The Bullet Heaven genre is mostly known for its hypnotic gameplay loop, building on assaulting your senses with the might of a slot machine on crack. It’s not really been seen in other settings quite yet, because how else would you build around it?
Enter, Kill A Million Rats by Nerdook Productions While not explicitly a clone of Vampire Survivors, the game mixes elements of it alongside city builders to make something entirely new- like an arcadey Animal Crossing with the ever-looming shadow of war.
Basically, the premise is simple. Your job as a Spirit of Vengeance is to protect a town of cute animal people from rats. Approximately a million of them, according to the game. You have a multitude of resources, and you spend turns growing both those resources and the infrastructure of your town. Once a certain number of turns pass, a wave of rats will attack,
What makes the game really clever is that your access to infrastructure and the map itself is randomized for every run. Today you may have started with a pond, while in a different save you might be surrounded by desert. Similarly, every turn you get to choose different buildings, meaning things like Mercenary Camps aren’t always available to you.
If you’re a fan of either genre Kill A Million Rats is sure to tickle your fancy- the base-building and resource management really adds more depth to the bullet heaven genre, while the more overwhelming nature of the rat hordes forces you to think on the fly to save your precious buildings.
That being said I wouldn’t recommend trying it out if you don’t like RNG- after what I assume can only be Mercury in retrograde I had a particularly bad run rerolling my rewards and ending up in a downward spiral as my village started losing out on food and manpower. Forget making it to winter, I wasn’t making it through the week.
If you like the idea of gambling the livelihood of an entire town then making them fight rats, you should definitely check out the demo for Kill A Million Rats. The creativity of mashing two genres together is to be applauded- and I’m hopeful that once the game launches properly we’ll start seeing some absolutely bonkers way to play pest control.
