Immortal Redneck Review

Immortal Redneck is a simple game. An American redneck crashes a buggy in Egypt for reasons unknown and finds himself on an operating table, surrounded by aliens. Quickly losing consciousness again, he wakes up within a standing sarcophagus, enshrouded in mummy bandages. Exiting the casket into a desert plaza surrounded by three pyramids, the eponymous redneck angrily rushes into one of the tombs and proceeds to shoot the everloving shit out of all manners of otherworldly creatures. That sounds straightforward and nonsensical, and that’s what Immortal Redneck is all about.

A rogue-lite shooter which doesn’t take itself seriously, Immortal Redneck is a surprisingly good game marred by severely misguided design decisions. Consisting entirely of procedurally-generated levels, this weirdly-named FPS takes place inside three differently themed pyramids, each besieged with monsters of all kinds sprawled across seven floors. The higher you climb, the smaller each level becomes, and enemy variety and quantity increases along with difficulty. The seventh and top floor is called the “apex”, and it’s where the boss of each area is located. Defeat that, and you unlock the next pyramid and start all over again.

However, clearing a pyramid takes a while. Every time you die -- and you will -- the pyramids all reset, with levels being generated again. You get to carry over all the gold you got from shooting monsters, and you can unlock skills to tackle the levels once more in a bid to reach its top. The quite literal skill tree mainly provides numeral advantages, reminiscent of Borderlands skill system where most upgrades were a percentage increase of some stat. It doesn’t make for the most exciting of times, but you have to spend as much as you can because -- and here’s the kicker -- all the money you accrued gets wiped once you re-enter a pyramid. This is effectively a progression block, as some of the highest upgrades require a lot of gold; being unable to slowly save up means some runs have the potential to be completely wasted if you don’t reach the exorbitant amount needed to buy something.

Gameplay revolves around shooting enemies, as most rooms lock the moment you step inside them and get flooded by enemies who must be eliminated to unlock the exits. The game helpfully highlights remaining enemies after a while, so it keeps the pace swift even when you can’t find them. Enemies’ health display is handled creatively, with the aiming cursor changing colours from green to red as the aimed creature’s health depletes, and weapons feel nice but somewhat inaccurate -- the pistol, especially, would consistently miss shots, but the lack of visible projectiles meant I could never be sure why.

The level design really captures the feeling of a derelict desert ruin, and it’s one of the game’s strongest aspects. The rooms themselves never change, always maintaining the same configuration -- they only change order and location, but each floor has a different set of chambers. Some of the most disparaging areas are the puzzle rooms, which involve an often unique design and feature a tiny bit of platforming to reach a bonus chest or the exit. Those are quick and simple, mostly involving a very forgiving sprinting and jumping system, and help break the pace a bit while being very lethal and keeping the stakes high. Together with the different themed pyramids, the whole ensemble provides a nice deal of variation.

Technically, Immortal Redneck is surprisingly polished. The graphics are beautiful and sharp, with a warm palette of colours that makes environments easily readable and the screen pop out. Creature design is consistently good, and sometimes cute -- there was a specific group of little purple lizard dinosaur thingies that made me genuinely sad every time I had to engage them. Similarly, the soundtrack is unexpectedly good, utilising a backwater string composition that mix and blends in with characteristics we associate with ancient Egyptian themes. While the music is quite good during combat, it really shines when you just stand amongst the pyramids in the desert plaza that acts as the central hub, its tunes perfectly complementing the landscape.

Weirdly for a game focused on “fun” and shooting, there is remarkable little fun to be had in regards to guns. Most of them feel underpowered and weak, and while there is a sizeable arsenal in the game -- anything from machine guns and shotguns to sci fi tesla coils and cursed Egyptian artefacts -- every single weapon is found randomly through levels and lost upon death. You always fall back to the same boring setup every time you die, unable to make permanent progress by buying a specific gun and making the whole game grow stale extremely quickly. You can spend your hard earned money unlocking a handful of god favours that basically act as different loadouts, but they are not always available -- you’re only allowed to change them once you die, and even then solely given the option between two random choices. It is a stupid decision on a game about shooting, restricting players over and over again to the worst weapons available and forbidding them from choosing the loadout they would like to play, even when they are 100 hours in.

Unfortunately, that sort of asinine creative design decisions can be found throughout Immortal Redneck. It’s over reliance on luck and RNG turns what could be a brilliant little game into a frustrating mess. It fails to give you anything remotely permanent, as nearly every single upgrade is merely a bigger number: more damage, more health, more “defence”. However, those are all reliant on luck: you need to shoot enemies to find ammo and health, as nothing can be found across the environment. Egregiously, the game lacks a melee button, meaning you can plausibly find yourself stranded without ammo and unable to kill anything, left with no option but to die. In a shooter game that aims to be “fun”, that is substantially antithetical.

The end result turns out to be a lose-lose scenario, where sucess doesn’t come from luck helping you, but from bad luck not screwing you; there is nothing in the game that is active, and the best thing that can happen to players is avoiding a bad thing. Take for example scrolls: dropped pick-up items that give a random bonus or onus that last for a whole run. The good ones are marginally useful, while the bad ones are game ending -- picking up a bad scroll can easily derail a brilliant run, meaning that it’s easier to not take a risk and ignore scrolls completely. Sure, there is one scroll that allows you to choose if other scrolls’ effects apply or not, but that’s like going to an ex’s house party while drunk -- why add a redundant layer of luck on top of an already smoldering pile of bad decisions? The gameplay design seems based around restriction and oppression instead of freedom and lightheartedness, the idea behind it apparently aiming to force change and add variety. Instead, it actually makes the game frustrating as it removes every aspect of player agency.

That all reflects a deeper problem with Immortal Redneck’s core design, which is its constant struggle with itself. At first glance, the game knows what it wants to be, but as one spends time with it and unveils its intricacies, the cracks start to become too noticeable to ignore. Its basic premise is fun, but the devil’s in the details -- and that’s where the title fails miserably. I can’t honestly fully recommend it -- while it’s production values are unexpectedly high for an indie title, it’s creative design decisions fall very short of the mark. Player choice is an integral part of any gameplay experience -- it is why we play a game instead of watching a movie -- but unfortunately Immortal Redneck doesn’t seem to understand that.