It looks extremely cute and all the mechanics are there for it to be a great base building game, but it feels like I'm constantly fighting against the user interface and the lack of in-game information and proper management windows. The weird console-style controls where you can't just use your mouse to hover over icons when navigating menus like the research tree or report windows is a constant pain. You'd think a game about rats would have better mouse support.

Played a lot of Rimworld, ONI, Dwarf fortress etc. Saw this and thought "oh hey that looks cute, I could use a break from the relentlessness of those games and play something chill", how naive I was looking back now. My first Rodent Royal was killed by a military junta after i couldn't afford to pay my guards anymore and they revolted. Okay so taxing is pretty important, ill sort that out next run. Next run I taxed those little rat bastards into the dirt until my kingdom collapsed from a stifled economy. My destitute ratizens dying in the tunnels of starvation as they could afford to eat. This game is to economics what ONI is to physics. One run you're slain by the undead hordes that assail you're gates, the next you're own entitles ratizens mount you're well coiffed head on a pike because they don't like having to pay to use the toilets. Your role as monarch of a kingdom of witless, ungrateful vermin is a thankless one. 8/10 would recommend.

Rats, Rats, we're the Rats. We build at night, we mine at night, we're the Rats. I'm the Queen Rat that makes all of the rules. Let's see what kind of colony we can build ourselves into.

This is one of those furry-adyacent games. You know, one of those that sort of sit on the top of that slippery slope that leads down to the depths of e621 or being a CyberConnect2 fan and eventually learning french. Either way, the game hides a deceptively complex social management system underneath the guise of the cute rats you'll be taking care of as the exiled noble Elizarath (you can change her name, but I can't come up with anything as good). Set taxes, keep people under the poverty line or uplift them out of brokieland, create your own army of rats, build a theocratic state based on the powers of darkness, have people die because they refuse to eat bread even though they can afford it, just because you haven't oiled them up beforehand. Those are only some of the possibilities afforded to Elizarath and the mighty kingdom of Ratopia. A word of advice for you, the player: By interacting with this game, you'll slowly but surely lose your interest in your fellow man or woman, and end up drawing your own fursona... maybe even a rat fursona, something that I, to be honest, haven't seen before. Everyone wants to be a wolf, or a tiger, or a bear. But who wants to be a ratizen? Anyway, for you... it's on the mouse.

Oxygen included

Oxygen Not Included but you don't need to be a Black Mesa scientist

It's a very mice game.

Imbue heavy taxes on your populace and fund your next expansion endeavor with the toil of your Poor rat populace that, for some reason, forgot that you're a Queen. And that they are Rats. And that this isn't a democracy. Go fascist (economically only, if possible) and enforce laws that make no sense. Subsidize rats taking a shit in toilets. Give free healthcare and don't expand your military so your invaders inequivocally murder your leader and force you to rollback 10 minutes. Extort the population and make them pay expensive prices in basic goods. Bribe your police officers and officials so they don't revolt and keep the prison system going "re-educating" your populace in well-behaving, productive hellholes. Discriminate against your populace and put troublemakers in your blacklist and ruin them financially and spiritually. Run experiments with your rats and pit them against each other inside Arenas for the suspiciously wealthy government officials to watch and rejoice. This game is based and if there was organ harvesting, the Sseth videos would flow - and so would the organs in the black rat market. Do you like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Oxygen Not Included, or slowly realizing you're playing sideways Tropico in a game full of adorable rats ratting around? Then get Ratopia right now and provide free healthcare before Rat Worker #27 dies for refusing to wash their hands after taking a dump and wasting all their money buying expensive, heavily taxed pottery. Of course, if videogames haven't broken you or given your fun ideas yet, you can try to be Lawful Good and make a cozy empire, I guess. *shrugs* God bless the state of Ratopia, long live Queen Elizarath. These developers need a raise, I shall grant them free toilets.

