fast

Now THIS is Podracing.

This is the UE4 revolution at its most apparent. In nearly every way this is a perfect game--easy to play, difficult to master, beautiful levels, a constant rush of excitement and real speed. To address some other reviews, the AI is a challenging system, not an unfair one (I am a Wipeout fan prior to this and get gold medals approximately 2/3rds of the time).

The instant adrenaline games, the true pick-up-and-play games have been neglected for too long. Finally we are able to start putting the fun back into gaming and it starts with Redout.

TL;DR: The game is great, git gud and come play :D |9.1/10 overall|

(Also, this is currently based mostly off career mode, havent played online aside from with friends)

I don't review often, but after reading the literal garbage review of this game on PC Gamer (still unsure on that decision in the first place) I decided I should try and at least put some positivity back into this game to that crap being served up by those bribe-♥♥♥♥♥s at PCG.

This game is fun, like serious fun. Best recommendation I can give, convince one or more of your friends to try it out with you and just have fun exploring the beautiful worlds, listening to some tasty jams, and tearing through whichever beautiful track you chose at approx. 1000 km/h. More on that:

Gameplay: (A-) So you jump into game and woosh, R2 (or RT or w/e it is on keyboard controls) and you're flying down the track in your brand new Class I car. You're already going crazyballs fast, and then you think "Oh ♥♥♥♥...if this is a Class I car, how crazy fast is this gonna get?" Oh it's gonna get really fast, you press another button and fwoosh you found your turbo boost buttonand suddenly you're going about 200 faster than you were about an instant ago. This game is FUN to learn and get better at.

Honest simple answers, the controls aren't as tight as they are in some racing games, but for all the boohoos about tight controls HEY.......shh. You're barreling up, down, left, right and every other damn way the game can manage on a hovercar...that drifts...at stupid breakneck speeds. Yeah, there might be some wobble. It's k, the chance you might go offcourse to stab the nose of the vehicle into the side of some poor, undeserving mountain is half the fun.

Between upgrades, vehicle choice, powerups (both passive and active), dual stick controls, a bunch of different courses, brifting and boosting, there is a surprising amount of depth to this game's mechanics.

Music: (B) The music of this game gets a solid mark, but falls just a bit short...lemme explain. The music in this game, for the most part and to my knowledge and opinion, does its job. And the fact that I have to phrase it like that hurts a bit, but it is on the nose. The music is high energy electronic, that pulses and drops and feels perfect when it lines up with a loop or a huge boost or a huge jump. It doesn't get annoying too fast and thanks to the intense visual portion of the game, the but that the music falls short for the gameplay is overwritten by the strict attention you have to pay to the track.
TL;DR: Not bad at all, but nothing stellar.

Career Mode: (A) It doesn't beat you over the head by making you run the same track over and over, you don't have to grind for decades to get in-game money, in fact your money is even buffered by career events that award somewhere between 8-50k in-game (lowest and highest I've seen). Has some super fun "BOSS" tracks (Don't look em up, save the fun <3) that will make you say "woah" out loud, even if it's just under your breath or whatever. Pretty much all my game time has been in career mode, and more hours are gonna get dumped there. Moral of the story: A career mode that showcases everything the game has to offer in a raw, no hand-holdy way. Oh and to comment on it as most have, yes the AI in this game can be downright brutal, but it isn't fun if you win every time, eh?

Other Notes: FREAKING PATCH NOTES. Seriously, this came as a surprise, but hey, not too shabby to have a game get mostly BALANCE patching, with a couple of bugfixes of course, just one week after launch. Plus the peeps at 34BT seem to have a pretty decent correspondence with the community. Not stellar, but the fans gotta reach out too. :3

Plus, while the phrase seems to mean less and less every day, this is a smaller developer, trying to bring us a fresh, fun game that, obviously, a lot of people sorely missed. I know I did.

Overall, this game is a beautiful homage to a lot of hyper-racing games of old, it's fast, it's fun and it's waiting for you to grab yourself a copy and start breaking some speed records. I'd give the game a solid 9.1/10 overall.

And for anyone who read any (or heaven help you all) of this, hope it helped, thanks kindly, and much love. <3 -FmD

Redout is a futuristic anti-gravity racing game, very much inspired by games like F-Zero and Wipeout. For those who may not have played a similar game, you race in ships that hover just above the ground on tracks that defy gravity with loops and huge jumps. Since you have no contact with the ground, the physics are very different to regular racing games and require you to think differently as you approach different parts of the track. Each ship can 'strafe' left or right, which allows you to very noticably change the angle of your ship mid-corner. Learning to use this is crucial and does take a bit of time to adjust to, particularly if you're more used to the airbrake system used in F-Zero and Wipeout. You can also adjust the pitch of your craft's nose, which leads me onto the title of the game. A 'Redout' occurs when too much blood rushes to the brain from negative G-Force. In the game this means that when you suffer negative G-Force you need to adjust the angle of your nose to prevent a redout, which makes the entire screen turn red and makes it difficult to see. You can also blackout through positive G-Force.

