Road Redemption Review (Mark IV)
Is Road Redemption finally Redeemed? Maybe yes. Depends of what you are looking for and your expectations, and if you judge it by what it is, and not what it could have been.
Most of the game's problems were solved, but not by the devs themselves. Game now finally "supports" DirectInput controllers because Steam Overlay added native support to all games. Optimization problems were "solved" because now a modern budget PC is much more powerful than the high end rigs of the time the game was released.
The game still has some design problems like disappointing ending, almost useless unlockable bikes and bikers, and a misleading "Endless Mode". And the promised release of the game's sourcecode never happened. You can have some basic mods to change some models, but nothing that really adds to the game.
The game has a very weird artistic style; aparently its a post-apocalyptic setting but civilian cars and the police drives around normally. It's like if the devs changed the entire concept of the game in the middle of the development.
There isn't much variation, the levels seems really copy and pasted, there is just 3 different biomes, and third one is specially ugly. The campaign can be beaten under just one hour, you are supposed to replay it with different gameplay flavors, but really there isn't much more to do. Quick Race Mode is pretty much a joke, which just repeats campaign levels for a single race that lasts literally less than 2 minutes. Campaign+ has really nothing special about it and isn't much harder than regular campaign. Game is also too easy because you have too many guns available early on, and allowed to carry to many of them. You can just shoot everyone from their backs and you don't even need to learn how the melee combat works unless you want to challenge yourself with no-guns bikers.
But the general good polishment of gameplay, lots of weapons, fun combat, and great splitscreen multiplayer makes it a great casual fun game, makes it a very good party game. I would rate it a 6.5/10
It's -not exactly- the successor to Road Rash that we always wanted, but it gets close. Maybe it's the best we are ever going to get, so just play it. Hey, at least it isn't 45 dollars anymore.