Review: The Apocalyptic Roguelike RAD Is More Fun in Name Than in Action

The more often you get stuck with the same items and abilities, the more redundant and shallow the game feels.

RAD
Photo: Bandai Namco

Did you know that “rad” is not just ’80s slang for “cool” but a unit of measurement for radiation? The developers at Double Fine aren’t the first to make that connection, but they’re certainly the first to use it as the raison d’être for a video game. Right out the gate, the studio’s top-down roguelike RAD feels half-cooked and reverse-engineered from the title’s double meaning, in that every one of its aesthetic choices can be traced back to the ’80s, and regardless of whether they make sense within the context of a story set after not one, but two apocalypses. Throughout, you’ll encounter magical keytars, a cult known as the Cathode Raiders that’s dedicated to old-fashioned televisions, and no shortage of classic arcade cabinets that you can’t interact with. Indeed, while playing RAD, you may find yourself wondering why a character wears a bicycle helmet in a world where bikes no longer exist, or why cassette tapes are used as currency and floppy disks as loot-unlocking keys.

None of the game’s stylistic trappings inform the overall plot, which pertains to your chosen protagonist—one of eight baseball-bat wielding teens that all handle the same—being sent into the irradiated Fallow. If anything, they’re at odds with the game’s use of advanced technology, like the transference gates that warp you between levels, or the Power Nexus that you’ve been sent to fix. After a while, you get the sense that the game’s world is broken up into a series of floating islands connected by underground tunnels only because Double Fine thought that might be, well, rad. And because nothing here takes on a deeper meaning, the game’s core exploration is a joyless chore. Why bother scrounging for monuments whose revelations aren’t of great consequence? (About the Hollow Forest, the second of its three zones, RAD says only that it was “full of life, but it was the scary, bitey sort of life.”)

The game, which lends itself to much punnery, at least keeps its ’80s paraphernalia out of the path of its fast-paced run-and-gun mechanics. Throughout, you’ll have to slay toxically transformed wildlife—like the maullusk, the slamphibian, even your fallen former “muteen” friends—and absorb their radiation in the process. Gain enough of that radiation from foes, items, and mechanical contraptions scattered across each freshly generated map and your body will begin to mutate as it randomly acquires active (Exo) and passive (Endo) abilities.

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Your head, arm, and body each get a slot for an Exo mutation, and as you continue to progress through the game, soaking up rads, you’ll start looking like a child’s three-paneled match-up book, where each pane has been flipped to create a new animal hybrid. This aspect of the game isn’t only aesthetically and mechanically whole, but also an utter riot to control. The diversity of your mutations is RAD at its most interesting. On one playthrough, maybe you’ll spit poisonous venom from your cobra head, throw your barbed armarang at foes, and safely burrow into the ground with your dungeness crab body. On another, you might be a completely different chimera, with your mind-controlling brain visibly atop your skull, a literal firearm (that is, a flaming arm that belches fire), and a horse’s fast-charging body.

As far as roguelikes go, the rest of RAD is disappointingly generic. There’s a main hub that slowly grows between runs, assuming you dutifully deposit tapes into ATMs, make purchases from the local shopkeep, and help Billy (the goat, natch) tend his farm. Additionally, the overall score from each run causes new items, artifacts, weapons, characters, and “quirks” (or difficulty modifiers) to spawn. But however diverse these new abilities might be, there are only three worlds in which to use them: the desert-themed highways of the Cracked Lands, the neon-verdant biome of the Hollow Forest, and the cybernetic region that is the Devoured Expanse. You’ll be visiting the same places and fighting the same foes with only the occasional change in weather to break up the tedium, and new content doesn’t unlock nearly fast enough. Per the game’s D&D-style composition notebook (the “Tome of the Ancients”), eight hours of play was enough to reveal 97% of the enemies, but only 33% of the mutations, and not a single one of the powerful combo abilities that the loading screens alluded to.

The more often you get stuck with the same items and abilities, the more redundant and shallow RAD comes to feel. And that sense is exacerbated after you conquer the game’s final boss. It’s then that your presented with a princess-is-in-another-castle-like tease: that you’ve only revealed the first of nine endings. Which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if each new run didn’t feel as if you were trapped in repeat mode. To put it in lingo that the cast of RAD might understand: The increasing normalization of each playthrough is totally bogus.

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Score: 
 Developer: Double Fine  Publisher: Bandai Namco  Platform: PlayStation 4  Release Date: August 20, 2019  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence, Language, Mild Blood  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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