Suddenly it occurred to me that
Radix would have made a nice companion to
Dark Forces in the
Star Wars universe. At least, some visuals are quite similar, and I wouldn't be much surprised if they were in fact intentional.
TBH, initially I wasn't very eager to try
Radix out as usually I prefer "walking" FPS games to the flying ones. However, when I played it a bit (shareware version 2.0, which removes the unstoppable forced forward movement), I found the game quite entertaining. My opinion, however, is that the often-cited parallels with
Descent aren't that much justified - as leilei says this feels more like piloting a glider, or like
Duke Nukem 3D with a jetpack permanently turned on. The similarity is further reinforced by the fact that the graphics engine is quite comparable to Ken Silverman's Build, with sloped surfaces and such.
What's a good thing about
Radix in my opinion is that it's overall quite polished, and the design of the game if very obviously thought out rather thoroughly. The palette doesn't assault you with wild colours, the interface is quite friendly, and there are the tiny details here and there like the entire map of the level that is shown during each briefing (the first episode takes place within the human installation after all), or the "photographs" of the current mission objectives you can check at any time. The level design also allows for some substantial variety, and offers numerous rewards to exploration-minded players; there are plenty of secrets in addition to the various mission objective-related areas. In fact,
Radix can be said to stand out among similar-themed shooters because each level has specific primary and secondary mission objectives as opposed to simply blasting through a level to the exit. Another neat feature is that interactive (read: destructible) objects are highlighted in the HUD, making the search for switches and suchlike things (usually computer terminals to be destroyed) much easier.
With all that said,
Radix is certainly not a breakthrough in the genre. I'm afraid it's the forced forward motion that really ruined the fun (and popularity) of the game - no wonder it was eventually removed by the developers, but probably not too soon to fix the matters. Other than that, the game has a noticeable degree of variation, a substantial arsenal of weapons and powerups to try out, decent (albeit sometimes rather dark) graphics and music, all wrapped in a none-too-original plot (basically a variation of the
Doom back-story). I'd say it deserves a place among the good quality "
Doom clones", but it's probably a good idea to play the
Version 2.0 REMIX, which not only turns forced movement off by default, but also features updates to graphics, sounds and level design.
