Rabbit & Steel Review

Do you like cute bunnies? Want to experience a MMO raid without having to spend hundreds of hours getting to it and prepping a full team? Grab a few friends or go solo because Rabbit & Steel will put your friendship and skills to the test!

Rabbit & Steel is a Roguelite unlike others in the market. Taking heavy inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV raids, you will experience what it's like taking on a boss from those encounters. I have played a lot of FF14 in general both as a raider and as a casual, so I felt right at home with this game. 

However, R&S (as I will be calling it from now on) simplifies the approach to raiding without losing what makes it so entertaining. even solo, which surprised me the most! So, let's dive right into this lovely, but intense cute game about bunny girls.

The Story:

"A few months ago, all contact with the Moonlit Kingdom was lost. Reports indicate that the city's denizens attack outsiders on sight. Investigative expeditions are repelled or go missing. A colossal white tower now manifests in the city's center each night, stretching skyward towards the stars. Something must be done. The rabbits will take care of this. The night is short. Move swiftly."

This, dear reader, is the intro of the game when you start playing it solo. All of the main story is locked behind playing it fully by yourself, likely because experiencing the narrative in a multiplayer session might disrupt the pace of the game. While R&S doesn't focus heavily on the story, what is there is still enjoyable and entertaining.

You play as a Rabbit adventurer sent by the adventure guild to investigate the Moonlit Kingdom. As the report suggested, you're attacked by residents on sight. However, in your travel you meet a merchant cat-girl named Asha who is friendly. It's through her you learn that a mysterious spell has made everyone aggressive. Only in brief moments do the residents regain some kind of self-control again to converse with. Asha suggests that perhaps by beating the stuffing out of the them may be a way to lift the spell.

I enjoyed the story, it was fairly brief moments you get to know characters deeper and their different mysteries surrounding their background and what happened in the Kingdom. I would even go as far as to say that I would have loved to see more of it, perhaps after a run is over. However, I am fairly satisfied with what I got and thought it was a pretty cute story all in all. 

 In particular I was a fan of the righteous crusader mice.

Gameplay:

As stated earlier Rabbit & Steel is a Roguelite in it's core, you select your adventurer rabbit and throughout a run you'll gain equipment that will drastically change your gameplay or increase damage/utility. 

Every Rabbit has a primary attack, secondary attack, special, and a defensive cooldown. How you use these depends on your class. Before any run there is a small training dummy you can practice your class on, most often each class wants you to combine the different attacks for stronger combos. It's a simple but fairly addicting process to learn.

In fact, compared to most roguelites it's far more important that you learn your class rather than what loot you get in a run. Don't get me wrong loot does help a lot but not doing proper rotations with your class during a fight puts you at a disadvantage in the higher difficulties.

At the start of each stage you'll have a chance to spend your gold coins at Asha's shop to either upgrade your base moves (always recommended), get a full heal, a potion that only lasts for the stage or level ups. Stages proceeds by taking on mini-bosses that teaches you the main mechanics that the final boss of the stage will be using against you. Right before the main boss you'll get another treasure with new equipment and a small heal in case you have taken damage. 

Speaking of those fights, R&S takes heavy inspiration from raiding in MMO's as stated earlier. Each boss has a set of patterns and mechanics they will do against you, teaching you everything you need to know before you take on the last boss of a stage. 

These mechanics can range from dodging mechanics in a specific order, dodging spreading AoE's, dragging a tether far enough etc. When playing solo certain mechanics wont be used, but you'll gain fully unique to solo play versions instead.

There are four difficulties in total starting from "Cute" and "Normal". The higher difficulties don't only increase the bosses health, but also significantly makes their patterns and mechanics harder. At the highest difficulty your original health pool of five gets decreased to only three hits. There are special rewards that you can only get by playing in higher difficulty, so the game incentivizes you to learn from the earlier difficulties, and then test your mettle in the higher ones (that's also where all the fun comes from). You can experience the full story and get all classes unlocked in any difficulty, though, if you play in hard mode you can unlock certain classes a lot earlier than otherwise.

Pros and Cons:

Let's start with the pro's. R&S is what I call a very Aesthetically pleasing looking game, with a very cute art style and easy to understand UI.

The gameplay loop is seriously addicting and fun to master, initially the controls may look fairly simple, but learning to do your rotation of pressing the correct buttons in the correct sequence while also dodging lot's of boss mechanics is a learning curve that should be fairly familiar if you have ever done any MMO raiding before.

Again compared to most roguelites R&S focuses much more on your skill rather than what random loot you get. To be honest that is one it's biggest strengths, there is enough randomness to make each run feel unique and fun, but you never feel like you're in a "no win" situation, and as far as I have played, there hasn't been a situation where you don't get any good choices for loot to help you out.

The music is honestly a good time, it's fitting, it's fun and very catchy.

R&S adjusts its difficulty with the amount of players in a party, so you can just play with any amount of friends up to max four. It's a pure blast to play with friends as you try to communicate and co-operate on mechanics happening. The difficulty in general has a really good pacing from lowest difficulty to hard, and teaches you kindly new mechanics overtime for you to memorize.

Workshop mod support, and you can pet Asha. . . . Yes it's pro.

Now for some cons. Ironically the first con, which wont take down my rating but I feel that I need to mention it, is that last difficulty spike. Once you have beaten hard mode, you unlock "Lunar." As mentioned, your health pool drops from five hits to only three, making the difficulty even more unforgiving. However, the biggest issue with it, is how much of a jump it really is from Hard. 

Up until this point, the challenge feels very fair and well-paced. Lunar, however, feels like a skipped difficulty level. Patterns are much faster, more complex, and very unforgiving even with defensive cooldowns, some of them asks a lot out of your reaction time, and will take more than just a few tries to learn. Lastly, the bosses have a DPS check that if you don't meet it in time, they will just outright wipe you (not the best mechanic to take from MMO's not going to lie). Heck, I'll be honest reader, I downloaded a practice mod that allows you to fight the final boss of a stage purely for practice and attempted the same boss too many times to count to the point of frustration. 

I understand that is kind of the point of the highest difficulty. It wants to be a hard raid from a MMO. For some gamers that is exactly what they want, and I won't blame them for that. Personally I just wish it didn't feel like such a double jump from Hard. Again, however, I see it as me just not being good enough at the game to succeed in it (yet ha ha), however, it might frustrate the players that want to unlock everything so I felt the need to mention it.

Closing thoughts:

Rabbit & Steel is some of the most fun I have had with friends and solo! It's simple to learn but hard to master, with an addictive game loop that makes you want to try again and become better with your favorite class. It's cute, has amazing music, enjoyable story, really fun gameplay. What more could you want from a game? Join me, fellow Rabbit adventurer, as we take on the Moonlit Kingdom together! Rabbit's Unite!

If this game sounds like up your alley, then please check out its steam page.

VERDICT: Essential 
Reviewed on PC