Rad Rodgers - Radical Edition

My first honest reaction to Rad Rodgers: Radical Edition was a kind of warm recognition, the feeling of stumbling across a cassette tape you forgot you owned. This is a side-scrolling run-and-gun platformer built to channel the irreverent energy of late DOS and early 16-bit platformers, and it wears that ambition loudly. You play as Rad, a kid sucked into his own game, accompanied by Dusty, his now-sentient console sidekick voiced by Jon St. John (the actual voice of Duke Nukem). Dusty straps to Rad's back, flings mechanical arms at close-range enemies, and provides a near-constant stream of expletive-laced commentary. There is a censored mode if you need it, but the adult humour is genuinely the most alive part of the experience. The Radical Edition layers a fair amount of content onto what was originally a leaner package. You get around nine main levels, eight minigame interludes between them (pinball, a pogo-stick vertical climber called Pogo Vertigo, and a "Dusty Says" reflex stage), a competitive Battle Mode, and two-player couch co-op. Guest characters including Duke Nukem and Lo Wang from Shadow Warrior are unlockable, each with their own Dusty-equivalent special slam ability. The Bolt Blaster handles unlimited ammo duties as your baseline weapon, while pickups like the Phoenix Cannon and rapid-fire upgrades rotate through your loadout temporarily. A coloured ammo bar on the side of your gun tracks your supply. The Pixelverse sections are the game's cleverest wrinkle: only Dusty can enter this glitched space behind the level geometry, repairing broken segments of the world so Rad can proceed. They break the side-scrolling rhythm just enough to feel inventive without overstaying their welcome. Where the game frays is in exactly the places its inspirations never let slide. The platforming is pressure-sensitive and generally workable, but the visual noise makes it genuinely hard to read which surfaces interact with the player and which are background dressing. Rad clambering onto ledges you did not intend, or sliding into thorn pits hidden in the busy foreground, is a recurring friction rather than a deliberate design challenge. The first half of the game is comfortably paced; the second half produces punishing difficulty spikes that feel less like earned escalation and more like the level design forgot to communicate the rules. Losing all three lives late in the game means replaying stages that can run close to half an hour, which stings. Repetition is a word that circles every review of this title for good reason: the one-liners recycle, the enemy types thin out, and the item-hunt structure of four keys per level eventually starts to feel mechanical. With that said, the soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult is genuinely good, a MIDI-inflected, synthesizer-forward score that earns the nostalgia it reaches for without feeling like a pastiche. The Pixar-adjacent art style pops in screenshots and holds up reasonably well in motion. The game runs to completion in around four to five hours if you push through without chasing collectibles, which is short but at least honest about its scope. The couch co-op adds warmth to a package that can feel solitary and repetitive in solo play. The 73 Metacritic score is probably fair: this is a game that functions, has genuine charm in its humour and soundtrack, and mostly fails to distinguish itself where its mechanical inspirations were sharpest.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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