Ryan's Rescue Squad

The only person who should be rescued here is Ryan himself, from child exploitation.

### Platform(s)

Microsoft Windows
Nintendo Switch
Playstation 4
PlayStation 5
Xbox One

### Predecessor

*Race with Ryan* (console game)
*Ryan's Dart Tag* (mobile game)

### Successor

*Super Spy Ryan* (mobile game)

***Ryan's Rescue Squad*** is a 2022 2.5D platform video game developed by Stage Clear Studios and published by Outright Games released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Xbox One. The game is based on the YouTube channel *Ryan's World*.

It is the successor to Race with Ryan released on November 1, 2019, also published by Outright Games.

## Plot

Ryan and his friends get sucked into a video game world by Dark Titan, Packrat, and Robo Panda, and must defeat the three villains to get back to the real world.

## Why This Squad Failed to Rescue Anyone

1. First of all, it serves as a massive ripoff of most, if not, every single good platformer ever made in addition to several games from other genres.
	* A lot of the game serves as a massive ripoff of the mainline *Super Mario Bros.* games in terms of the overall gameplay. The spaceship segments from *Super Mario Land*, item blocks, enemies, power-ups, moving platforms and more were used here.
	* The slime mechanic rips off the egg mechanic from the Yoshi's Island/Wooly World games and the overall design of the toy world looks too similar to the Yoshi's Wooly World duology.
	* The swimming segments are a ripoff of those from the Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Land trilogies in addition to the checkpoint system and the barrels especially.
	* The game as a whole also feels too similar to the Klonoa games in terms of level design and certain gameplay mechanics.
	* The intro is not only too similar to Sonic Generations, but it also falls under the "humans falling into video/board game world" cliché present in things like the Jumanji franchise, Sword Art Online, Goblin City from the Chapter Black Saga from Yu Yu Hakusho, to an extent, Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach, to an extent, and Spy Kids 3.
	* Packrat as a character serves as an obvious Dr. Eggman clone in terms of how he acts, is designed, and even the vehicle that he drives throughout the game.
	* Speaking of Packrat's vehicle, it's a mix between the Pringles mascot, Eggman's Egg Mobile and Bowser's Koopa Clown.
	* The level clearing gates are too similar to that of the Kirby games.
	* The level selection hub is ripped straight out of the Crash Bandicoot series, especially Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, and even the pre-Lego Batman 2 era of licensed Lego platformers.
	* The Spaceship Flight minigame is a flat out clone of Asteroids. Here unfortunately, you can only shoot in one direction where moving and shooting 360 degrees was nailed in said game during **1979 by Atari** proving that the developers put no heart and soul even into ripping off a popular game.
	* Not only is the Bull's Eye minigame a copy of Yoshi's Island’s gameplay mechanics, but it also serves as a ripoff of the bonus screens in Chibi-Robo Zip Lash in some form.
	* The aliens look like literal Bomberman rejects.
	* Some of the mechanics were taken from the old Naruto Ninja Council games.
	* It even goes as far as to take the canon mechanic used in games like Garfield's Nightmare.
	* The puzzle piece idea looks like it's been taken straight from Banjo Kazooie.
	* The slime enemy is similar to that of the enemy found in Giana Sisters DS and its mobile and PC releases.
	* Half the bonus minigames look like they've been ripped straight out of Mario Party.
	* The laser used in the final boss has been used in several other games before this both during bosses and platforming levels.
	* There are likely many more examples of the different games that this one in particular rips off, but there are far too many to list here as to give a general idea of how blatantly unoriginal this game is.
2. The graphics are really poor both during the cutscenes, and in gameplay. Considering that this is made in **Unity, an engine that’s capable of making better graphics,** this may have been a free mobile game to boot given the graphics quality here, keep in mind that there are other free games made with the same engine that have much better graphics, rather than charging a little less than full price for this game on all modern platforms which aren't appealing to Ryan's fanbase.
3. Just like *Race with Ryan*, the title and logo of this game are both generic, and they look like a kindergarten student drew it.
4. The cutscenes look so bad not only on a visual standpoint but looking like it was rushed through completely.
5. Parts of the game are literally broken, here is a list of examples:
	* The jump mechanic causes the player to not jump onto certain platforms properly unless they time their jumps perfectly even being the result of several cheap deaths throughout the game over it.
	* The conveyor belts in the space levels do **nothing.**
	* There's one section in the game where the **player can go through the walls of a platform and glitch out of the level** causing their character to die in the process.
	* Sometimes, jumping on enemies causes your character to take damage.
	* The Gil sections in World 2 barely work and suffer from him getting stuck in walls at a frequent rate in addition to him controlling really badly overall.
	* You have to be very precise with hitting the item blocks because slightly missing causes the item to not come out.
	* The Asteroids minigame only makes you shoot to the right as mentioned before, it’s possibly due to poor programming.
	* The slime ball can only be shot in 8 directions compared to the 360 movement of Yoshi's egg in Yoshi's Island.
6. Some of the voice acting is really annoying, especially Gus' horrible and unintentionally derogatory sounding Indian accent.
7. The music, while tolerable, is pretty repetitive.
8. The eggs you find throughout the game serve as product placements for the official Ryan's World eggs that are no longer being sold on most store shelves even before the release of the game.
9. It shares several issues with its own source material such as Robo Panda and Dark Titan being evil clones of both Combo Panda and Red Titan Ryan respectively. It tries to be meta in the worst way possible and also with some of the characters being poorly characterized.
10. The name of one of the minigames, The Floor Is Lava, sounds like a dated attempt to be trendy. This trend was popular all the way back in **2016-2017.**
11. At its launch, the game costs around $40USD. The money can be used to buy any other decent or better platformer for just a much, much cheaper cost or sometimes for **free**.
12. The plot feels like a shameless self-promotion for the Ryan's World channel, and all its spinoff channels. It even references this fact several times during the game. Looking past that, it's a really generic story.
13. The bosses serve as one of the most shameless copy and paste jobs in recent history using the same attacks across all 3 bosses; Packrat and Dark Titan requiring a slime ball and Dark Titan also taking parts of the platforms away leading to instant death if the player isn't careful. The final boss is the worst example of this since it’s literally a boss rush of all 3 bosses except now each boss only requires 1 hit and a giant laser chases the player.
14. For some reason, the characters in the lobby only speak in text boxes but can speak out loud everywhere else in the game. It’s an example of inconsistency let alone a more obvious inconsistent thing in the game.
15. The game is very short, lasting around **3 hours** or less, with only 24 levels to play through including 4 bosses, 20 normal levels and 4 bonus minigames.
16. The only thing the suns can be used for is to buy cosmetics. This requires **12000 suns** for each part of the costume from every character in the game. To finish 100% of the game you’re required to grind continuously for suns to earn enough to unlock the remaining costumes after you play through the entire game. After you get all the costumes however, the suns become **practically useless**.
17. Speaking of the cosmetics, in order for you to actually use them, you would first have to collect one egg in-game in order to unlock just one part of a costume. You also have to collect 120 eggs in total for each of the 120 costume parts and then you have to buy each part for 100 in order to customize your character with it.
18. A 100% completion of the game gives you **nothing** for doing so, not even acknowledging the fact that you unlocked and collected absolutely everything including 60 Ryan tokens, 120 Ryan surprise eggs and all 120 costume parts, 40 complete costumes 10 per character, for all 4 respective characters.
19. Despite the bad programming, the game is devoid of any challenge making anyone who plays this game other than kids and Ryan's World fans very bored.
20. At the world selection hub, there is something that resembles an unopened portal at the Centre of the room. It’s likely being a case of **DLC Bait** for the future of this game where more levels are most likely going to be added should an expansion pack for this game to happen.
21. The PC version has non-skippable cutscenes. Even though it says that you can press the space bar to skip the cutscenes, surprise surprise, it doesn't work.
22. Despite the game being available on the PS5, it is not available for the Xbox Series X/S, instead having the Xbox One being branded as being for both consoles. It’s pretty unusual since most multiplatform games are always released on both consoles, regardless of the generation they're in.
23. This, in addition to Tag with Ryan, Race with Ryan and all the other Ryan games, are shallow and cynical cash grabs aimed at promoting the *Ryan's World* brand and collectively represent the overall problem with child exploitation in video games and on social media.

