Title: Immortal Redneck
Available On: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Developer: Crema
Publisher: Crema
Genre: First-Person Shooter, Rogue-like
Official Site: www.immortalredneck.com
Release Date: April 25, 2017 (PC); February 26, 2018 (PS4, Xbox One)
Where To Buy: PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace, Steam
The name of a game has a unique way of giving you a glimpse of what you’re in for. Take Batman: Arkham City for example; it’s predecessor had you, Batman, cleaning up the mess of the Joker at Arkham Asylum. It’s sequel’s title gives a pretty good impression that now you’ll be cleaning up the streets of a city sized disaster. Other names give you all the information you need out of the gate.
Immortal Redneck from Crema Studios is a rogue-like first-person shooter that places you in the shoes of your average, everyday redneck on vacation in Egypt. Unfortunately, after a fatal accident during his dune buggy rides through the sandy hills, he falls into a cursed tomb and becomes locked in a sequence of life and death. It is here that the player picks up the pieces of this poor redneck’s life and attempts to break the cycle holding him.
You play as this immortal redneck, who finds that the only way out of his current circumstances is to unlock every floor of the pyramids by destroying the creatures inside and climbing his way to victory. The biggest issue with the game is found right here: I’ve now told you everything about the story that the game provides. With this little information, you enter the pyramid, kill some baddies, maybe climb a staircase to another level, then inevitably die. Then, you do it all over again.
Why would you continue to play? Because the biggest benefit the game has is that it’s fun to do so. After your first death, as with most rogue-likes, you gain the ability to upgrade yourself and your ability to survive via the materials and coins you collected within the pyramid. Then you reenter and try to collect more and get even farther than you did previously. Maybe you find a blueprint or some new guns, maybe you die in the first room you step into.
Fortunately, the game feels like Quake had a baby with Binding of Isaac. The first-person shooting feels comfortable and familiar, even when the game throws a variety of weapons like handguns, grenade launchers, and ancient Egyptian artifacts at you. The movement feels comfortable, fast, and fluid. The rooms can vary from familiar small corridors to new and fresh towers. The combination of all of these makes it so that each time you step back in, you’re determined to make it even farther than before.
One of the best things Immortal Redneck has to offer is the expansive skill tree. Each time you die, you can visit the skill upgrader that helps you enhance your power and survivability. The other thing you have a chance to obtain is blessings from various gods. These blessings make it so that you have new strengths and weaknesses, as well as a new variety of specialty powers to help you make it higher and higher. These can each be changed out before you enter the pyramid and last even after death, meaning each time you enter you have a variety of playstyles to choose from.
In addition to coins and weapons within the tomb, you have a fair chance of finding ability scrolls. These scrolls hold both positive and negative effects that are immediately applied to your character upon pickup. You may find one that has infinite ammo for the floor you’re on, but you might also find one that takes a large percentage of your current gold supply. Whether or not you decide to risk picking one up is a fairly challenging decision to make when there’s a room full of enemies keeping you stuck until they’re eliminated.
The only problem I had with the pickups in Immortal Redneck is that things like coins disappear rather quickly unless they are picked up, which means there’s very little incentive to kill things at long range when anything they drop is likely to vanish before you make your way to it. Alternatively, the scrolls and guns stay around indefinitely, which poses the risk of accidentally picking them up when running away from a group of enemies.
Probably the biggest benefit the game has to keeping a players attention for more than a half hour is the boss battles that you find at higher levels in the pyramid. Each of these felt like a break from the repetitive room sweeping and raise in difficulty that comes with climbing levels. The first time I ran into one, I realized which gun and pickup decisions I made earlier were beneficial and which I needed to keep in mind for future battles.
Verdict: Overall, if you are a person who loves first-person shooters (like myself), this game feels extremely comfortable and easy to play. It tends to scratch that itch of “one more floor” consistently. If you’re already into rogue-likes, this one is a great one to pick up and mess around with. In the end, the “redneck” portion of the game that I thought I wouldn’t enjoy made the experience carry a bit of humor that I didn’t expect. This is a game worth trying.
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