Rabbit And Steel review

written 2026-06-09

Rabbit And Steel is a coop action roguelike for 1-4 players that I first played in 2026-05. My overall opinion is it's excellent, both as singleplayer and multiplayer.

Enemy design

Overall, I think enemy attack patterns are really good. Most threats hit large areas with long telegraphs, and are combined in ways that make it a challenge to figure out in time where you should be. Common ones include:

Zones that endanger outside them
Objects that hit you if you're too close to them
Wide columns/rows or circles of damage
Spinning beams
Cross-shaped blasts
You will be teleported a certain distance in a certain direction
You will be unable to move on one axis

And multiplayer-specific ones:

Often a zone that other players need to get in or away from is tied to one player's position
Zones that will hit everyone unless a certain number of players is inside them

I really like how these mechanics emphasize teamwork, forcing players to non-verbally agree on who should go to which safe spot when they need to spread out, or where to meet when one player is carrying the safe spot for someone else. To some extent it requires predicting *teammates'* actions similarly to how PvP action games require predicting opponent's actions. It does mean you often get hit because of your teammate's mistake and not your own, but you just have to laugh it off because that's how coop games go, especially this one.

Bosses last about 5 minutes and have movesets so big that they do new things the whole time. Unlike other games with very big enemy movesets, this mostly doesn't cause a learning problem because telegraph are long and clear enough to be fair the first time you see them. They use them in a fixed order, but the specifics of each attack (like the position of hazards or the direction of spinning beams) are different each time so they don't reduce to memorization even if you know the order.

Minibosses are similar and last about 2 minutes. Enemies below this rank (about half of all fights) are much less diverse, with only 1 or 2 attacks they repeat, but even those aren't super repetitive because those few attacks are very dynamic so require constant improvization, and the fights usually last 30-60 seconds.

Sadly, the game has some readability issues. Telegraphs look too similar to active hitboxes. There's a "match colors" mechanic that asks you to distinguish two very similar shades of blue (though they are supplemented by shapes). And, on high difficulties or with many players, often there's just too much visual clutter, telegraphs overlap and make each other hard to read.

Journey

Unlike other roguelikes I've played, there are no choices on the journey map. You can choose which zone to do first in the run settings, but the rest of the zones will be picked randomly, and each zone has a fixed sequence of a shop, 3 fights, a lootbox, and a boss fight.

The journey map is a major design space to skip for a roguelike, but the rest of the game is deep enough that I didn't miss it. There's still plenty of interesting decisions both in and out of combat.

Speaking of journeys, this game also has the shortest runs of any roguelike I've played so far. Successful runs are usually 30-45 minutes, and failed runs usually less than 15. I think this is a good design choice because online multiplayer needs games to be short enough to finish in one session. As such, this is also the only roguelike I've played that doesn't let you save and resume runs, and I haven't missed that feature.

There is a balance issue: late game is too easy relative to early. Out of my hundreds of losses, probably 98% have been in the first zone.

Player abilities

You can choose from 14 classes (5 unlocked at first), each of which has 4 abilities: Primary, Secondary, Special (usually with a moderate cooldown), and Defensive (always some sort of brief invulnerability with a long cooldown). Each has its own mechanics and playstyle, but the common formula and controls make it pretty easy to learn a new class.

The game makes attacking interesting by giving abilities complex relationships so that optimal damage requires a nontrivial pattern of usage. Also, many abilities slow you down while casting, or will miss if you aren't in the right spot relative to your target. Some even move you around on use. For example, the Assassin Rabbit's Primary hits in front of them, and has a 15% chance to reset their defensive's cooldown (meaning make it immediately available). Their Secondary does slightly less damage and slows them while using, but always hits, and resets their Defensive's cooldown if it has 5 seconds or less remaining. Their Special deals extra damage if standing behind the enemy. Their Defensive gives them brief invulnerability and speed but also makes their next attack do 30% more damage.

This game uses a lot of % chances, but most of them don't introduce much luck because fights are long enough that luck will even out. Its real purpose is so that optimal play isn't rhythmic; you have to pay attention to whether the % chance triggered and change your next play based on that.

Upgrades

There are a few different kinds of upgrades.

