With Fortnite being so immensely popular right now, and its predecessors “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” and “H1Z1” also being some of the most-played games on Steam, it’s no surprise that there’s yet another Hunger Games-style game and it surely won’t be the last.

Radical Heights, by developer Boss Key, who brought us LawBreakers, is a Battle Royale game set in the style of an 80s TV game show. When you start up the game you are greeted by Chuck Newburn, who “once scaled the Empire State building naked, with nothing but a bow-tie”. For winning a game you’re promised a life-time supply of hair gel, cash or even a cassette player.

Now for the game itself, it really is as Early Access as can be, which is to be expected after only five months of development. There’s whole buildings completely without any textures, there’s occasional invisible doors and sometimes door steps are too high forcing you to unnecessarily jump into buildings.

Considering how early it is and compared to other games in the genre, the gun-play actually feels very refined and I’ve personally found only very few flaws. Bullets actually have to travel; they’re not instant, and there’s bullet drop. In terms of balancing, I’m not sure whether they have to go through some balancing with the shotgun or if I’m just used to it being broken and not working very well in other games, who knows. Melee attacks also seem very strong, three hits and you’re gone, which isn’t too unlikely when multiple people drop in the same place at the start of a game.

One of my favorite mechanics of the game is that there’s no fall damage at all. This might be surprising to some people, especially in the first game when you’re free falling to the ground and panicking trying to figure out what the key bind for the parachute is. It’s very fun and even liberating not having to worry about taking fall damage any time you drop from somewhere slightly higher up.

There’s random events that change every game which also help keeping the gameplay fresh. There’s a bike race where you have to get to a specific spot, get on the bike and race to the finish line in the set time for special loot. There’s an event called money drop that produces random circles on the map where it rains down money or you could get huge spinning wheels dropping somewhere, which you get to stop and you’re awarded with random prizes. You can find random “mystery doors”, which you have to stand in front of for a few seconds and once it opens you get rewarded with anything from guns and ammo to cash prizes.

I’ve been mentioning cash but if you’re not familiar with the game you won’t know why it’s important. If you happen to be very unlucky and not find any loot, or only bad loot, you can instead go to vending machines which are spread throughout the map and buy your weapons and armor there. Players that play a lot have an advantage because you get to keep a part of the money you earned or found, which means they can withdraw it from ATMs, which are also at various locations. If you want to play it safe you can also instead deposit your money, in an “offshore bank” account.

All these elements make for fun ways to acquire loot or if you play it smart, get easy kills while enemies try to make use of them. Another thing I like which Radical Heights does different is that you can actually heal back up to full health with regular bandages. In games like PUBG and Fortnite for example, you can only heal up to a specific point with bandages and then have to use other, higher-grade items to heal to the full one-hundred percent. There are med kits too which heal more at once but they’re not required to fully heal you back up.

Whether it’s poison or an electric storm, there’s always a mechanic that constricts the area of play after some time to keep the game going and force players into smaller areas. In the aforementioned games it’s a circle, yet this is another thing Radical Heights does different. Instead of a circle, random tiles on the map get locked and that makes for interesting situations. The tiles first get marked with a yellow shade, which means you need to get ready to leave soon if you’re inside one, because as soon as that timer runs out that shade is going to turn red and you will immediately take damage.

If you survive for long enough you’ll make it to the Shootout Showcase. All tiles close down except for one and a big dome drops down and gradually makes the circle smaller creating very tense situations.

There can be slow, quiet times which can be fixed by closing the grids down sooner, or more random elements. I would prefer having a smaller, more 80s-feeling map though, as currently this map doesn’t seem like it’s from that era at all. A leveling or progression system would also be a great addition to improve replayability.

With all that being said, I’m very excited for how this game is going to develop in the next few months. If you’re a fan of Battle Royale games, or even if you’ve never tried one, give Radical Heights a chance. The positives outweigh the negatives by far, so with the game being free-to-play there’s nothing lost by downloading the game and giving it a try for a couple rounds.