Ryan's Rescue Squad

I'll be straight with you: I came into this one ready to write the shortest possible review. Licensed kids' platformers from YouTube celebrities are almost always cynical shovelware, and my tolerance for that is somewhere between zero and negative. Ryan's Rescue Squad surprised me enough to pause before filing it in that bin. This is a side-scrolling 2D platformer built around four distinct worlds: Toys, Pirates, Space, and Prehistoric. Each one isn't just a reskin. The prehistoric world hands you a dinosaur called Shelldon to ride, the space levels put you behind Moe's flying saucer, and the pirate world opens up underwater swimming sections. That's a reasonable amount of mechanical variety for a game aimed at five-year-olds. You pick from four characters: Ryan, Combo Panda, Alpha Lexa, or Gus the Gummy Gator. Character choice is cosmetic rather than stat-based, so don't expect any class differentiation. Each world packs five levels, a boss fight, and a bonus minigame unlocked by finding hidden puzzle pieces. The minigames include things like The Floor is Lava and Spaceship Flight, which are lightweight but add a beat of variety. Collectibles come in the form of surprise eggs, sun tokens, and R tokens, and they feed into a costume shop where you can deck out your character. It's a thin loop, but it's consistent enough to give completionist parents something to hunt while their kids fumble through the main path. The combat is as simple as it gets: jump on enemies, throw slime, launch yourself out of Gill's barrels, eat power-up pizza to go invincible. Boss fights are readable cartoony encounters with basic telegraphed patterns. Nothing here will challenge anyone who has cleared even a single mainstream platformer. Checkpoints are generous to the point of being everywhere, which is the right call for the audience. What does work in the game's favour is build quality. It doesn't crash. Controls are responsive. On-screen button prompts appear contextually when new mechanics show up, which keeps small players from getting stuck. For a licensed title published by Outright Games, that level of polish is genuinely worth noting. The honest problem is length and value. The whole thing wraps up in around three to four hours on a first run, collectible hunting included. That is a short window for what is typically a full-price product, and whether it justifies the cost depends entirely on how much replay the kid in your life will squeeze out of it. Adults playing solo will find it done before they've warmed up. The local co-op is the smartest way to play: one of you guides, one of you cleans up collectibles, and the co-op teleport feature stops the weaker player from getting stranded. That parent-child co-op dynamic is genuinely where the game lands best. From a shooter specialist's perspective, there's nothing here for me mechanically, and I wouldn't touch it outside of this context. But I can recognise a well-built game for its target audience, and this one clears that bar cleanly. The IP gatekeeping will filter out most adults on its own. If the child in your household already knows who Ryan is, the familiarity factor adds genuine engagement that the game mechanics alone cannot carry.

Fred · Scout Team

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