Road Redemption

Last Ride? The Best Exisiting Road Rash’s “Spiritual Sequel”
7.5/10
Opening
For gamers of the millennium, Road Rash, a 1991 game, undoubtedly carries countless memories. Combining action and racing, two seemingly unrelated elements, Road Rash brings players unimaginable fun. Unfortunately, after the release of the last work in the series, Road Rash: Jailbreak, in 2000, this classic series, which is of great importance to players, seems to have been forgotten by Electronic Arts. After the release of two spiritual sequels to Road Rash in 2017-Road Redemption and Road Rage, similar games completely disappeared from the market. As the most outstanding spiritual sequel, Road Redemption further expands the gameplay, but there are still plenty of shortcomings.
Strength 
The player in Road Redemption needs to drive motorcycles to speed in various scenes ranging from roads, ice fields, and high-rise buildings to ruins. The only difference from racing games including Road Rash is that players can, and are even encouraged to kill their opponents to maintain their advantage permanently. In addition to racing opponents, various hostile opponents, police, and friendly forces will join the battle. A variety of weapons such as sticks, swords, guns, grappling hooks, explosives, grenades, and a variety of scene mechanisms, would also make this illegal road race even more chaotic. Characters with different skills in each game all have their own abilities and can bring a new gaming experience for players. The standout heavy metal rock style soundtrack also adds more passion to the exciting racing and slashing.
Weakness 
The campaign mode of Road Redemption consists of a light plot, roguelike, and many repetitive levels. Once you die, you will have to start from scratch. The plot is exceptionally old-fashioned and boring, and the core roguelike content does not provide players with diverse plastic gameplay but instead focuses on the acquisition and recovery of in-game resources, which cannot support players' long-term play. Most of the enemies in the game have a strong desire to attack the player and will constantly try to cut off and interfere. Players will need to balance fighting and even aiming and shooting while driving at high speed. In addition, the driving feel of the vehicles in Road Redemption is not very good, which poses a barrier to entry for new players. Enemies in a race will always gain some wake acceleration when they are at a disadvantage, and this is often enough to catch up to the player, making the racing strategy of killing the opponent often more advantageous.
The actual modeling and scenes of the game seem a bit rough nowadays, especially compared with the trailer. The seemingly diverse scenes are essentially the same, and the enemy types and even the in-game upgrade options are quite narrow. There are also many bugs in Road Redemption in the collision volume judgment between characters and scenes, it is easy for players to get stuck in some scenes that seem to have no obstacles. After completing the campaign mode, Campaign+ and Campaign++ merely add more levels, increase the enemy's health and desire to attack, and make the scene more chaotic, which effectively makes it challenging to bring refreshments to players. Aside from discounts, Road Redemption has always had very few players online, which has made the online mode largely unavailable.
Conclusion
Whether in sales, gameplay, or reputation, Road Redemption is far superior to Road Rage, which makes it the well-deserved, most excellent "spiritual sequel" of Road Rash. Despite this, the core of this game is very different from Road Rash. Various weapons fights and mild roguelike game content are the core of Road Redemption, while racing has become an auxiliary means to add fun. This inherent gap may disappoint fans who came here for the spiritual sequel of Road Rash.
Overall, Road Redemption is hard to get started with, and can fully bring fun to players in the initial period. However, its core is highly monotonous, with too high a repetition rate, old-fashioned and boring plots, and a roguelike design that cannot bring freshness, which all doom it to be nothing more than a throwaway game.
Found my review valuable?
Follow my curator to get the latest review push!
Your support is my greatest motivation!

Two reasons to play this game:
1. Nostalgia about Road Rash games.
2. Roguelite gameplay with skill tree.


Two reasons not to play it:
1. Phsics, mechenics, controls... basically everything sucks. It feels like an unpolished indie game.
2. Dont expect it to be a racing game. The racing part is what you want your brain to do on auto-pilot while you focus on fighting and health/nitro management.


Notes:
First time in my life I have seen that the splitscreen mode can detect multiple screens and have each player get a full screen. WTF.


