Radical Rabbit Stew Xbox One X Review

Radical Rabbit Stew starts as a full loving game, with frantic puzzles and charming visuals until you realize you’re entire goal is to smack rabbits into giant pots. With each stage designed with agility in mind as a lone chef not only pots deadly rabbits but avoids cannons, bombs, and zombies to rescue his friends from a petty rabbit queen. Radical Rabbit Stew is a short but active adventure through colorful worlds that encourages you to keep moving.
 

The story has the Rabbit Queen abducting space chefs from their space diner because she was jealous of the incredible food they made. Tired of eating the same plain vegetables the queen’s perfectly reasonable response is to have her minions to attack the Space Diner and kidnap the chefs. As the only chef left you to embark on a journey to save your friends from the Rabbit Queen and defeat her followers.

The protagonist will travel through 3 worlds full of action focused puzzle levels, boss fights, and occasionally obtain upgrades ranging from new spoons to more health. The stages start off basic, showing you how to complete levels, use new tools, and reach the end goal. All of these abilities are put to use for some hectic puzzles. With the goal of potting rabbits remaining the same throughout.

You’ll use your spoon to whack the rabbits and propel them into pots scattered around the stage. This sounds simple but over time new mechanics are introduced and add to the complexity of completing these tasks. This includes propelling rabbits through curved sections of the map, variants of rabbits being added to the enemy pool, and environmental hazards such as bombs, cannons, and breakable barriers. The different types of rabbits provide new obstacles such as explosive rabbits that detonate, Fat Rabbits that require a charged attack, or racing Rabbits that move quicker than average bunnies. The game combines all of these into frenetic trials where you must manage whacking rabbits into pots and navigating the stage to avoid being hit.
 

Levels are quick and frantic, focusing more on high amounts of quick challenges instead of long puzzles. Each stage contains a variety of precision-based timed puzzles where you have to clock your strikes. Rabbits can be stunned with a single strike and propelled in a certain direction, with repeated hits killing the rabbit to prevent you from spamming your attack. Eventually, you gain access to a grappling hand to grab rabbits from a distance and cross gaps, a giant spoon for heavy and large strikes, and creating bombs. All of these are properly used in the puzzles following their introduction with more elaborate situations presented. Despite the increasing amount of tools the puzzles never become overwhelming. You can look at the stage and quickly understand what is required of you based on the tools most predominant use.

Puzzles are quick and to the point. Since rabbits play a key role in progressing they respawn very quickly after death, encouraging trial and error to figure out what to do. Despite the rabbits being key to the progressing they’ll attack you on sight. There are no health pickups or mid-checkpoints so once you die you’ll have to start over. This isn’t a harsh punishment since every stage has been designed to be completed between 30 seconds and 2 minutes and when killed load times are very quick.

Stages are short and each level is designed with momentum and speed in mind. This use of constant movement is complemented with obstacles such as high-speed bumpers to increase your speed and hostile dangers such as bombs. That persistent need to move creates the illusion that you’re moving quicker than you actually are. The chef isn’t fast but with how the stages are designed it makes it seem that he is.
 

 

You’ll need to evade the many environmental hazards and enemies as they become increasingly difficult and numerous. The environmental hazards range from bombs, lava, deep water, and giant slabs of stone. The enemies come in a healthy variety of rabbits ranging from the traditional white rabbits, explosive rabbits, zombies, bat-rabbits, and heavily armored ones. Since the chef’s invulnerability period after being hit is short you can lose your health very quickly so you have to take enemy counts seriously or you’ll end up dead.

Controls are precise but hitting targets can be fickle. Since you can stand between 2 surfaces when between them you can often miss the target and slide to the other tile. It’s not a major issue but it can become annoying during speed runs. Which this game strongly encourages.

The entire game was made with speed in mind, with achievements linked to completing the game in 1-2 hours but doing so will be tough. While not challenging the hectic puzzle design can become overwhelming especially when explosives are added to the mix. Often you’ll get hit from the overwhelming number of enemies on the screen if you’re not paying attention. With some stages having so many explosions and rabbits flying around it can be crushing.
 

Each world has a couple of boss encounters that take advantage of the chef’s abilities. These are simple affairs and do break up the puzzle levels by offering something to break up the puzzle-focused levels. These fights can get hectic as bosses often require quick reactions to avoid being hit from multiple points but mostly are easy to manage affairs.

The levels seem perfect for individual rankings found such as timed or a star rating but that feature is not here. Given the game’s quick level design and focus on speed this would’ve been ideal. There are optional blue coins to collect if you wish to return to older stages but if these were linked to a rating system picking them up would’ve been more alluring. Often they’re placed in challenging situations such as by the final pot. Once you pot the final rabbit the stage ends so you need to collect the coin before then.

Once you complete the campaign there are other options to take part in. The first being a stage editor that allows those creative enough to create unique stages using all the same assets the developers used. I lack that creativity but the options are plentiful and since you have access to mostly everything, the exception being bosses, you can make some interesting levels. It’s strange that you cannot share them though.
 

If you wish to showcase your competitive chef nature you can play the multiplayer mode. Up to 4 players compete in potting the most rabbits while also attacking other chefs. It’s fun for a couple of games but lacks any meaningful progression system or variety to keep players playing.

The visuals are incredible. These are 16-bit animations and they’re done very well. Character models, especially bosses, look amazing and lively. The wide color palette definitely complements the bright atmosphere and the musical score gets you in the mood for some high-speed rabbit combat. This is especially apparent in the game’s world map that looks absolutely exceptional but I did wish you could’ve teleported to specific levels instead of manually having to travel there on the map.
 

Radical Rabbit Stew is short but delivers a solid 2-3 hour adventure built for speedrunning. The quick puzzle focused levels offer enough dynamic diversity with each new stage. The multiplayer option is a bit lacking due to the lack of a progression system but the level building offers a lot of options to showcase your creativity. Radical Rabbit Stew is a fun and short adventure great for short burst or speedrunning.
 

Adam Siddiqui,
Managing Editor, NoobFeed
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