The Indie Informer

It feels like video games have forgotten about camp. In the mid-2000s, everywhere you looked, you’d find titles leaning heavily into the ridiculousness that the medium allows with games like Lollipop Chainsaw, Dead Rising, and Bayonetta. As hyper-serious games about drama and self-reflection have taken over the mainstream, however, it feels like we see fewer games willing to dive head-first into that perfect mix of goofiness and self-aware fun. Luckily, Ra Ra BOOM is here to revive camp, with a premise straight out of ’90s Cartoon Network show and twists on the beat ’em up genre that make the game hard to put down.

Ra Ra BOOM follows the story of four space ninja cheerleaders as they explore what remains of Earth while fighting off a deadly AI and its goons. Right off the bat, the game drops any pretense of seriousness in favor of the sort of wackiness you’d expect from the likes of the Powerpuff Girls or Totally Spies. While I don’t think the dialogue is exactly something to write home about, it doesn’t feel like Ra Ra BOOM is trying to craft a compelling narrative that’s meant to be dissected in video essays over the coming years. It’s an intentional throwback to the stories of over-the-top games like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, or any of the countless licensed arcade beat ’em ups of the ’80s and ’90s.

The focus of Ra Ra BOOM is instead on its combat. The game features the genre’s usual mix of light attacks, heavy attacks, and dodges, but also gives its space ninja cheerleaders guns that they can use to keep enemies engaged while at a distance. The guns add a layer of flexibility to combat by giving me the option to keep the pressure on enemies if they try to escape my punches. Guns also allow players to engage their enemies by chipping away at some of their health as they’re spawning in which opens the floor for even greater efficiency: destroy the robot in front of you, turn around and shoot the smaller, rolling robot that’s coming in from behind, turn back around to face your next close-range foe.

Something Ra Ra BOOM struggles with is variety. You can upgrade attack damage between levels, but save for a small handful of additional attacks and abilities you can purchase in the upgrade menu, the main difference between abilities at the start of the game and abilities at the end of the game is learning to apply them. That said, this isn’t something exclusive to Ra Ra BOOM, this is a common gripe I have with the beat ’em up genre at large. However, I was hoping that Ra Ra BOOM might look for ways to innovate the stagnancy of abilities a little bit more.

That’s not to say Ra Ra BOOM does nothing to innovate the genre. A major frustration I run into with beat ’em ups is when your character is slightly off-axis from the enemy you’re trying to attack, and you waste precious time punching at the air that’s an imperceptible number of pixels in front of them. Ra Ra BOOM gets around this by putting every level on a few set lanes that visually lock every character onto the same axis when they’re standing at roughly the same depth. It’s a really solid way to navigate a common complaint, and the fluid animations make sure that, while you’re technically locked to the grid the entire time, things don’t feel too rigid.

While I found the moveset variety a little disappointing, I do like the overall progression you make with your upgrades. Each time you save up enough spare parts taken off the demolished chassis of your robotic enemies and spend them to increase your health, your attack power, or the distance you knock enemies backwards, you feel like you’ve made meaningful progress and can take on increasingly challenging situations. It feels substantial and makes up for some of the progression problems I have with the game’s limited moveset.

Unfortunately, Ra Ra BOOM sometimes confuses the idea of “challenge” with killing you instantly. I found most of the normal enemy encounters to have a solid balance between being difficult enough to push you to learn the mechanics and enemy attack patterns, and giving you enough breathing room to fight your way out of a tricky situation by the skin of your teeth. However, the bosses you fight at the end of each level are a completely different story. Bosses take out the majority of your character’s health in a single attack and, more often than not, will knock you to the ground, leaving you wide open for being hit a second time, resulting in an instant KO.

It’s never fun to feel like, no matter how skilled you are at a game, there’s just no shot of you getting through an encounter without getting a game over. I wouldn’t mind the challenge that the bosses presented if there was any indication of how I could have improved my performance, but there was not. It felt like most bosses were designed around the idea that they’re going to be taking a huge health tax that you might survive if you’re extremely lucky.

My feelings on the difficulty might have been different if I hadn’t been playing solo and instead had a crew of up to three other players fighting alongside me. The game made no indication playing solo might cause balance issues, which led to frustration.

While the nuances of Ra Ra BOOM’s combat and difficulty are things that stuck out to me, I was willing to forgive a lot thanks to its presentation. The voice acting is great, and the characters frequently sound off during fights to discuss their unique perspective on the world as teenagers who never got to grow up on Earth. There’s a real charm to the game with its catchy title music, appealing art style, and premise that leans on the best aspects of nostalgia without needing to wallow in it. Instead, it uses nostalgia as a jumping-off point to create something entirely new with classic tropes.