There are several game modes. Race (does what you think), Time Trials, Last Man Standing (the last place ship on each lap is eliminated), Survival (your ship health drains over time) and Boss (which is a series of tracks chained together through teleporters). There are also 'Pure' races where no powerups are allowed. I should point out now that Redout is HARD. Particularly in the first few races it really feels like the AI rubberband but I've seen arguments for both sides on this. You need to be on the top of your game to even place on the podium until you've earned enough for ship upgrades.

Visually the game is beautiful. Even on lower settings it looks amazing and the sense of speed when you're racing is the best of any racing game I've played. The interface in menus is a bit clunky but its a minor complaint. The soundtrack is a bit of a mixed bag but mostly adrenaline-pumping which suits this genre of game perfectly.

Complaints are few and far between but there are some areas I'd like to see improved. The options menu is incredibly sparse (there is no option for Window mode in-game and you can't manually rebind controls). The difficulty is going to put off some people, and I genuinely think that the first few races need the AI nerfing as it's really punishing for newer players. It would also be nice for a wider variety of tracks and ships. There are a good amount of tracks but only 4 locations so the scenery gets old pretty fast. Likewise there are a few different teams and each team has a few ships but within a team all the ships look very similar, as opposed to something like F-Zero.

Overall though I'm a massive fan of Redout. If you even slightly liked F-Zero or Wipeout you will probably love this. Get past the difficulty curve and it's incredibly rewarding. Between this and BallisticNG the anti-gravity racing scene has really come into its own again.

Sorta rhymes with Wipeout, looks like Wipeout, sounds like Wipeout, feels like Wipeout, plays like Wipeout.

This is an eager love letter to the Wipeout games, and it pulls it off. This is the Wipeout VR we were never going to get.

If you wistfully remember pouring countless hours into Mega Mall, or pinning Icaras and Feisar posters on your wall, or wanting to work for The Design Republic... this is your game. Do it.

Especially with a Vive.

Great skill based hover racing game. The more time you put in, the more you get out of it. Getting a hang of the controls feels extremely rewarding. Plenty of Pros and most of the Cons are subjective/could be fixed with an expansion or patch.

Pros:
-Tight responsive controls
-Well designed tracks with plenty of verticality
-High skill ceiling
-Around 20 different tracks
-Excellent sound design responds to your gameplay
-Plenty of different vehicles and classes

Cons:
-Few music tracks, becomes repetitive
-4 track themes. Could be expanded for more variety
-Only 3 control schemes, no custom key bindings
-Lack of balanced powerups. You will end up only using 4 or 5 of the total 10 (12?) options
-Limited vehicle customization. Just pre-set color schemes. There are a good number of these, but something like custom colors, or custom logos would be really nice

Once again, very good game, the Pros definitely outweigh the Cons, and I look forward to the dev's continued work on this game, especially if it can address some of the Cons.

If only racing wasn't such a Niche Genre...

If you're like me then you're not so happy that Nintendo doesn't care about F-Zero and Sony shut down Studio Liverpool so there's no more Wipeout. Sure, you've explored older crazy fast racing games, and maybe you even picked up Fast Racing Neo on the WiiU, but that's still not enough. Then a ray of light shines through the clouds, and suddenly you are bathed in the glory of Redout.
Inspired by crazy fast racing games of yore but with ideas and ambitions of its own Redout is a fine adition to the family of AG racers. With a large amount of even types, 6 ship types to pick from with 4 tiers each, an equippiable (and upgradeable) passive and active skill for those non-pure events, and 4 stat categories that you can upgrade, 4 track themes each with a multitude of unique feelings tracks, a seemingly Wipeout inspired soundtrack but with compositions set to fit the track rather than on a playlist, VR support, top-notch visual presentation and a feeling of speed I've been wanting to experience for a long long time Redout is a must buy for any fans of the genre, especially those wanting this type of game to make its way back to PC.
My only two complaints are that you can't place bots in online multiplayer matches (So that is only 2 other people are in the lobby you can still fill out the other slots until new players join) and you can't fully customize gamepad controls. Why isn't LB set to use your active power-up? Why X?

TLDR; I've had a fantastic time with Redout, its full of great stuff, futuristic racing fans should pick it up.

A racing game like nothing I've ever played.