Ra Ra Boom Preview

Ra Ra Boom calls to the kid inside of little old me; I grew up playing scrolling beat-em-ups like Streets of age and Double Dragon, and more modern fare like Castle Crashers, and they are rarely any less than a good time. So when Ra Ra Boom popped into my inbox, I couldn’t wait to check it out. It’s got style and flare for days, and the four levels on offer in this preview (out of nine in the full release) are varied well in their designs and mechanics. I’m not totally sold on the feel of the combat though, but things did improve towards the end of the preview thanks to several upgrades we acquired.

A four player, co-op title, Ra Ra Boom lets us choose from four distinct ninja space cheerleaders; Aris, Ren, Vee, and Saida. The each feel different to play, from speed to damage and move set, and can be swapped in and out upon each death in game. I personally preferred Aris’ style, while my daughter went for Ren who was slightly faster but with a weaker ranged attack. I do like that each have their quirks as it gives player choice more meaning than simply who looks the coolest.

While they may feel different in action, the base set of moves is identical across the board; light and heavy melee, a charged up special, and a ranged firearm. In theory this lets us play it as either a brawler or shooter, but realistically we’re going to need a little bit of both.

Partly, this is due to the lane system in play. As you can see in the screenshots, the ground is segmented into horizontal lines (nicely integrated into the design of each stage might I add). While we have free movement, we’ll always be within one of these lanes when we stop moving, as will the enemy. In theory, it makes one of the ages old problems of 2D beat-em-ups specifically far easier to navigate as we always can tell which lane we’re attacking on. So lining up ranged attacks is simpler, but also dropping our level filling special is more accurate too.

Where my initial hurdle with Ra Ra Boom came though was that it doesn’t feel super fluid in the heat of a fight. Even with the lanes in place it can still be easy to flick to the wrong one and miss an attack, and enemy reactions to being hit go from stun locked to smacking us back with no in-between. I would have an enemy in my combo unable to move, but before I’d finished they suddenly were able to counter and there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it (initially). The fighting is visually great, with lots of flashy animations and colours, but this can also hide attacks, so much so both my daughter and I didn’t even realise we’d died several times but were still mashing to attack to no avail. It just feels like it’s missing a small touch of feedback in combat, something like an obvious sound effect when we die, or more of a warning when enemies are about to counter.

Other than this niggle, the combat is fun to engage with. The special charges up with attacks fairly quickly, and we’re rarely left in one area for more than a few seconds to fend off enemies before moving on. Level design is top notch, each looking and feeling distinct, our favourite being the amusement park area. These can be replayed with different ‘homework assignments’; though in this preview they weren’t fully implemented, in the final game there’ll be up to four different assignments to complete on each stage.

One reason to play them regardless are the upgrades. Collecting dropped scrap from defeated enemies lets us spend it in the store for things like more health, better firepower, or new moves like a dodge or aerial attack. We managed to buy all of the available skills and upgrade our stats fairly significantly in this two hour slice, and once we’d done so the combat’s issues definitely felt less noticeable. For one, the dodge move let us get out of harms way far quicker (though still not quite far enough), and upgrading our health and damage made lighter work of the trickier foes. It does feel like we should have had some of these from the beginning (the control scheme mentions dodging, but not that we don’t have it from the off), but again it’s fairly quick to get hold of the upgrades as long as we can make it to the end of the level without losing all our lives.

Our initial issues aside with the combat feel, we’re keen to see the final form of Ra Ra Boom and whether more upgrades and tweaking can elevate it to a standard that will challenge it’s peers. There’s certainly fun to be had, and with up to four players the on screen carnage will no doubt get very hectic indeed.

This game was previewed on PC (via Steam). All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by the publisher.