Immortal Redneck (PC) Preview

The titular redneck decides to go for a little vacation, and, for some strange reason, ends up mummified, and in ancient Egypt. Now, he'll have to blast his way through a pyramid filled with all sorts of monstrous baddies; a pyramid that changes shape every time one re-enters it, since Immortal Redneck uses rogue-like elements to spice things up. In other words, the recipe in here is: fight, gather coins, and buy stuff with said currency to increase the protagonist's chances for survival.

Right off the bat, this FPS fails at the most basic part - the fun factor. Everything works as it should, the controls are fine and all, and the hero is both fast and agile, but the gunplay is way too simplistic. It's the standard FPS-fest with circle-strafing, backward-run shooting, and so on, with nothing standing out, like in Doom, or the - thematically similar - Serious Sam. In other words, it feels as if Immortal Redneck has no… soul; nothing to point to or comment about, no unique formula of its own.

Furthermore, all that shooting just doesn't feel satisfying. A great part of the fun in the genre is the immersive feeling that the boomsticks can give you. Quake's nailgun, Doom's double-barrelled shotgun, Heretic's Dragon Claw - All these felt good, powerful, badass! The weapons here, though? From the typical revolvers and shotguns, to the magic trinkets and potato launchers, they all give away a strong Nerf vibe.

As for the enemies? Things that run, things that shoot projectiles, things that use hammers, things that fly around. Nothing special to say about them, not to mention that they look a tad… boring, to be honest, as if the overused Egyptian setting wasn't already so. Do these pose a challenge, at least? Well, sort of. Health items are not exactly that abundant, so, while this is not exactly very difficult, foes will slowly bite off small chunks from the health bar, and the inevitable will soon come.

Death in a rogue-lite might be permanent, but the coins acquired from a run can be used to do some levelling up… and this is the second part where Immortal Redneck fails. For starters, the skill tree (which is an actual tree, by the way) is unexciting at best, with almost all perks being passive ones, like more health, ammo, and so on. Secondly, the whole thing is extremely grind-y, with each subsequent levelling-up of a particular skill costing a lot, and providing a tiny increase.

Subpar battles, a difficulty level that's not that hard, a lack of an original concept of its own, a simplistic skill tree that requires lots of grinding, and, finally, randomly generated levels that actually manage to get insanely boring too soon, as they are not exactly as random as one might expect. In conclusion, while this preview build only offers one of the three pyramids, one out of several skill trees, and, generally, not the whole package, don't get your hopes up just yet.