Redout 2

you go sooo ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fast in this game. it is a genuine thrill.
the younger me who played hundreds of hours of the wipEout games is ecstatic

please please please play this game, a joy to the eyes and ears, blinding speeds. You won't be dissapointed!

Game is sick and fast and competetive as hell. Still a small community in the 34BigThings discord doing online races on saturdays.

If Redout was a fun time, Redout 2 will also be a fun time.
If you haven't tried Redout, how do I say.
- The control is like for a 6-DOF spaceship. It works with the game. It's fun.
- It goes fast and going through corners smoothly feels great.
- Just having the ship running along the tracks feels good.
Just two things I dislike:
- Later in Career mode the lap amount increases to 4. I use to clear just one event and get exhausted. 15 minutes in average, is a long time to continuously keep yourself alerted of everything outside the ship.
- Just like it was in the previous game, ANYTHING outside of the track will end your ship on the gentlest contact. And there's Arena Race which instantly ends as soon as your ship explodes. I was pissed off at this and decreased the difficulty to the lowest. If I have to deal with instakill stuff, I want to do it with less of other concerns going on at the same time.
In a fewer words, the game gets exhausting.
Other than that. Not much to complain. Some would say Career mode goes repetitive with small amount of tracks. But take it this way, you are going to need to play the same tracks at least that much frequently to have the layout in your muscle memory. Also just running along itself feels good. Whether it be the same track or not, the fun is still there.

I've enjoyed this game immensely better than the original Redout which felt far too "floaty" for my liking.
Redout II feels nicer to play in every respect and I love the new boost mechanics.
This is hands down my favorite AG Wipeout-inspired racing game on Steam so far, (the runner up being BallisticNG which is also amazing), I've only gotten a few hours into the campaign and I love everything I've seen so far.
Only complaint is that a few of the maps are very visually busy or have sun glares that make it difficult to see where the track is leading which often results in crashing the vehicle but its not so bad once I've gotten more used to the track. Probably a skill issue on my part.
I hope this game sees more development and grows the playerbase more. I'm so happy I decided to give this game a chance despite the bad launch week reviews because I was disappointed with the original game and Redout II seems to have fixed all of the things I disliked about the first game.
Edit:
Also wanted to mention that the majority of my hours were played on the steamdeck which runs the game buttery smooth even with maxed out graphical quality settings

If you're looking for a challenging but fun racing experience I 100% recommend this game to you. The learning curve is a bit harsh but it's also definitely worth it to get good at this game.

Only downside is if you have ADHD like myself you'll start to see racing lines irl, ESPECIALLY if you have a car of your own.

