Rogue AI has taken over the Earth (topical!) and four space cheerleaders are on a mission to take it back in Ra Ra Boom, a side-scrolling beat ’em up with four player local co-op.
Gameplay takes the form of a fairly run of the mill beat ’em up. You progress down a path, eventually being forced to stop by enemies. Your goal is to make sure they can never leave the hospital again before continuing on. You have a light attack combo, single heavy attack, a special attack that does more damage the more power you charge into it, and a ranged attack. You can control one of four separate characters, which act like extra lives, as death for one allows you to spawn as another.
A unique mechanic in the game is the level layout, which is split into lanes, which you and the enemies must stay within. The upside of this is obvious. You basically are unable to miss an attack by being slightly above an enemy, as is the case with many other beat ’em ups. Scrap from your robotic foes and power-ups also fall within the lanes, meaning that you can pick these up easily.
Once you have finished a level, you can spend the scrap you got from the robots on either small boosts to stats or new abilities. I’d highly recommend luck. It increases your scrap and health drop amounts by a lot, so it will snowball your upgrades and keep you alive. I was fully upgraded by the fourth level. I’d also recommend picking up the dodge skill to move through enemies and hit them from behind.
There’s a bit of shelf-life extension here too, as you can also replay levels with different restrictions, like using only ranged or melee attacks, or just having tougher enemies in general.
However, there are a lot of issues with the game, some big and some small. The biggest issue in my opinion is the heavy attack. For some reason it has a massive delay on it — almost a full second, like it’s waiting for another input. I just ignored it.
I also feel this game has a glaring missed opportunity, especially for no-mate-Michaels. You are unable to swap between characters except on death, which is really annoying as each character offers a tangible difference, especially in their special and ranged attacks. While you might think the girl with the projectile blocking shield might be useful right now, too bad, you’re stuck with the ninja until you lose all your health.
Another missed opportunity is the lane mechanic. Yes, it makes it easier to hit things. Does it do anything else interesting? Not really. None of the new abilities you can buy work in tandem with it, making this feature feel like a way of addressing a beat ’em up genre issue rather than being its own fun mechanic. The most interesting thing that is done with it is turning some sections into an endless-runner-like game where you have to avoid obstacles as you are forced to run forward.
Then there’s also the little stuff, like an inconsistent ‘‘Go’’ arrow. This beat ’em up staple typically shows up in such games once you’ve defeated all of the enemies in a sub-area, letting you know it’s time to move forward. A ‘‘Go’’ arrow does exist in Ra Ra Boom but I could never figure out what triggered it and it doesn’t make a sound, so sometimes I was unaware a fight was finished. Even worse was when it popped up a few times during a fight.
There’s also a few nit-picks, like power-ups not having a display to let you know if they are still active (apart from the trails bullets leave). It’s also quite unbalanced; the fact is that the fully charged super attack just melts boss HP so there’s really no challenge to these battles — and it only gets worse after upgrades.
Ultimately, Ra Ra Boom feels like a beat ’em up that has been stripped down and modernised, but with nothing much interesting really placed back in, despite there being clear ideas around that. The laned design of the levels or playing as multiple characters are interesting concepts that nothing is really done with. As a result, the main gameplay is simple and exploitable and its flaws stick out more because of it. The last bastion of hope for the game would have been the plot, but the characters or story did not really grab my interest at all.
Ra Ra Boom launched on August 13 and you can play the demo on Steam today and see if it is more your speed than mine, or perhaps grab three other friends to blast through this with and see if that ups the fun levels.
- By Michael Robertson
