Confederate Express

Fun game that really challanges you to get better. Good pixel art. Simple controls but enough to get the job done. The combat is really clutch sometimes and a victory feels really good.

Confederate Express
Confederate Express or more specifically its developer has been at the center of some old fashioned drama, recently revived by the unexpected release. Sure, it brings up a lot of moral questionability or whatever (you can look it up yourself if such drama interests you) but I'm not really interested in reviewing the politics, I'm more interested in the game. And honestly, Confederate Express is pretty damn good if not overly simple.
Gameplay
Confederate Express is a very pretty pixel-art game but it's also incredibly basic in its execution. That isn't necessarily bad, especially not in this case. With a single click of the mouse you're able to tell your survivor dude where to move and where to shoot, though he'll generally do that on his own when in the vicinity of a zombie. Pressing on through each detailed set-piece of zombie apocalypse mayhem, its a mostly rinse and repeat process of carefully shooting and dodging your way past increasingly difficult and complex hordes.
It doesn't sound like much but its actually incredibly satisfying to see the hordes of brainless zombies being mowed down by your gunfire spewing coins to collect, and as new types of enemies show up with the ability to fire at your position it becomes a much more challenging and much more reflex-demanding experience.
During the course of your adventure you'll come across a handful of makeshift shops and merchants to use those scooped up coins on, selling a plethora of interesting items, perks, and upgrades that will make your life a whole lot easier (or even in some cases, harder). Turrets can be bought and periodically deployed with a click on the map for a few seconds offering a moment of suppressing fire, upgrades for your gun can change the range and pattern of fire, and there's even perks like the Hardcore perk which drastically change the way the game is played by giving you a health bar but turning on perma-death and forcing you to restart at the very beginning if when you manage to die.
The thing about Confederate Express is that despite its very simplistic, almost mobile feeling single-click movement and attack mechanic the game is pretty damn challenging. Its difficult in that mostly satisfying way, where you know with a little bit more attentiveness you could easily overcome where you last died. Positional awareness will be your greatest ally as you take a keen notice of where the killing bullets strike you from each time you restart a stage. Though the movement seemed a little sluggish to me to really properly dodge all of the shots initially, through a bit of sheer trial and error I was eventually able to pass these difficult dodge'mup sections through sheer trial-and-error.
Visuals/Sound
There's a lot in Confederate Express that stands out as being incredibly and impressively detailed. The way bullets that whizz by zombies missing their mark spray into the environment in the background creating all kinds of visual environmental damage like pieces of drywall cracking and breaking away, or the way your character dies in visually appropriately way depending on the type of bullet he was hit with either in a blaze of fire or electric crackling of a lazer shot all add to the visual fidelity that makes Confederate Express so damn attractive.
Animations, too, clearly have a lot of work put into them. The lurching bodies of slow moving zombies and the huddling, quivering masses of scared survivors all make for realistically fluid set-pieces. Flames and explosions flicker and dance with a living, breathing quality and the lighting scattered by all of it is accurately skewed by the shadows of all these objects.
There's also a very minimal amount of music in Confederate Express but it's effective, it's ambient, it's haunting, it works. There are only a handful of tracks which is fine since they serve more as chilling atmospherics than anything, and are played at random throughout the post-apocalyptic journey to keep things mixed up and unpredictable.
Final Thought
It's not very complex on the surface but Confederate Express demands a lot of attention and determination to complete. It's easy enough to hop into due to an oversimplified control scheme, which does leave a bit to be desired in the action department, but the sheer challenge of dodging bullets and avoiding being swarmed keeps you retrying and coming back looking for new strategies in the form of items from shops or trying new positioning tactics. It might not be a very meaty game but from retrying alone the 50 level campaign will keep you busy for a good few hours, and its an engaging few hours thanks to some incredibly attractive pixel-art and genuine horror atmospherics.
This review made possible through the consideration and contribution of Review Experts(REXnetwork) and the developer.

