It’s been an exciting 24 hours for Radical Heights, the brand new free-to-play battle royale shooter from LawBreakers studio Boss Key Productions. Within the previous day, the sport has been introduced, trailered and launched into Early Access, however not earlier than turning into embroiled in a short-lived pay-to-win controversy. Unsurprisingly, it’s not been the smoothest of launches both, with gamers at present as more likely to wind up caught in a tangled heap of limbs within the foyer as positioned in a match.
Somehow, Boss Key managed to court docket controversy earlier than Radical Heights was as a result of launch, via the announcement that the Founder’s Pack pre-order bundle for the sport would come with a lifetime 10% persistent money booster. The key twist of the sport, outdoors of it’s ’80s game-show stylings, is you can money out a portion of your prize-money takings from every spherical, win or lose, and use them in later matches to offer your self an early enhance via gun merchandising machines. It’s not arduous to see why giving a small subset of gamers this perk could be a questionable determination. Thankfully, Boss Key backed down from this move and as a substitute provide a further bundle of Rad Gems to Founder’s Pack gamers, a premium foreign money used to purchase purely beauty costume items.
So far, I’ve managed to get into one and a half matches. My first was a solo-queue spherical the place I encountered no actual technical issues, however discovered my journey via this impressively cheesy retro game-show world lower brief about ten seconds in by a headshot from an unseen assailant. Somehow, I managed to financial institution $71 in my persistent account regardless of this. My second match was much less profitable, as you possibly can see within the screenshot up prime. The match started as regular, however didn’t teleport the gamers into the sport map, inflicting them to spawn on prime of one another in wingsuit poses within the foyer room.
Eventually, the tangled mess of limbs started to wiggle itself free and gamers started in search of weapons. Some discovered them. Others simply took to beating their fellow gamers to dying bare-handed. I bounced off a trampoline as much as a excessive ledge the place I lay in a nook on the highest flooring, laughing and ready for dying. So far, so good then. Further makes an attempt to leap right into a match left me caught, seemingly endlessly, on a loading display screen. A information ticker within the recreation encourages gamers to ‘Embrace the jank’. I really feel that it has embraced me already, and I might fairly prefer it to let go, please.
While that is merely conjecture, I’ve bought some issues concerning the monetary stability of the studio. It’s no secret that LawBreakers tanked, one thing that few studios can afford, and Boss Key Productions have been eager to reiterate that in contrast to their Nexon-backed earlier recreation, Radical Heights is a wholly self-published title. In brief, the studio are shouldering any and all monetary dangers on this one. It’s a dangerous gambit for the studio, headed up by former Epic lead Cliff ‘Don’t Call Me Cliffy B’ Bleszinski, and one which I hope pays off for the sake of everybody working there. This one would possibly take some time to seek out its footing, although.
If you’re feeling like a winner, or simply curious, you possibly can grab Radical Heights free via Steam here. It’s a comparatively light-weight 2.2gb obtain, though it decompresses to round twice that. Technical points apart, it must be famous that at current, solely male avatars can be found.