"The Alien Resurrection of racing games"
13/09/25 Edit: After almost 100 hours, I finally "get" this game. Was it an enjoyable experience getting here? Absolutely freakin' not. Is Redout 2 well paced and without design flaws? Hell no. Do I enjoy racing my friends now that I understand literally every little thing about the game and every single one of its insane BS corkscrew spaghetti maps? Yeah, somehow I do.
Do I recommend this game? I really don't know - do you like having your walnuts stuck in a vice and twisted? If so, Redout 2 is 100% for you and will become your new obsession.
If you want a game that's even remotely fun to learn, is well balance for new players, has good campaign pacing and a finished multiplayer experience, skip Redout 2, at least for now. If you're willing to accept this freakish monster of a game for what it is, you'll probably not find anything else like it though.
I dunno how that can be a positive review after the trials I went through, I would much rather have this be a "mixed" or "informational" review instead, but that's how it is. If you love to suffer, you'll love Redout 2. If you want a fun, enjoyable experience for most of your gameplay, start with Redout 1.
This game is borderline impossible to beat on even the easiest difficulty. For the 99 out of 100 players entertaining buying this, you have been warned; this is a sadistically designed experience enjoyed only by professional masochists. It demands utter perfection, and anything less will be laughed out of the room.
Some stats to weep to (August 2025):
- 80% of players didn't even try multiplayer
- 80% of players didn't even complete B class (the first set of races)
- Only 5% of players unlocked SRRL class (the final set of races)
- Less than 5% of players ever got a 1st position qualifier in solo play
- Less than 5% of players entered 10 multiplayer matches
- Less than 3% of players beat the game
- 2% of players unlocked all the 2nd highest tier parts
- 1.5% of players unlocked all the highest tier parts
Those last two stats in my opinion are unforgivable sins - to lock critical endgame parts behind absolutely insane time trials that are no fun at all really shows this game's hand. In order to even obtain endgame parts you *have* to be better than 85% of the human playerbase.
As a Redout 1 player, I was surprised at this game's ability to make me hate my previous favourite Cairo mapset. If you recall any of the tougher maps from the first game, this game takes their mean spirit and turns it up to 1000. There is absolutely zero chill in this game at all which eliminates any real fun factor the game has despite decent mechanics and a handful of genuinely fun tracks to learn. The stubborn insistence on not only trial-and-error memorization of maps but including brilliant new design conventions like blinding the player when passing through water, putting large structures in the way of critical jumps or just refusing to let the player see down range in any meaningful way (Mariana Trench, looking at you...) I'd wager is simply too much for most regulars.
Originally I never went into detail about what exactly makes this game so "hard", other than memorizing the maps being a chore. The bulk of difficulty in the game comes from this alone, but another really poor design choice has come to my attention: in every map set, 2 maps share about 30-60% of the track with each other. This is one of the worst design choices the devs could have made and is a massive feature regression from the first game where every single track in a mapset (of which there were often 4-5 maps per mapset in Redout 1) are COMPLETELY unique, with no shared parts between them. Redout 2 for whatever reason decided that wasn't a good idea and now if you don't have a photographic memory for each track name you can easily be misled into thinking you're driving on Map 1 of a set, when you're really on Map 3. Also, there are only ever three maps in a map set - another big regression making the tracks feel too similar and lacking differences that set them apart.
This specific problem is what made me hate the Cairo mapsets in this game - they're barely different to each other at all. This is a real shame, because the maps in Redout 1 were peak in terms of their design, regardless of whether they are simpler or not. I would gladly pay big money for a "Redout 1 all maps" DLC.
Another huge problem is multiplayer is genuinely unfinished with a couple of nasty bugs, most notably a recurring bug I have in my crew where joining players will be forced to use the host car/parts/livery combo no matter what they choose. No clue why this happens, but it's really annoying. Also, half the features you'd expect from a multiplayer game are straight up missing. No ghost options to avoid collisions. No choices for game modes, only race. No boss map selections. No B/A/S/S+ class selections, power rating caps or part vetoing. No individual lap time tracking for a race, just the total time it took to complete. It's incredibly bare bones and definitely needs some love, which I hope it one day gets, but I'm not holding my breath.
The cherry on top is several tutorial stages that explain advanced and/or critically important lessons like "you can detach from the track and it can be useful" are ALSO locked behind huge sections of gameplay that arguably force you to learn this stuff through blind failure - so coming back to find them feels more like an insult than help. I have no idea why the game was designed this way, you would think someone would have thought to let the player educate themselves at will or skip forward, but I guess not.
Considering I've ground out 37 hours of not-really-fun on Zero difficulty, I can't imagine many other people will be that interested in Redout 2. I do recommend the first game however as it's easily beatable by baseline humans, and you can even 100% the achievements without taking a permanent hit to your sanity. It took me about 100 hours before I was posting above Gold times on Nightmare difficulty, a slog I doubt all but the most dedicated and masochistic players would enjoy.
One positive I can say about this game is there is no kernel level anti cheat, thank cheezus for that. So if you care about supporting devs who don't use KAC, buy this.
For those who somehow made it to the end of this review and thought "wow, this sounds great!" Redout 2 will not disappoint you, and you should buy it immediately. For everyone else, start with the first game and try this one after completing Redout 1.