I like this game. The graphics are gorgeous, the controls are responsive, and there's definitely replay potential.
I have several thousands of hours played in high-skill MOBA environments so the control scheme and general mechanics of Confederate Express came intuitively. The two-button move system in lieu of A-clicking is nice. That said, I can see how less-experienced gamers might have trouble distinguishing between the two move commands (*tip*- use "move" to reposition without attacking, and "attack move" to attack the nearest hostile). Movement is initially slow (you can level up your speed later), but there's no noticeable turnrate so it feels crisp. Target acquisition range is also limited, but you can hit faraway enemies/objects by lining up a shot trhough a nearby creep.
The first 10 or so stages seem designed to gently ease the player into learning how to stutterstep correctly, so your arsenal of weapons and powerups is limited. You can purchase upgrades periodically by interacting with stores and spending gold. Some are passive (+movement speed/damage/range/health/gold yield) and some are active abilities that are automatically bound to q,w,e,r. During my playthrough, I only had enough gold to purchase one upgrade at each store, so choose wisely. My ricer instinct kicked in and I opted for increased gold yield over faster movement speed early on, only to get relentlessly bombarded by ice grenades the very next level ;_;
Speaking of levels, from a superficial floor plan perspective they're pretty uninspired and consist almost exclusively of corridors and large squares that lead to more corridors and squares. Enemy/barrel placement is well-thought through though, especially in the late game. I initially groaned and gnashed my teeth at the inability to manually target the OP shotgun-equipped neutral guards/rubbernecking smartphone equipped civilians that try to murk you if they get clipped by a stray bullet, but this constraint actually adds puzzle-like depth to the gameplay. Careful consideration of bullet trajectory and explosion radius is key to efficiently clearning stages, especially when deploying turrets to tank the agro of certain enemies.
On enemies - other than the slow-moving zombies, enemy design is interesting and varied, both in terms of aesthetics and abilities. Special enemies are difficult but fair, and each death is avoidable by gitting gud. During a particularly memorable encounter, the normally ambient background music crescendoed into an uproar as a bigass, extremely lightfooted caped cyborg wielding a sword cleaved through a crowd of civilians (and myself, several times)
Managing the cooldowns/charges of my full arsenal of weapons and skills to take out four of them just a few levels later was immensely satisfying.
Overall the I enjoyed the grafix, gameplay, difficulty progression in the mid-late game, and hilariously abrupt ending. I didn't care for the simple level layouts, majority of the music, or first quarter of the game.
I've beaten it once, in just shy of two hours (left the game running while I ate brekkie and watched my stories, no save function btw). If you like experimenting with different builds/difficulty level the game offers more longevity.

Well... I'm a kickstarter backer of "Confederate Express" - this game isn't that game so I'll consider it this way -
The dev didn't deliver the Kickstarter, my pledge ($10 bucks?) went poof. I got a free game called "Confederate Express" instead - this game.
I want to say this - I think that huge mistakes have been made - the Kickstarter community is an amazing one and we should strive to use mistakes to learn (both devs and backers). Thus - I think we can be compassionate and try to be understanding and hope that when someone stumbles and even does actions which seem deliberate and... well you know. We can forgive - maybe not so much forget - but at least move past gripes.
The thing is this - while the dev didn't deliver what was promised. There is something here! Which in more than one Kickstarter - wasn't the case. So for that - kudos! I hope that the dev continues with this amazing hobby of ours - gaming.
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Onto the game itself - it surprised me and that's rare. It is almost like "Hotline Miami" where you have a single life and are offered a sort of a puzzle. It is different than "Hotline Miami" where there is only a single weapon and controls aren't precise. So in a way - it is a unique challenge to be solved - often frustratingly so. But when you get sort of good at it, it feels satisfying and there is that feeling of "just one more level".
But you do get better and the game starts to click more, after a bunch of stages you are offered to buy an upgrade of health - and all of a sudden you feel immortal. Before you survived with 1 hit point, now with 4 you feel invincible - a very unique feeling.
So to sum up - it's an interesting game, has really cool art - and I really still wish that the original promised game was delivered, but we can't have everything - otherwise we wouldn't appreciate what we do have.
So do I recommend it? I'd say maybe check it out on sale.