Radikal Fighters (PS5) Review

 

Radikal Fighters is an isometric Battle Royale Game with a twist. Similar to Pacman, the map of Radikal Fighters is packed with hundreds of little dots. Collecting these dots will allow you to purchase items and weapons from vending machines or purchase a respawn after an early demise.

Unfortunately that's about it with the interesting ideas in this game. The gameplay in Radikal Fighters is overall quite underwhelming. You can only move diagonally in the different lanes of the ugly map, which is quite limiting and gives the movement a disappointing feeling. Even worse however is the gunplay. On a gamepad the controls are unnecessary convoluted. You can for example not shoot directly by pressing the attack button, but need to aim with the right analog stick for any shot to register. Nothing in the game however tells you that and there is obviously also no tutorial for new players. Therefore around half of the very few players, I ever encountered in this game, were unable to fight back and just moved around weirdly while swinging their melee weapons towards the air. You can also not aim freely, but just in set degrees, which is of course also quite limiting.

The game features Solo, Duo and Squad Battle Royale matches and an additional Paint Royale mode, which plays like a mix of Splatoon and Pacman. The team which covers the most dots in their team's colour will win the match. It doesn't really matter however which gamemode you choose, since the game doesn't have anything that resembles a playerbase. The lobbies could feature matches with 50 players. The most players I ever encountered was 4 and that included me and a friend of mine. Most of the time you can't even play, since you will be the only player playing this game (despite Crossplay between Playstation 5 and PC). There are also no Bots in the game, even though you can encounter infinitely respawning Zombies during the matches, but they certainly can't save the game either.

I don't want to always criticize the visuals of low budget games, but for a Playstation 5 game, the character designs are rather embarrassing.

 

Result:

Radikal Fighters has an interesting twist, but the Pacman concept doesn't manage to save this game. If you take the dot collecting aspect out of the game, than you are just left with a noticeably under-average isometric shooter without players. Movement and gunplay are too weak to carry this game.

 

3/10