Opening: Queen is running away from her "old kingdom" where she... knowing how the game goes, ran out of money and the peasants revolted... From the first animation, the spy-master leaves, cause he is sick of your crap and you are officially out of money... but you can have him run errands again, when you have more money! BUT FRET NOT! WE CAN DO IT (again, but this time with more trusted and well paid guards)! Build your new empire from "ground" up... using the said ground... Or you can dig yourself to "hell"... With greedy peasant rats who are trying to swindle and pocket money out of the treasury at any opportunity! I mean... 10 gold for carrying one rock to the location?! WHAT?! Want to have a corrupt and lazy police-rat to beat your subject and put them in jail? Yes you can! Dissident clown that burns down half of our town before you realize there is no "invasion" and the enemy is within? Yep, also possible! Want to have 100% communism-style taxes with some handouts for your rats? Yep, can try that too... although probably not for long or use this handy pro-tip: Police rats do not become dissidents (because they get a cut from the queen) and can "police" all the time. Create new kingdom just the way you like it - from sticks and dirt, cause all other crafting materials are terribly expensive... and then realize you actually NEED dirt and be forced to buy it from your just-as-greedy neighbors! Or convert structures to wood by deforesting the map, or stone by digging down towards the unfriendly center of the earth... Explore new lands... and exploit their resources! FOR PROFIT! Recruit new rat subjects! And then subjugate and rob them... Also for profit! Meet your neighbors and then swindle them for money before they realize what is going on and send invasion parties... This is my understanding and I am sticking with it! 100 out of 10. Can't recommend enough! P.S. My only question so far is... So I've dug deep enough to find hell... What's below?

I have to do everything by myself even though I'm the Queen 10/10

They are not rats they are mice. I will defend my mice to the death.

No Lyle no! Not the belt buckle! These are the good ones!!!

I want to like this game. I really do. But the design for forced combat is so unacceptable. They give you gates, doors, traps, barricades, a military... but the city takes a LOT of space, and zombies just spawn randomly inside your base. Every tool they give you is fucking meaningless. The military takes far too long to get to combat sites, and go to each one (of many) one at at time as a group. Meaning you lose entire sides of your base at a time. It creates scenarios where all I can think is; Can I recover? yes. Do I care to even bother? no. Am I going to bother playing when they can't comprehend how combat is supposed to work? absolutely not. Why bother build a castle when the enemy just teleports into your walls...

I had a healthy sleep schedule, a good personal care routine. I was getting ready for the next term of college. Pre med seemed so feasible. Now, I'm staying up to feed rats cheese and create a borderline caste system each night. I think about this game while playing other games. Do not buy Ratopia it will ruin your life.

Unfortunately, the developer has not added a real-time option yet. As it stands, the game pauses all the time. Completely. And there's no way to change this in options. For example, whenever interacting with buildings, giving orders, etc. Even when opening the storage. The game pauses all the time. Even when demolishing 1 tile. I wish my Ratizens could just keep moving while I'm checking what's in the storage and managing my town.

rat taxes

Played the demo on my Steam Deck and it was fairly entertaining, but some of the controls were a little wonky. Picked up the full game during the Spring Sale to play on my PC and found that it doesn't support ultrawide resolutions in 2024. Digging through the forums it's a "we might add it in the future" sort of feature. Refund requested.

Just play oxygen not included, this is a badly translated ripoff which does many things worse, and almost nothing better. If I hadn't fallen asleep with the game on, I'd refund.

Don't be fooled by its cutesy aethetics, console-esque GUI, and easy start. Ratopia is a brutal simulation of societal stRATification in the undergrowth of the forest. This game has one of the most complex taxation systems I have ever seen in a game, its like if you frankensteined mechanics of a hyper-specific city sim to a cozy game. My biggest complaint is that the game's tutorial hyper-explains moving and building and then goes "oh yeah taxes and work scheduling are a thing, anyways wheat is cool". If you've always wanted to make a feudal rat welfare state and Petco caught on to what you were planning, this is your game.

Choose hard mode for realism, I never had so much rats hate me

UI is cluttered, selecting buildings sucks.

So much fun! Well paced. I didn't like Oxygen not Included, but this city builder/survival game has just the right amount of complexity.

