Immortal Redneck Review (PS4)

Immortal Redneck is a roguelike first-person shooter/dungeon crawler in which you play as a redneck tourist, who has been mummified after an unfortunate accident. How did he survive the accident? Why has he been mummified? And why is he now trapped in this deserted desert? All his answers await him within the pyramids, and you must help him find them.  

Your aim is to reach the very top of three procedurally generated pyramids, by ascending their interior floors one by one. As you explore the various rooms within the pyramid, you'll be locked in and must defeat a wave of enemies in order to leave each room. If you happen to die in one of these enemy encounters, it’s back to square one; you'll be sent back to the bottom, where you’ll have to start over on a newly generated pyramid.

It’s not all doom and gloom when you die though, as throughout your run you’ll be collecting coins which can be used at the end of your run to unlock new skills from a skill tree. There’s a huge variety of unlockables on the skill tree, from new characters to attack and defense stat increases. However, if you leave any currency unspent, it’ll be taken away from you at the start of your next run and will not be carried over. The more you play the game, the stronger you’ll get, as you’ll keep increasing your stats enabling you to progress further. It’s not a new idea, but it definitely makes you want to keep jumping back into the game.

There’s a wide variety of enemies throughout the game; club wielding mummies, arrow firing sphinxes, large leaping frogs, waddling whales that cough up fireballs, etc. The foes are wonderfully weird and wacky, and put up a good fight when combinations of them are present. Each enemy killed has a possibility of dropping supplies, such as ammo, health, coins, scrolls, or weapons. The AI for the most part is fairly challenging - when the different types of enemies all attack at once, it can leave you in a sticky situation, trying to dodge projectiles whilst also avoiding frogs that are leaping at your face. The combat on the whole is fast paced and frantic, but very enjoyable to play.

Each floor within a pyramid can last up to 20 minutes if you explore every single room, and a full run will last at least an hour once you’ve picked up the controls. Even if you end up dying early, you’ll jump straight back into another run because of the game’s addictive nature.

After several floors you will occasionally encounter a boss. These bosses will switch up the gameplay a bit with a bigger room that allows you more space to move around, giving you time to figure out how it’s supposed to be taken down. For instance, the first boss we encountered was a flying mummy that disappeared into one sarcophagus and then jumped out of another random sarcophagus in the room. We had to destroy the sarcophagi before being able to deal any damage to the boss. The bosses are an excellent switch up to the smaller rooms of foes that can feel rather repetitive after a while.    

Immortal Redneck has a huge selection of weapons that can be found in chests or monster drops; grenade launcher, bow and arrow, pistol, shotgun, RPG, flare gun, mini Uzi, machine gun, chain gun, etc. You get the idea; there are a ton of different weapons to try offing your enemies with. Each of them is a blast to try out and it won’t take you long to decide on a few of your favourite. Lastly, there are Scrolls that can be collected throughout the dungeon, often found in special challenge rooms, that give you either a good or bad attribute. It’s a bit of luck whether you get a useful one or not. For example, you could get one that lets you see enemies through walls, or you could get one that limits you to using one weapon. Scrolls definitely help to balance the game by introducing risk versus reward elements.

Immortal Redneck can get repetitive at points, especially having to redo the first floor several times when you are very weak early on in the game. However, this is combated well by its procedurally generated structure, and also by the unlockable medallions. Once you have defeated the first boss, you'll unlock a medallion that’ll allow you to start each run just after that boss. It’s excellent for making good progress in the game and eliminates some of its repetitiveness.