The video game industry may be on seemingly permanent fire, but there are a few bright spots, one of which is that we’re in a golden age of beat-’em-ups.
It’s tempting to attribute that to Dotemu’s 2020 revival of Streets of Rage, which did give the genre a big shot of adrenaline, but several different studios had been keeping the home fires lit beforehand. You could point to weird hybrids here like Dungeon Fighter Online, or more classic takes on the old arcade/console formula, such as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, River City Girls, The Takeover, Fight’n Rage, or whatever other indie brawler you’d prefer I had mentioned.
Ra Ra Boom, a new 4-player beat-’em-up from a bunch of first-time developers in Cincinnati, is closer to the classic arcade feel. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon of a game that’s distinctly aimed at teenage girls, with a forgiving difficulty curve and a likable cast of characters. It might be too shallow for longtime fans of the genre, but Ra Ra Boom has a lot going for it as an entry-level brawler.
20 years before the start of Ra Ra Boom, humanity was forced off of Earth by an out-of-control AI called Zoi. A full generation of humans has grown up in an off-world colony, aware that Zoi is still out there and that it plans to finish the job someday.
Aris, Vee, Ren, and Saida are four teenagers from the colony who are training to join its special forces. One afternoon, their gym time is interrupted by a sudden attack from Zoi. They get away in an escape pod, which crashes on the surface of Zoi-occupied Earth. With no way back to the colony, Aris decides to lead her friends on a last-ditch attack against Zoi’s headquarters.
Initially, Ra Ra Boom is a pretty classic beat-’em-up. All four characters get a light/heavy attack, a weak ranged weapon with infinite ammunition, and a slow-to-charge special attack that can chunk entire waves of robots at once. There’s some variance between characters, but it’s relatively subtle, and seems to mostly involve their special attack pattern. (Saida gets to blow up everything within 200 yards of herself, while Ren inexplicably fires her special attack off at a strange diagonal. Ren clearly slept through what turned out to be an important class.)
The first level is about as tough as Ra Ra Boom ever gets, since you don’t have access to its upgrade system yet. You gradually accumulate scrap as you beat up robots, which can be spent between levels for passive stat upgrades, a couple of new abilities, and better combo routes. That lets you get a little creative about how you fight, with options like aerial launchers or specialized ammunition, but your characters rapidly end up feeling like they’re a little too powerful for what they’re trying to do.
On the one hand, that does mean that Ra Ra Boom dodges the “damage sponge” problem that’s common to indie beat-’em-ups, where every enemy feels like they’ve got twice as much health as they should.
On the other, once you’ve got a few crucial upgrades under your belt, Ra Ra Boom might as well roll the credits. By its halfway point, it’s only equipped to challenge you under particular and specific circumstances, usually by making some obnoxious exception to its own rules. For example, you regenerate health in the field with drops from wrecked robots, so any boss that doesn’t have backup is distinctly tougher than the ones that do.
The really irritating enemies are the robots that can reverse your controls for short periods of time. Early on, this isn’t much more than an inconvenience, but then you get hit with it in the last level during an elaborate platforming sequence. That sends Ra Ra Boom off on a weird note, as it’s one of those games that suddenly changes all its rules for its last fight.
I’d be more annoyed with it as a whole, but there’s an overall charm to Ra Ra Boom that makes it hard to dislike. It’s like the video game adaptation of a lost ‘90s cartoon show, with a likable cast of characters who go through their own simple but distinct arcs over the course of the game. Ra Ra Boom reminds me of the slightly weird end of ‘90s kids’ programming, like “Exosquad” or “Mighty Max,” that was allowed to have the faintest hint of an edge.
In the end, Ra Ra Boom is easy, cheerful, and accessible, but has a few irritating gimmicks that hold it back. Any hardcore fan of arcade brawlers will probably be bored by it, but Ra Ra Boom’s great if you need something to play with newbies or kids.
[Ra Ra Boom, developed and published by Gylee Games, is now available for PlayStation 4&5, Xbox, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store for $19.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a Gylee Games PR representative.]
