There are more genres and subgenres of video games these days than you can shake a joystick at. The colorful new adventure RAD, for example, has been classified as a “roguelike” game. But, no, it has nothing to do with a similarly named female hero from the X-Men or that 2016 Star Wars movie. In this case you can think of roguelike as being closer to a single-player, procedurally generated dungeon crawler.
This adventure takes place in an apocalyptic future or alternate reality. But it’s not just any old dystopian hereafter, mind you. This is a tomorrow that’s seen two devastating apocalypses. You know, like a nuclear holocaust coming on the heels of environmental collapse, or something. ‘Cause, as we all know, humanity can never catch a break in these kinds of stories.
Anyway, the aging, gas mask-wearing citizens of this world know that the clock is ticking quickly toward mass extinction. Energy resources are dwindling, the air is unbreathable, the ground is radioactive, and mutated many-eyed monstrosities roam the poisonous land. So the surviving oldsters turn to the only solid resource left: teenagers.
In this bizarre, dark and goofy tale, you play as a teen guy or gal who has stepped forward with a souped-up baseball bat in hand. You’re ready to self-sacrificially journey into the outer Fallows to find, well, some mysterious answers and vital chips or bits that might just save us all.
Gameplay-wise, you’ll be roaming the procedurally generated landscapes; bashing whatever glowing, sharp-toothed and toxin-spewing thingies you encounter; uncovering treasure; and trying to puzzle your way from one level to the next. You pick up two different currencies as you go as well: cassette tapes and floppy discs. Remnants of ’80s-era junk still litter the land for some reason, but you can use that stuff to open certain locks and buy bat upgrades and the like.
It’s your personal upgrades that really power this adventure, though. Since you’re running through a radioactively burning world filled with slathering mutations that often splash glowing goop all over you, it only makes sense that you can absorb that irradiated essence. And your power-ups come in the form of grotesque but useable mutations too. (This is a game called RAD, after all.)
So, at certain points, your exploration and combat yields mutational changes to your avatar form. You might suddenly sprout a cobra-like head that can lash out and chomp at foes. Or your noggin morphs into something closer to a regenerating, smoking-skull grenade that can be thrown at distant enemies.
Or maybe you’ll develop a tape worm that gives special boosts when you eat the meat of globby goonies, or an extra arm with another gun-firing sidekick (arm-kick?) on its end, or perhaps an egg-laying ability that lets you deposit little spider-baby helpers. These outlandish boosts are all random, unexpected and designed to elicit exclamations of gross-but-gleeful joy.
But is this game a joy? (Or, uh, rad?) Well, that depends. RAD invites determined players into a deeper and much bigger challenge than you might expect. The humor can be twisted and quirky, if not really nasty. There’s a bit of occasional bad language that pops up in this T-rated game like an extra head, too. I found uses of “a–” and the s-word in the dialogue mix (both verbal uses and printed text), for instance.
The game’s elevated perspective on onrushing mutant hordes and misshapen big bosses keeps anything resembling blood spray at a distance; but the battling is certainly frenetic, and the baddie-besting can be tough. And when you run out of health points, your character’s death is permanent, forcing you to start a new run.
So the rad factor of RAD will likely come down to what appeals to the gamer mashing the buttons of this colorful, quirky adventure. Or maybe it’ll simply come down to how much glowing, splashing goop Mom will put up with in the family room.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
