Radical Heights

Radical Heights is a free-to-play third-person battle royale shooter set inside a fictional 1980s television game show dome in sunny Southern California, where up to 100 contestants drop in, scavenge for weapons and gadgets, and compete to be the last one standing. The game's central distinguishing mechanic was a persistent cash system: money earned by killing other players and participating in game show events such as prize wheels and cash grabs carried over between matches, allowing players to spend it on weapons from vending machines at the start of future rounds, theoretically rewarding consistent players with early advantages. Players could traverse the map on BMX bikes, use gadgets including trampolines and inflatable decoys, and compete in a shrinking grid zone system rather than the circle closure model popularized by PUBG and Fortnite. The concept had genuine personality, but the execution was so unfinished at launch that most observers treated it less as a game and more as a public display of a studio in distress.

Radical Heights was not a game built from creative ambition. It was a survival move. Following LawBreakers' catastrophic commercial failure in 2017, Boss Key co-founder Arjan Brussee quietly left the studio in December to return to Epic Games, where he would work on Fortnite's mobile version. With the studio's finances deteriorating and no clear path forward for LawBreakers, Cliff Bleszinski pivoted the remaining team to build a battle royale game in approximately five months, rushing it onto Steam Early Access on April 10, 2018, with almost no prior announcement. The reveal and release happened within 24 hours of each other.

The game launched in a visibly unfinished state that even its own marketing acknowledged, billing itself as "X-Treme Early Access" in a self-aware nod to how rough the product was. Despite the barebones presentation, the 1980s game show aesthetic and the presence of prominent streamers, including Ninja, generated a brief wave of interest. But the novelty evaporated within days. Radical Heights was entering a battle royale market that Fortnite had already locked up completely, offering nothing mechanically or aesthetically compelling enough to pull players away from an established, free, and continuously updated competitor. Player counts fell sharply within the first week and never recovered.

On May 14, 2018, just 34 days after Radical Heights launched, Bleszinski announced that Boss Key Productions was effectively finished. He described LawBreakers as a game that "failed to gain traction" and Radical Heights as a last-ditch attempt that came "a little too late." Servers remained online briefly before going dark on July 8, 2018, less than three months after the game's release. Radical Heights never left Early Access, never received a full release, and was never formally reviewed. It exists as a postscript to the LawBreakers story rather than a game in its own right.