Rad Rodgers PC Review

Boy, Rad Rodgers certainly is an oddity. Pitted as a 90s-inspired platform game, this new project from publisher THQ takes all its cues from the weirdest angles that the genre has had to offer. Part Conker’s Bad Fur Day, part rDonkey Kong Country, sprinkled with Metroid elements; the modern release feels trapped in time, quite like the company’s early budget releases. Even the updated visual splendor seems to work mostly against itself. It’s going to take a true fan of nostalgic platform systems to do this game any justice.

To its credit, however, Rad Rodgers just doesn’t phone the nostalgia in with easygoing 16-bit or Nintendo 64 polygons. The world is more reminiscent of something like a modern Donkey Kong game, littered in detail and splattered with glorious lighting and added effects. Behind the foreground, there’s a churning, living environment. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing too, though, as the background can often get in the way of the gameplay, obfuscating threats or paths. It’s a pretty picture, yes, but that’s not the focus above all else; there’s running, jumping and shooting afoot.

 

 

Rad Rodgers does play as intended, to a tee. Each level, Rad and their sidekick Dusty, a curse-slinging game console with sentience, look for four puzzle pieces to advance to the next stage. These items are spread across a non-linear area, where backtracking happens often. As a result, looking for another puzzle piece can sometimes become a chore within itself, as the next route can often be difficult to spot, if it even exists at all. Some paths only open up after other pieces are completed. Luckily, a side effect of running back to old areas is that the exploration bug does lead to miniature secret areas, where extra lives and better weapons can be found.

Finding helpful items may become mandatory, as Rad Rodgers also has platform challenges that need to be conquered time and again, due to the backtracking. Pits and water obstacles fill each level, which return every time Rad comes back to go from looking left to right to right to left. Making matters a lot worse, there’s a limited amount of lives to be had and stages can stretch to half an hour of work. If all lives are depleted, the game will boot Rad back to the start of the level, which can be soul-crushing, especially for a game with a much fluffier design.

Enemies don’t come back once defeated, making it slightly easier to navigate areas. Positioning for these monsters can be tricky to tackle as a whole, however, as a lot of them block a narrow path, where getting hit seems almost inevitable, even with Rad’s gun firing freely in any direction. A pixelverse side-area periodically pops up that plays out like an NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles water level of having to float between narrow corridors and obstacles. Most stages eventually boil down to getting the deed done as soon as possible, given how the time spent and the returning obstacles clash with each other.

 

 

There’s not a lot to Rad Rodgers that breaks the mold of standard platform game tropes. Jump, shoot, explore and move on. Every few stages, gameplay breaks off into a bonus stage. A main area theme gets closed off with a boss fight. Here and there, the game’s style will lift a few elements from its peers, like Crash Bandicoot boxes or Sonic the Hedgehog jump-pad sequences. Now and then, there’s a chuckle to be had that shows that developers are deeply entrenched in the platform genre. At the start of the game, it’s even possible to opt for a foul-mouth option à la Conker. Even if that “mature” mode devolves into the worst-written, laziest form of throwing out four-letter words and references to butt plugs, it does show that this game wants to pay tribute to practically any of its predecessors, as bumbling as the game goes about it.

It’s a shame that Rad Rodgers couldn’t think of anything better to differentiate itself than to reach at any other memorable platform game, because that wears its own credit razor thin. There’s a pretty and functional modern project to be found here, but that’s about it. In fact, more of its attempts at razzle dazzle fall flat than empower the game, but there is a lot of “stuff” thrown inside to try and capture an audience. Liking this game is simply a matter of just how much of that “stuff” matters to someone and that’s going to be a very tight rope to walk upon.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed (@Daavpuke)