What can we expect from the new battle royale from Boss Key Productions?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’re crouched behind a table in a decrepit building, assault rifle in hand. There’s a stairwell in front of you, and you can hear the thump of boots from a floor above you steadily getting louder and louder. Any minute, the guy you’ve been stalking for the past ten minutes of this match is going to descend from the rooms above with a trove of gear and loot, ripe for the taking. You raise your gun as the outline of his shoulder peeks around the upper landing of the stairwell…
...and fire, making him explode in a festive display of confetti and green dollar bills.
Radical Heights isn’t PUBG or Fortnite - they’ve made that much clear with their glitzy 80s game show aesthetic, the presence of usable ATMs and gun dispensers strewn over the map, and the lack of anything even resembling a parachute as you cannonball from an airplane and land on your feet. This is a take on the battle royale genre by Boss Key Productions, a company you might remember behind the commercial flop that was LawBreakers.
Boasting a development time of five months before being released to Steam Early Access, it’s clear that Radical Heights takes itself a little less seriously than the likes of PUBG and Fortnite. The game takes place in a colorfully violent (or maybe violently colorful) game show that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Saints Row IV minigame where all your basic battle royale rules still apply. You’ve still got the air drop, the scramble for weapons, and the shrinking battlefield.
What differentiates Radical Heights from other battle royale games, however, is its focus on money as opposed to guns. In addition to armor, ammo, and supplies, you’ll also find yourself looting stacks of bills from cash registers and the bodies of other players over the course of a match. You can use this money to purchase things like weapons and healing from brightly lit dispensers that sort of remind me of the upgrade machines you’d find in a CoD Zombies game or the vending machines from Borderlands.
Of course, you can still pick up guns and healing items placed around the map like any other battle royale game, but here’s what makes money so important in Radical Heights - you can, at any time, run to an ATM and deposit your funds for use in a later match.
This is an interesting concept to toy around with, especially with the status quo in battle royale games currently being “start with nothing, gain an arsenal over the course of a match, lose it all when you either win or die”. Rinse and repeat. And more than anything, I think this is what’s going to drive some people to gravitate towards Radical Heights over PUBG and Fortnite. The money mechanic, although potentially exploitable, relieves a lot of the weight RNG holds over a typical match. There’s something to fall back on now if you’ve searched every house on the block and are still running around empty-handed - just make a mad dash for a “TOPGUNZ” dispenser and spend some of that hard earned cash.
The things you did (or rather, the money you made) last match matter now, and I think there are a lot of players that will appreciate that kind of persistence between games, especially given the lower probability of winning a battle royale game.
That being said, I don’t think Radical Heights is a PUBG or Fortnite-killer just yet. People fond of more physical, realistic, traditional Arma-like battle royale will always flock to PUBG, and there’s not enough polish on this Early Access title to bring in fans of the more streamlined, casual experience from Fortnite. But given enough care and attention, there just might be enough for Radical Heights to carve out its own little niche. The game has solid theming, a great unique twist, and an immediately distinguishable aesthetic - it’s just down to Boss Key to deliver on the final product of this promising Early Access entry.
