A Woeful Lack of Polish
By developer Boss Key’s own admission, Radical Heights is a “janky” package (see the in-game news feed). But while we’ve seen video games successfully iterate and improve from Early Access in the past – most recently and famously, Fortnite Battle Royale – Radical Heights feels like it’s much too rough in its current state to convince us things will turn around any time soon. There’s Early Access, and then there’s rushing a product to capitalize on a genre fad, which is rather what Radical Heights reeks of.
Vehicles and buildings look terribly rough, and some structures lack textures altogether. The shooting mechanics feel rudimentary, absent of any weight and recoil, and we’ve encountered all sorts of bugs when traversing the map. Yes, we expect these kinks can all be worked out in time, but if Boss Key was trying to pull a Fortnite, it completely glazed over a key detail: Fortnite felt polished at launch. Epic spent over five years developing the PvE game, and even though the current battle royale mode has moved things forward dramatically since launch, it was still a joy to play from the first jump out of the Battle Bus.
Certainly, PUBG has its fair share of glitches and technical woes, particularly on Xbox One, but it’s also a much deeper and more technically advanced package on the whole. You simply can’t compare an epic-scale military sim like PUBG to the simplicity of Radical Heights. There’s a gulf in quality between Radical Heights and its competitors that is plain to see.
