Radiant starts off with a typical story, your sister is kidnapped and it’s your job to save her. First impressions weren’t very positive as the animations were off and the camera was too zoomed in on my 1440p monitor (this can luckily be changed). The game does get better with time, it can even get very addictive thanks to the progression systems and the satisfying controls. The story and writing were entertaining enough to keep me engaged. The graphics can be charming and I appreciate there being distinctive biomes with their own themes. There are some songs that were pretty catchy. Most of the achievements were fun to get too.

There are some weird bugs though. Most are minor but they do add to the negative impression of the game not being very polished. The one that annoyed me the most is my game crashing/freezing during a dialogue with the last boss. It kept happening, the only solution I found was quickly skipping that dialogue and hoping I would get lucky the next time. Next we need to talk about the repetitiveness of the environments and gameplay. Even though the biomes have different themes, they each have multiple levels and those levels don’t change much throughout a biome. You also move from left to right the entire time and all you do is fight the same enemies again. The repetitiveness is saved by the addictive fights but more could have been done to make the game feel more varied. Lastly, there are 2 super grindy achievements. One requires a certain material to forge all equipment at the blacksmith and the other you need to defeat 10k enemies. Even though I wasn’t fond of the former achievement, I could still stomach it. The latter though, I was working on it for a bit but I couldn’t after a while. I literally have no desire to keep beating enemies not knowing how many I have left and being done with everything else. The devs patched the game a couple of weeks ago to add a roguelike mode but I have no idea if that mode counts that achievement and whether the current progress I’ve built is shared. I’ve asked the developer this question but I have yet to receive an answer. If the answer is yes then it would have been enough to continue with roguelike, but I’m not going to try blindly.

Radiant is an okay game but the main mode could have been better. The repetitiveness and bugs get in the way of having a fully positive experience. It’s a shame because you can clearly see the passion and effort in so many different ways. The fights are cool, they remind me of the feeling you get of playing some of the older Dynasty Warrior games. I can still recommend it on a sale if you’re looking for a relaxing and turn your brain off time. It took me around 12 hours to get all the achievements except for the defeat 10k one.