sells wool for 100 gold and 1500 gold. I had 1,000 gold at that moment (AFTER GETTING ALL MY MONEY STOLEN), so I bought the 100 gold wool. This old lady fucking goes "This wool is shit, you should get your money back, get me better wool next time." I am effectively stuck unless I want to fucking grind pennies out of enemies, waste of fucking time. This game really just punched my gut then waited 20 minutes to come back and twist my nuts. Fuck you.