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Gnaw & Order blends incremental clicker mechanics with roguelike squad tactics, letting you build and upgrade a party of rats to survive a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The core draw is experimenting with hundreds of skill and passive combinations to create explosive damage engines, then watching them activate in satisfying sequences during combat. Best suited for players who enjoy tinkering with synergies and watching numbers escalate.

About this game

What players are saying

▲ Recommended 1 hrs

Cool incremental idle game, a mix of clicker, roguelike and survival. Create a squad of rats and help them survive in a post-apocalyptic world. Equip and upgrade your battle rats.
Gameplay:
https://youtu.be/3QbNI5-FkA4

It reminds me of "Idle Champions", but here it is not a full auto-battler, here you need to click on enemies.

There is a huge variety of monsters, bosses, rat units, skills and loot.
You can change squad members, increase their level, equip them with armor and weapons, improve their skills.

This game has a very interesting upgrade system. You can buy, sell, combine things and can install special skills in special slots.

If your squad dies, you start the run from the beginning, but you can use the earned points to unlock permanent squad upgrades (unlock additional slots for units and starting active / passive buffs).

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5 minutes of game

10 found helpful Steam ↗

▲ Recommended 18 hrs

** DISCLAIMER: While I am not financially tied to this game this review comes with a personal bias in which I think the developers behind this game are great people. With that, I will try to be as honest as possible in my review. **

Summary:
A great pickup for its price if you like experimenting with class combinations and min-maxing your damage output engine to see "number go up" while being able to ignore some of the rougher edges with regards to polish and in-game clarity.

Review:
Gnaw & Order is a rogue-like auto-battler that excels in its replay-ability by exploring interesting systems via rats armed to the teeth with abilities that burst and explode light a fiery wasteland V8 (or V16 after enough upgrades). You start slow and steady learning the mechanics through text explanations and gameplay as you're introduced to all of the available rat classes right out of the gate. Each rat you find can combine with rats of the same class to unlock their next tier that includes an additional skill tree. This essentially gives each rat x 3 skill trees to explore which is around 30 classes to level into. Items will drop that you can equip, sell or combine, and tokens will allow you to open packs that include said items or gear abilities that can eventually combined to improve other abilities. There's even a stock market that you can monitor to sell your equipment at the opportune moment. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is as these systems can be a tad overwhelming at times. While I found myself greatly enjoying the ability to experiment and uncover synergies, I had many unanswered questions about my damage output, visual clarity regarding the abilities that were triggering and other keywords that were presented via text in abilities. The developers have been able to include clarity over the course of the recent patches, but even after my time playing, there's a lot to be desired there. At times the engine will stop visualizing the abilities that trigger and the numbers flying in front of the enemies can't help you identify what character is doing damage or what those numbers are when things really snowball. This can also greatly hinder someone who is curious and wants to dive deep into the genuinely interesting mechanics and synergies included in Gnaw & Order.

Visually, the game plays to it strengths and provides a lot of UI-embedded feedback vs many onscreen animations. The setting is clear and enticing to get you going, but a lot of the creatures of the wasteland and the main rat characters themselves seem very loosely tied together as there is no story to uncover beyond flavor text given at the beginning and the bad guy waiting for you at a later wave (to avoid spoilers). With respect to sound and music design, the bare minimums are there, but unfortunately the soundtrack gets old quickly after a run or two. Audio feedback while navigating menus and during combat are solid.

Lastly, I genuinely mean this when I say, this game has so much potential and I would recommend you give a shot if you have $5 and a few hours to kill after work. I found myself addicted to figuring out how to deal as much damage as possible. Whether I'm building my favorite "Money Crit" build with the Entrepreneur, Gambler, and Mechanic or a wacky "Fire + Poison + Drug Addict(!?)" build, I'm still trying to find ways to combine all of these abilities into a perfect storm and watch the enemies' health bars pop like balloons wave after wave. If you can get past the rough edges, the lack of clarity, and trust your guts on how the abilities work, I guarantee you'll have a good time with this game.

8/10

3 found helpful Steam ↗

▲ Recommended 4 hrs

Really addictive clicker! I love creating combos with my little rats and watching them blow up enemies really quickly

3 found helpful Steam ↗

Reviews are by Steam users, hosted on Steam.

Latest updates

Smoothing the Game Out!

