Radical Heights does cool things that PUBG and Fortnite aren’t

At first glance Radical Heights feels like flailing. The team at Boss Key Productions, fresh off the failure of its hero shooter, LawBreakers, spent five months banging out a battle royale game and then tossed it to the wolves in Steam Early Access. While it’s very clear that the game isn’t finished, Radical Heights is doing some very interesting things.

It’s familiar, but not too familiar

Moving through Radical Heights, the environment itself looks very familiar. It’s all mid-1980s era suburban sprawl but with the color saturation cranked up to 11. While PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and H1Z1 before it were firmly post-apocalyptic, Radical Heights skews more towards Fortnite with a casual, almost playful tone.

But look closer and you’ll notice that the environment is actually just an elaborate television set. There’s a dome over the top of the whole map, and every few blocks there’s an actual facade with nothing behind it but ramps and ladders. It’s almost like a blend of Smash TV and The Truman Show.

Boss Key Productions

An actual in-game economy

The TV aesthetic extends to the vending machines, which hand out guns and armor for cash. There are also brightly colored storage lockers filled with loot, but in order to open them you have to stand in plain sight while a timer ticks down and hope no one takes you out. Punch a cash register or shoot out the front of a change machine to reveal piles of cash. At times money simply rains down from the sky.

But where games like Battlegrounds and H1Z1 limit the in-game currency to strictly out-of-game purchases, in Radical Heights currency can be traded in right there on the battlefield for tangible upgrades including armor and ammunition.

When you die, a portion of the money in your inventory is lost, which contributes to the urgent need to stay alive. In one of my first few games I accumulated close to 5,000 virtual dollars. Without anywhere to spend all that dough, I began frantically searching for an in-game ATM so that I could push my ill-gotten gains out to an offshore account for safekeeping. The ability to bank your cash for future rounds adds persistence to the game, which is a neat touch.

Boss Key Production

It seems like everything in Radical Heights is fungible. Even high-level weapons can be tossed into a chipper and converted into hard cash. Then, once you’re out of the game, extra money can be used to purchase cosmetic items that you’ve found in-game. Alternately, you can spend real-world money on “rad gems” which can be used to purchase any cosmetic items you like from the storefront.

I could easily see myself playing round after round, lurking in the shadows and moving from honey pot to honey pot, simply trying to earn as much money as possible.

A dynamic new map

In the battle royale games that we’ve come to know and love over the past few years, there’s always that circle closing in from the edge of the map. Stay outside for too long and you begin to lose health.

Radical Heights comes at the concept it in a slightly different way. The map is divided up into a number of grid squares. As the game progresses, different sections of the map become locked out. That allows the designers much more flexibility in how they move concentrations of players around the map.

Boss Key Productions

Imagine a scenario where two groups of 50 players are each isolated in two different zones on the map. Then, once there are only two players left standing, the remaining zones are suddenly connected. Those two geared up players are essentially given an open runway, clear to launch full-bore at one another for an epic final showdown. It’s easy to see where this game is headed, and with spectator mode enabled from the get-go it has the potential to amp up the drama for those just following along.

In short, it’s a system custom made for high-profile, showpiece matches filled with amazing moments.

To use Boss Key’s own words from the in-game news feed, Radical Height is extremely “janky” right now. But there’s a lot of great design at work in here. Some of these ideas have the potential to move the battle royale genre forward. Now it’s up to developers to keep pace with the audience and finish building this title as quickly — and stably — as possible.