redout 2... feels like a thought experiment. or a cautionary anecdote for educational purposes. it's also my favorite racing game of all time.
so what's the thought experiment? well, suppose you were given a tech/gameplay demo to work with, and it's just absolute gold. this plays great, it looks great, it shows great in marketing, it's fun for multiple skill levels. you've got a gem here, and it's all yours! can you make a bad game out of this without touching the gameplay elements?
i suspect some sort of genie or perhaps a troll gave redout 2 developers 34BigThings this exact problem.
structure:
like many racing games (especially with relatively small playerbases), the meat of redout 2 is in its single player campaign. here's how this one works!
- tracks, ships, and cosmetics are dripfed to you at a glacial pace across 60-70 hours of gameplay
- you're unlikely to be able to express yourself or have a ship you're happy with before 20 or so
- each event has a bonus challenge that is sometimes clearly not meant for that event. maybe set by some kind of AI generator? who could say.
- for instance, a track with zero jumps will have a "fly Xkm" challenge, which requires hurling yourself off of the track barrier, flying up and over a kill plane, doing a backflip for extra distance, and landing.
- in order to inflate completion time, you are expected to place 3rd (out of 4!! racers) on most events your first time through, unlock the next tier of engine, equip it, then go back and redo those events now that they're winnable
- which means you are spending half your time celebrating getting Not Last Place. truly the reward chemical cup runneth over
and yet! and yet. even with all the above, the world is so engaging and fun to be in that you find yourself genuinely interested in the one sentence of flavor text you get about Time Trial #928 that you're supposed to lose so you can come back later and win.
developer support:
look. i'm a game dev. i get it. making games is so, so hard. whatever budget they got is certainly not enough. but sometimes, some things can become noticeable issues even to the discerning, empathetic gamer.
- ok great. you're selling a season pass. really pointing at the stands here, though, can you deliver the kind of content that makes this consumer unfriendly "preorder dlc before you know what it is" style work out for you?
- the first advertised DLC, the Summer Pack, announced mid summer, anticipated... you know, in the summer, comes out! on a balmy, summery October 20th
- one other DLC drops, ever, for a grand total of 2 worlds, and 6 tracks, which is less than a quarter of the base game, sold sight unseen for 2/3 the price
- the last public update was about a year ago, and the game's main menu still has "season challenge" and "community" buttons greyed out and marked as "coming soon." they're not coming soon. :(
this isn't like. a rabble-rousing Gamers Rise Up These Devs Are Evil post. it's not. but at some point this stuff harms the experience of just trying to enjoy the thing, you know? and that's not even to mention...
the leaderboard situation:
so. at launch, redout 2 had a serious... bug? oversight? i'm not sure if we got confirmation on which. one of the stats you could select for in the way you build your ship was "thrust." in theory, thrust improves your acceleration, and lowers the length of your boost meter. in practice... it just lowered the length of your boost meter for zero benefit. it's not the biggest issue, some games have purposeful or accidental trap options, and we simply build to lower thrust.
some time later, a patch finally drops that reworks this! thrust works now. and in the process of rebalancing the rest of the stats to accommodate this... the game is now a bit slower. some of the more brutal single player time trial challenges become nearly impossible. but most importantly...
the leaderboards are full of pre-patch times. times you actually cannot compete with on the current version of the game, no matter how good you get. for me, the way i continue to play racing games at all beyond the completion of the single player campaign is by competing for faster times on the leaderboards, but you can't actually do that anymore. it has been over a year since it was claimed that the leaderboards would be reset, but they just... haven't.
for the majority of the game's lifespan, there hasn't been functional leaderboards!
AND YET
this stupid trainwreck of a game is so, so good. it's incredible. racing has never felt so personal and so analogue before. my ship is tailored to handle exactly how i like it, and it's very different from other ships, and driving it feels like moving a limb. the game's dual-stick control approach demands near constant, often gentle input from both hands and the tactile sensation makes you feel like spiderman you're driving a racing spaceship. the sense of speed is nearly unmatched by anything not named F-Zero GX. i love it with all my heart.
in the end, it honestly feels like the answer to the thought experiment is "no." i would still recommend the game to anyone (though i'd also warn them about all of that.) despite what seems like intentional effort, they couldn't really ruin it for me. thanks for reading my infodump about the best worst racing game of all time.