## Redeeming Qualities

1. The gameplay like with Race with Ryan is in some way functional and it can be fun at times despite the easy difficulty.
2. The voice actors for Combo Panda, Peck, and a few others reprise their roles from the Ryan's World YouTube channel and do a good job at their performances.
3. At least the sound design is okay especially the music too.
4. The costume mechanic is pretty creative, and at the very least, there are no micro-transactions for this game, **not yet at least**.
5. Ryan is at his least annoying in this game considering that you can play as others as well and that you'll only be able to hear lines from the characters you play as.
6. It's at least decently faithful to the source material with plenty of call-backs from the franchise with lesser known Ryan characters like Packrat and Shelldon making an appearance.
7. There are no lives, meaning that it's very accessible to children, their main target audience.

## Reception

While the reception is generally mixed to negative, it is considered an improvement over Race with Ryan by many.

## Trivia

* For some reason, the PlayStation and Xbox releases were quietly cancelled in Australia/New Zealand as of now despite a Switch version releasing there on April 14, 2022 and the PC version releasing the same time as everywhere else.
* This is the third Outright Games franchise to have a sequel after Paw Patrol (2 of them if you count the Paw Patrol Movie Game) and Ben 10, with Hotel Transylvania getting a second game made by them later on to coincide with the recent release of Hotel Transylvania: Transformania.
* This is Packrat's third appearance after Super Spy Ryan, and its tie-in mobile game adaptation of the same name.