Radical Heroes: Crimson City Crisis is an unabashed ripoff of a Nintendo Entertainment System game, River City Ransom (copyright Technos Japan, 1989), but it should be known to date Technos Japan haven't taken any legal action against Apogee (although Apogee have removed this game from sale, presumably pre-empting any legal defense of Technos Japan's intellectual property rights).
Differentiating slightly from River City Ransom, the game is played on a 3D rendered 2D plane. This adds remarkably little to the generic console/arcade brawler style gameplay, and while this is wholly a ripoff of River City Ransom, it's also shallower, as the general upgrade/progression system of the brawler is dumbed down (and it's unclear why anyone would need to dumb down a console game... was Apogee's target audience rocks? Or farmyard animals?).
The game features lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets with 2D retro pixel "art" textures plastered on them, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The graphics are worse than Wolfenstein 3D from the 1990's, something Apogee should be familiar with given their ancient links to iD software. See how far they have fallen. The 2D retro pixel textures are a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game, especially given Apogee's AAA lineage. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 50,000 games for gamers to choose from (over 9,000 completely free titles), the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Radical Heroes: Crimson City Crisis was removed from Steam by Apogee for reasons we can only speculate on (avoiding legal repurcussions from stealing someone else's game might have something to do with it). This is still understandable given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Apogee should know better than to publish this kind of garbage.
