A Tower Defence/Shooter Hybrid That Lacks Staying Power
I’d love to know what the story is with REDEX. I have so many questions. Who are the goons that I am killing in the hundreds? What beef do I have with REDEX, the titular ‘lab’ that I seem to be storming? How can I order tesla coils and turrets from the internet and receive them in the space of a second? And why is this all an odd pun on FedEx, the delivery company?
None of these get answered in REDEX, an odd little hybrid of run-and-gunning and tower defence. Your main character is hunkered down in the middle of a small 2D arena, with only a computer terminal and your choice of two guns. A wave counter ticks up, and suddenly shotgunners, riflemen and other soldiers start streaming in. Their aim is to kill you, and the only recourse is to kill them back.
Each soldier drops coins, in a silver format (plentiful) and gold (not so plentiful). Between waves – or during them, if you’re feeling cocky – you can spend the coins at the terminal. There’s an array of useful stuff here, ranging from computers that generate cash passively (but get targeted by troops as a result), all the way up to the tesla coils and turrets that I mentioned. On purchase, the item is quickly airdropped to you, often far from where you want it, and you have a short amount of time to snag it, lug it to where you want it, then open and erect it. The next wave will likely have started at some point during that process.
A Postage-Themed Shooter, Anyone?
The waves are of the endless variety. Every tenth wave, the level’s boss appears, spawning enemies and careening in and out of the game screen. Depending on the density of turrets, coils, reload stations and decoy dummies in your base, this battle will either be a short one (positive) or a short one (negative). Rarely is it something in between. And then you’re on to the next set of ten waves until eventually you conk it.
After the run, it’s back to the main menus for a spot of upgrading. The main character can improve traits like ‘Harvesting’, to increase the rate of ammo-gain, or ‘Engineering’, to extend the lifespan of turrets. Or you can spend your gold coins on new weapons, of which two can be taken into each run. The choice is hugely important, as I found the quality-span of the guns to be massive. It’s very easy to be lumbered with a slow-reloading sniper rifle when all you want is an SMG.
My enjoyment of REDEX looked like a low-flying bell curve. At the start I absolutely despised it. I honestly wondered how I was going to play for long enough to generate a review. It’s a worthwhile caveat to place in front of you: this is not a game that introduces itself well, if at all.
An Unwelcome Welcome
I like to call it the Alpha Protocol Syndrome. REDEX is so determined to offer a wide range of upgrades that it neglects to make the starting version of the character enjoyable to play at all. When you first start playing, you have a terrible plinky-plinky pistol that fires erratically, takes an age to reload, and barely makes a dent in incoming enemies. Killing an enemy nets next to no silver coins, and death arrives pretty quickly. This is all without mentioning the terrible button-mapping (LT to jump? L3 to reload?) and re-mapping that doesn’t work properly. It’s a horrible experience but, in most of the above cases, it’s deliberate.
You see, after a few runs, you can add some upgrade pips to the player’s stats. Why on earth ‘accuracy’ is included, we don’t know: in a shooter like this, accuracy should be a given, not something that’s earned. So, your main character improves their survivability, their earning potential and – alongside some weapon purchases – some damage potential too. Eventually you can hold your own.
Welcome to the Palace
This is where I started rising up the bell curve. It soon becomes clear which ordnance is worth purchasing and which very much isn’t. It’s paramount, for example, that you build a Dummy Palace (™). Decoy dummies are placed on the outside, and turrets are placed on the inside (all of these need to be carried into position, as the supply drops won’t build this for you). Enemies will focus their fire on the dummies and get mown down by the turrets. With enough Engineering upgrades (and toolbox drops) the dummies regen enough to stay alive through every wave, and you can stack even more turrets, tesla coils, silver-earning computers and coin gatherers inside.
It’s here that I started to enjoy myself. The main character can become redundant as you build battlements and hide inside, only coming out to kill shotgunners that – counter-intuitively – have the greatest range of any enemies. That power felt pretty good. The enemies that were initially handing me my ass were now being handed theirs. I was earning gold coins at an incredible rate, and wiped out all of the weapon purchases and their associated achievements.
A short fling rather than long romance
But I quickly toppled off the peak of the bell curve. It soon becomes clear that REDEX doesn’t know what to do at this point. There are three levels to unlock, but they don’t distinguish themselves from each other. Main Building Roof, the second level, has a fan that propels you or enemies into the air, but that’s in an indefensible position, so you won’t see it. The RedLabs level is a complicated, annoying mess of platforms, but that confusion only scuppers the main character, not the enemies. They each play out in much the same way, with the same player tactics every time.
I was hopeful that there would be new gear to buy with each level, and it’s only kind of, sort of true. The toolbox, supercomputer and tesla coil arrives in Main Building Roof, which are all welcome (albeit, they’re all upgraded versions of stuff you already have, so don’t mix things up strategically), but there are no new inclusions in RedLabs. The increasing number of waves are just repeats of previous waves, too: the enemies just gain increased stats, rather than anything new that you have to find countermeasures for.
There are new difficulties to unlock, but I wasn’t altogether bothered about exploring them. I’d found the optimal way to play (or, at least one of them) in the form of the Dummy Palace (™), and I was constructing it in every level. The levels didn’t demand a new way to play, so I didn’t bother. And the tedium was real: I was playing merely to grind out a few achievements, and I wasn’t enjoying myself anymore.
Enjoyment Bookended by Pain
REDEX asks a lot of a player, outside of the cheap entry point. It tutorialises itself poorly and asks you to die, over and over, before you become even barely functional. Later on, it asks you to grind through levels that don’t repay the favour of being enjoyable to replay. There’s an enjoyable hour or two in the middle, but they’re bookended by pain.
Call us picky, but there are games out there that don’t bother with the whole pain thing.
Important Links
Ready to Fight to Be the Last One Standing? REDEX is a Cheap Survival Shooter! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/ready-to-fight-to-be-the-last-one-standing-redex-is-a-cheap-survival-shooter/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/redex-console-edition/9nf97nljzflz
