Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition is a roguelike twin-stick shooter on Nintendo Switch. Learn more about it in our Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition review!

 

Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition is a roguelike twin-stick shooter, and that means that right from the start this game is not going to be for everyone. The story is pretty weird and funny since the world you live in is under attack by vegetables which have been turned into a bunch of nasties by the aliens. That’s not all since the game world is set within a 1980s VHS video art style, complete with the weird lines across the screen which is something you’d see on VHS tapes that had been damaged from use or that had aged. There are also plenty of references to that era, paying homage to, for example, some of its movies here and there.

Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition will have you traversing through each area as you shoot your way past hordes of vegetables such as cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, parsley, broccoli, carrots, and more. As you defeat them with your melee weapons which are mapped to the right bumper button, and a variety of ammunition based weapons and bombs at your disposal, you will collect keys which will allow you to enter buildings and kill more veggie hordes. Clearing out properties in full will earn you access to a safe to loot, as long as you find a key for it within the building.

Not only that but killing the hordes will earn you coins as well, and they drop so many coins that it’s pretty easy to rack up over a thousand coins in a very short space of time! But what you want are the pink crystals which you earn from defeating bosses. Saving up these pink crystals will give you access to some pretty awesome big guns. If you want to see every gun that the game has to offer, you’re going to end up playing this one for a while depending on how lucky you are with you are with getting keys, as the key drops are rather random. Each run you do lasts about an hour or so give or take a few minutes, so if you’re the type of gamer that will 100% a game, then you’re in for a long one!

 

At the start of each run and until you progress to a checkpoint, you will have a simple weapon with infinite ammo and a basic melee weapon, like a baseball bat or police baton. If you die you will go back to the very beginning of that area, but after you clear an area and progress to the next one and die, you simply restart from that one, so that your effort is not for nothing. So if you’re in trouble and are feeling overwhelmed by enemies, be sure to just soldier on to the end so that you don’t have to give it another go.

As for the weapon variety, there is every weapon imaginable plus some weird ones like the ChilliGun which spits fire – my favorite weapon. It is really unfortunate that only two weapons can only be equipped at any given time, which I think is a bit unfair considering there are so many weapons to choose from, so having a wider variety of available weapons at any given time would have been great. Sure, you do have a weapons wheel which you can access easily with the ZL button, but there is a reward for not using the weapons wheel in the first place, which is why I felt having more than two weapons slots right away would be very useful as you go.

 

Some roguelikes will have skills you can keep for future runs, and for this game, you have that with a twist. The skills are presented in the form of challenges, with things such as completing the game without dying to unlock a new skill that you can use at your next run to make it easier for you. There are a total of 22 skills to unlock, so you do have a lot of challenges to complete! And once you complete your first area, you will get a map which you can access at any time, showing your current location and where all the loot and enemies are, which is handy to have at your disposal. The none minor complaint I’d have about this is that a mini-map in the corner of the screen would have been even more helpful, but this is not a deal-breaker.

Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition is a fun twin-stick roguelike on Nintendo Switch that will definitely scratch that roguelike itch. So if you’re a fan of the genre be sure to give this colorful release a go so that you can take on some deadly vegetables that are up to no good and which must be defeated at all cost.

Disclaimer
This Walking Vegetables: Radical Edition review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by Merge games.