In shops, you can buy a "level up", which just adds 1% to all your damage, or you can pay a larger price to upgrade one of your abilities into a variant. Each ability has 5 variants, named after gems. For example, for the Wizard Rabbit's Primary, the opal variant decreases cooldowns on all other abilities by 2 seconds each time it's used; the ruby variant has a much longer cooldown for less damage per time, but resets your Defensive's cooldown; the emerald variant makes it no longer slow you while casting and increases your speed at all times. Deciding which of these is best is very difficult and depends on what other upgrades you have.

Shops also offer potions, which are very powerful for their price but only last for the current zone. And the final boss is in a technically separate zone with no shop, so buying potions at the last shop isn't trivial.

Lootboxes found once in each zone present a few random items each player can choose one of, which usually give them a permanent upgrade. There's another interesting team dynamic here since each item can only be picked by one player, so you may have to think about who could use it best.

Much like player abilities, the game largely makes loot choices difficult by giving them tricky effects or complex relationships with existing items, like "When a % chance succeeds, deal 200 damage to all enemies" or "Your Primary's damage increases by 40%. Your Special's cooldown increases by 4s". It is maybe a bit too math heavy to evaluate how good these items are, but at least it's easy to estimate based on how many things with % chances you have, or how much damage you get from your Primary compared to your Special.

Confusing descriptions and rules

The game is not consistent about whether "allies" includes yourself. (As far as I know, every item that says this does, but some say "self and allies" clearly implying that the ones that just say "allies" don't.)

It's also very counterintuitive and unexplained that two different items applying the same debuff can stack *if* the items use a different icon to represent the status effect. These are effectively separate debuffs with the same name.

There are also some counterintuitive rules about how modifiers are stacked, for example if you have 2 buffs giving +30% damage to the same ability, you get +60% total, not +69% as it should be. And since a large part of the game is optimizing your build to do as much damage as possible, this is a problem.

Reviving

In multplayer, players who get knocked out can revive with 1 hp after about 15 seconds. It's good that this mechanic exists so players don't get forced to sit out much of the game, but I think it's a bit overpowered since there's no limit to how many times you can revive or any cost to getting knocked out except missing out on some damage, which rarely has serious consequences.

Difficulty balance

There are four difficulty settings: Cute, Normal, Hard, and Lunar. They change attack patterns and some other things like enemy health and the amount of healing you get from treasures, and these differences are quite big enough. Sadly, Lunar also reduces your max health from 5 to 3, which is excessive. 3 is not a reasonable max health for a roguelike, especially with 5-minute boss fights. The game could really use a setting inbetween these.

Time limit

There's a bad mechanic mostly on high difficulties where fights have time limits, after which the enemy starts spamming undodgeable attacks. Invulnerability doesn't even protect against these.

This mechanic is bad because it's a very sharp consequence for something you can't fully control, and you can't even see the time limit, so it's very lame to outright lose a run for not meeting this invisible requirement. It's rare on difficulties below Lunar, but a major problem there.

This mechanic could be better implemented as a soft time limit, where enemies gradually get more dangerous the longer you take (or get sharply more dangeorus after a certain time), by doing more difficult attacks or doing them more often, but not spamming completely undodgeable attacks.

It's also completely unneeded since the game already has plenty of incentive for you to win fights quickly. Not only it means you have to dodge less, but you get more exp and gold.

Story

There's a story that progresses across runs, but it only progresses in singleplayer, which is a poor design choice for a multiplayer-focused game. You have to do at least several dozen singleplayer runs to finish it.

About the story itself, it's pretty boring for a lot of reasons. The screen time is spread across so many different characters that none of them have memorable personalities, and each of the 5 groups get the same conclusion: they realize that they've been after the wrong things in life and should value friendship more.

And the story often contradicts the game or itself. For example, the conclusion scenes for each group of characters happen when beating their boss, and show the boss shocked to lose, like it shatters their worldview, even though other dialogue and interface text establishes that all runs are canon, so you've beaten them many times by the time you see this. And the dialogue and achievement descriptions suggest the spell making them aggressive is finally broken after this, but of course they attack you all the same in future runs. Even future story scenes show these characters behaving just like before.

Also, despite the large cast (47 named characters), there's no representation of any gender other than women. You'd think at least the player would be left ungendered (since the rabbits you play as are just classes, not named characters), but no.

Online play

There are a couple problems with online play. The host of a lobby can unilaterally end the run for everyone. And if the host leaves, it kicks everyone else out instead of promoting someone.

On the good side, the community for this game seems a little bigger than mino_dev's other game; it is reasonably often possible to get a party without Discord.