476 days ago

Balancing Nerf + rework to Mutant Radiate passive chance to trigger from (20% → 5%) Expose core radiation increase from (50% → 35%) Power plant cooldown (3 → 5) Raygun cooldown (3 → 5) Power plant plus cooldown (4 → 7) Swapped the passive out that increased skills damage for one that causes radiation when dodging to give more synergy with it’s previous classes Swapped the clicker build with the fixer tree in the mechanic class to give him a more interesting early game Greatly increased enemy scaling after wave 150 and again after wave 200 Removed the chance for weapons to have the passive that makes their damage scale with money (it was causing too many balance problems) Balanced the Mad Scientist a bit: Nerfed Roids on the mad scientist by increasing cooldown from (8 → 12) and reducing attack speed increase from (100% → 75%) Buffed dragon killing potion by making it increase other skills cooldowns from (2→1) and fixed the description to make it more clear New things Added a setting to let combat continue when in cheesepad Made it so the magnifying glass can be opened while in cheesepad Added a max level of 100 for each of your party members (which shouldn’t affect gameplay, but we wanted to cover our basis for any overflow errors) Added a visual for sell toggle on cursor 3 new achievements Bugs Fixed: the name of the equipment wasn’t showing up Fixed: The mod menu didn't close when clicking to other buttons Fixed: elite passive that heals working incorrectly Fixed: the skills on the skill bar and engine still have the old mirage (bird) icon Fixed: merging skill after first level added 2 levels Fixed: sell value display on ‘all’ equipment type says 0 Fixed: Game not pausing when in settings (whoops) Clarifying Changed the use on cooldown skills to say ammo instead of cooldown Added a description for frost in skills that have it Changed the auto upgrade button to say auto level instead Clarified passives that reduces activation time Clarified skills that buff other s...

Mods and Some Reworks

483 days ago

New things Added a new sink for meta currency that you can use in base camp once you’ve unlocked hardmode that lets you exchange meta currency for up to 3 perks that will affect your next run. Reworks Reworked some of entrepreneur passives Made the passive that converts money to auto attack damage have a chance to trigger now instead of all the time (100% → 25%) Replaced one of the critical chance increase passives with a new passive that converts crit damage over 2x to critical chance Replaced the critical damage increase passive on the rogue tree with a new passive that increases parties defense by 10% for 5 seconds when critting Capped combo points per tokens skill so you can’t get 100s of combo points at once Swapped one of plaguebearers passives (the one that reduced cooldown on poison damage) or one that inflicted poison on crit. We felt the origional passive took away from strategic elements of the character, plus, the new passive allowed for more synergy with other classes. Lowered enemy health scaling from waves 10 to 20 as with some builds it felt like a bit too slow here even if they would eventually be good. Fixes Fixed clicker damage text sometimes covering level for young rodent Fixed shield indicators showing before wave 10 (weren’t actually affecting anything, just a visual issue) Fixed leaderboard not adding your score if you didn’t return to menu after the run fixed visual placement of stance hover panels which was causing them to flicker on some aspect ratios Fixed one of the achievements triggering incorrectly when you had no party members Fixed bug with equipment extra engine slot perk incorrectly removing slots on the engine when unequipping if you had more slots than 16 Allowed the use of meta gameplay settings while cheesepad is open Fixed concoct potions healing a flat amount instead of the percent like they were saying. https://i.imgur.com/RIyPGMD.gif

Even More Visual Improvements & Achievements!

490 days ago

Visual improvements Added a preview pop up for skill combining to show the outcome Added base traits icon to the skills in the engine to help with planning synergies Made the invest button show what stats you'd get from investing Added the trait icon with the synergy text to help show what to look for Clarified a bunch of ability descriptions Shows merge cost when trying to merge skills or how much you are missing when you try to merge skills and don't have enough Added a way to see what investment buffs you've acquired Added more of an overview to each class to give an idea of what they specialize to hopefully help you decide who to pick when picking between characters Fixes Compare mode with equipment with passive was getting funky and going off screen sometimes Fixed the shader when dragging equipment when you have multiple of the same type of equipment Fixed compare mode and equipment pop up not updating when switching character tabs New things Enemies now have a chance to be spawned with a shield that makes them take 25% less damage from either physical or magical skills. You'll see the shield above the enemies head when they have this affect with either a sword or wand. This should incentivize experimenting with different builds and balancing builds a bit more, but if you don't like it, let us know! 5 new achievements, 1 of which is a hidden one. And as always, feel free to join our Discord if you have anything you want to see in the game!

Posts come from Steam's official announcements feed.