Conclusion: strong buy, for nostalgia, action and roguelite addiction

Being a spiritual successor is a tough thing to live up to, and Road Redemption almost pulls it off.
The key distinction is that Road Rash was a racing game with some fighting mechanics, whereby in Road Redemption you spend most of your time fighting, with less emphasis placed on the actual racing. Due to this, the racing, track design and bike handling all feel secondary (i.e. worse). It's an arcade racer with combat - think Carmageddon and Twisted Metal except linear.
Combat is actually decent. You have to manage acceleration and nitro on roads that swerve drastically, avoid being surrounded, getting shot at, blocking, attacking and kicking as some enemies auto-block while others resist weapon types, and dodge incoming traffic and general road hazards – all at the same time. It's quite entertaining, if not a bit too much and frustrating at times. Also, it has to be said, but the rooftop levels + hallucination (raining cars) + shielded enemies = a horrible combination.
Variety in bikes (besides looks) is dismal however. Stats between them seem arbitrary and there's little reason to use anything beyond the starting bike. There's no best for speed, or handling, or weight, there's just the starting bike and it being the best all-round. That brings up another issue, perks such as damage, regen and XP gain are not clear - sure there's a percentage, but do they stack and by how much do they increase said stat, what's the actual total?
A missing mechanic from Road Rash is running back to your bike post-crash - this could be out of necessity due to how wonky the physics can be and AI behaves. Getting stuck on the environment can happen, with AI riders overtaking you within seconds placing you last unless you 'return bike to road' via the menu quickly.
This is another issue, the AI racers will always catch up (slingshot) to you. Unless you manage your nitro, it's challenging to stay ahead - as a result, managing nitro becomes a core mechanic. You have to take out enemies or perform near misses to build it up again, in order to move up to the next crowd of racers, rinse and repeat.
However, the opposite is also true, as there are missions requiring you to take out a number of targets. Problem is it's possible to overtake them via a shortcut and not encounter them again due to the levels being linear (and fail the mission). Ironic given the slingshot/rubber band mechanic appears on every other level bar these ones.
Campaign wise, I’m not sure it needed to be a rogue-like. It would've been nice to have one continuous ride with pit stops to spend cash on upgrades before heading out again. As it stands, the rogue-like nature of 'spend any accumulated XP on upgrades and lose what you don't spend upon death' feels like a way to pad out an otherwise short game.
Visually, it runs exceptionally smooth despite all the chaos. However, it does look dated and something that doesn't warrant my 3070Ti running at 90% GPU utilisation. Is it a drawback of the Unity engine or poor optimisation?
Music matches the theme with heavy metal and occasional trance - but be warned, the volume is set too high by default. I'd recommend lowering it, otherwise you won't hear anything else such as the great voice acting. Very Mad Max-ish in the approach to the setting and colourful language used.
Road Redemption doesn't take itself seriously and plays into the fact the game is about being a douche to others on the road. There are knock-off character and bike names such as the Hundo and BMG, you can drift and use nitro while cornering, and it rains cars. There's even a "Name A Character" DLC as a way to support the devs, which adds your name to a random rider that everyone else can pummel - more games need this. Sure the rogue-like nature can be tiring, graphics dated and chaos overwhelming at times, but it does have a certain 'fun' factor that's worth trying out.

Rough around the edges but fun for an evening if you have someone playing along with you. Vehicle combat games are hard to make fun, but it's pretty close
a phone number for the developer showed on screen and I drunkenly called it, to my surprise he answered. I didn't know how to react so I said 'hell yeah' and hung up.

Experienced on the Meta Quest 3
You can view my VR mod gameplay here:
Yes, you can play Road Redemption in VR using the VR mod by Astien (search for it). The VR mod is totally free and includes 3rd or 1st person views, plus motion controller support. Yes, you'll be driving in first person, checking your rear-view, while swinging your arms to knock off the police and those other dirt bag bikers off their bikes!
Game not only looks beautiful, but it runs great. I was getting a steady 90 fps on my RTX 3080 with graphics set to beautiful. No issues whatsoever.
Now, not everything uses motion controls. You do button press to kick and you are using the joystick to steer the motorcycle. Still, it's fun to drive in first person and swing madly left and right while trying to stay on the road in one piece. I highly recommend this VR mod! Thank you Astien!
VR Mod Rating 9/10.
I bought this game! If you enjoyed my review, please consider joining my Steam Curator group Oculus Rift Reviews.

Great game where you can kill people as brutally as possible but lacks online co-op.

This game is fun but also feels kinda unfinished.
The controls are floaty and the aiming with controller while driving and not crashing into obstacles or cars requires lots of training. I can live with that but many others won't and are going to dismiss this game directly wich is kinda unnecessary. I think sorts of a lock on system would be an idea to help fighting and driving at the same time.
But the main cons from my side: the missiondesign/ story-roguelike attempt & the trackdesign. I have no problem at all with the fact this is a hybrid between racing and fighting/shooting game, with mainweight on fighting. But I dont feel this tracks and missions at all. Feels like a masterdegree studyproject rather then a fleshed out product.
No offense, I appreciate a lot here and really like the idea of the road rage revival! But after finishing this 100% I have the feeling that there are just 3 or 4 different tracks in this game 2 of those even similar just with different weathertextures. you'll face curves and obstacles more to distract and upset instead of having really nice wide tracks with mostly smooth corners.
The theme is kinda madmax.. but the execution feels super goofy and unserious although you're shooting cops and gangmembers. Not cartoony in a fun way, more like there was an idea but not enough time and budget to realise it properly. More tracks and more variety at those would help a lot. Instead of throwing various strange missionideas randomly at the player, I'd try to create a simple concept with different roots to pick from. The main idea with the assasins you gotta execute is actually fine, but give em different themes in different settings. Try to make the character selection feel like in other good games with different characters.. different unique types with strengths and weaknesses.. not a every character you unlock gets more fucked up all the time lol.. and last but not least: the driving physics could need some work :D
I don't want to be all negative cause theres so much potential here and I had a great time at least for 5 up to 10 hours so I'll rate it 05/10 on a sale