Gorgeous and tightly designed, but also absolutely brutal and, at least for me, far more stressful than it is fun. My issues basically come down to the massive overhead on everything that you do. Let's take a simple problem like early game food production for example. Everything in the game requires you to build stations to do anything, and stations need a rat. So, you build hunting grounds to hunt rabbits, except that doesn't actually get you meat, it gets you rabbits, and not enough rabbits, so you build two. Then you need a butcher to butcher the meat, except he's barely fast enough to meet the production of rabbits, so you need two of those, too. Oh, and you need somewhere to store the meat and rabbits so they don't spend their entire day running to the central storage. Right, and you also need a porter to transport the goods from that box to the central box so that the food is accessible to everyone. Oh, but now you have five more rats than you started with, who all also need food, beds, and entertainment within reach, aaaaand... you're back at square one, and you need more food production again. Even gathering plants is ideally done in conjunction with a silviculture station and requires a similarly complex arrangement. Nothing in this game is simple, none of it produces enough of a good or service for you to ever feel comfortable, and any issue you "solve" immediately increases the overhead and logistics required to support that solution. It's not like a regular city builder where any form of expansion comes with a considerable surplus of the good or service you're creating, allowing you to comfortably stop at some point until forced to grow to meet new challenges. The wheels grind on endlessly, forcing you to keep expanding, keep growing, keep tacking on more goods, more services, more housing, more infrastructure... ... and that's before you even get to taxes, laws, or the efficient and cramped architecture required to make any of it happen in the first place. There's plenty of cute decor and base customization available, but all of it seems like a luxury you'll only be able to consider perhaps 40+ hours in, as efficient design requires you to cram 3x3 bunk beds into tiny hallways connected by ladders just to house the ludicrous amount of workers required to do anything. Ratopia just isn't for me. It has zero chill, even on easy, which, by the way, really doesn't make the game any easier, as it only affects your starting resources and the conditions on invasions (yes, military defense is also a concern). The game is simply difficult by design, always starving you for resources and space thanks to the pitiful output of any given station and the excessive needs of each individual rat. I knew I had to refund it after I took a nap and had a stress dream about it. You just have to be hardcore into management for management's sake and very comfortable with designing complex production chains and infrastructure to solve the simplest of issues.

it is a fun game but they are definitively not rats. they are mice.

So let me explain some of the most frustrating issues iv encountered, that in all honestly seem easy to fix, which makes it all the more irritating we have them. Rat AI Characteristics: - These Rats really make it tough to like them. Most have negatives rather than positive character traits, some just complain for honestly no reason, and others are just used to tell the player HEY YOU DON'T HAVE THIS AND YOU'LL NEED IT, when we already have a rat admin to tell us this stuff....Oh and whoever designed a rat to strait up EXPLODE after his happiness goes down by -5 needs to rethink how rats work.....or people.... Building: - Building things could not be more convoluted. How do I go about explaining this....see you cant put down any outlined buildings, or buildings that have yet to be constructed. Rather if you want to put down lets say a toilet you need all the resources IN YOUR STORAGE prior to even putting that toilet outline down. This means if you want to plan out a full room, let alone a complex area you require ALL of the resources required to build ALL of those items at that EXACT moment. If you don't you cant build it. An easy example of how irritating this is comes in the way of farms in the game. I cant make a flipping grain farm if my rats keep eating my grain to make the dang farm or even put it down to be built if every time i have to put food in the storage that they THEN EAT to even get to that point. See my point? If not play the demo, you'll understand right away. Oh and there is no building priorities, which alone is horrible for managing anything. Every try building a pillar after the roof? If not go ahead and tell me how that went. Combat: - Combat is seriously more of an afterthought than a full on complete project. I love the idea of defending our base, It's why I have millions of hours in Terraira, but this....this is unfair and frustrating. I'm not the first review to say it's completely broken in terms of common sense no matter which way you flip it. See enemies can and will spawn within your walls, and despite the plethora of doors, gates, cages, spikes, and now lighting zap devices, as well as trained rat defenders the chaos provided by something that should in fact never happen in the first place makes it all feel overall pointless and less rewarding. Why have these items if they spawn INSIDE THE FLIPPING CASTLE! Last I checked the real castle would have never been such a great idea if I don't know, the enemy just yeeted themselves inside all yolo style. It's just....bad. Plus ya there's nothing rewarding about combat at all either. Be nice to have some drops or something. But no...no it's just annoying. THE QUEEN!: - So overall I love the queen idea for this game. It makes it very different compared to games like Oxygen Not Included and other top down, god like games. HOWEVER, she seriously needs help. You hear all the reasons above right? You read this review to the point on a very rainy day were "Ya I think he has a point". So you understand now that if your a 5 mph queen trying to run around as your rats eat the grain you need to make the food they asked for before they set your ass on fire and revolt, while the enemy spawns in your base and starts dancing around like they own the place, ALL WHILE you still have yet to complete one room since you gatta run all over gods creation to just plan out something that in fact could have been done in 10 seconds if you only could put down items THAT YOU MAYBE CANT BUILD AT THIS EXACT MOMENT! See my point? But ya, I like the game, despite all these issues it's promise is high and I could just name a few major areas that the game clearly will explore over time making it interesting how it will turn out overall. Rat AI Characteristics/Personality Traits Complex Work/Economy/Work Systems Interesting Combat With Various Means Of Tackling The Challenge Ever Growing Biomes Ever Growing Skill/Upgrade Tree's Relations With Other Nations/ Trade/ Conflicts So you see there's a lot to like. It just needs to address these massive concerns to first get off it's feet. And maybe seriously consider a UI change while it's at it. ......really try the demo, you'll see what i mean.