As an avid fan of flashy arcade space shooters, I couldn‘t wait to boot up Redout: Space Assault. With its combination of on-rails action and roguelike progression systems, it seemed poised to scratch my itch for adrenaline-pumping run-and-gun fun. Unfortunately, nearly every aspect of the game – from controls to visual variety – falls astonishingly flat, resulting in a dull slog rather than a heart-pounding roller coaster ride.
Lifeless Story and Characters Fail to Compel
The vibrant worlds of Star Fox and Sin & Punishment immerse players with their colorful characters and imaginative narratives – aspects that compel you forwards. Space Assault, however, opens with an impenetrable story involving some murky galactic conflict between organizations called Poseidon and Piranha. None of the terminology gets properly explained, making it hard to discern the actual narrative threads.
You play as a pilot named Leon but receive no context about his background or personality before taking control. During missions, Leon exchanges stale dialogue with other lifeless characters that fail to emit any emotive qualities. Their bizarre facial animations and disjointed line delivery further diminish any sense of immersion. After 30+ years of gaming, I can appreciate a good story is not vital in pure action titles. However, the developers dedicate so much screen time to expositing a messy, uninteresting plot that goes nowhere.
Beautiful Backdrops Mean Nothing with Repetitive Environments
One area where Space Assault shows glimpses of visual splendor is in its interstellar backdrops. Vibrant purple nebulas peppered with glittering stars stretch as far as the eye can see while brilliant orange gas giants loom in the distance. It nails the dazzling and epic scales expected of space opera worlds.
However, that eye candy loses its luster rapidly since every environment looks nearly identical. Besides changes in color palettes, the actual structures and objects you traverse remain the same. It‘s always just generic satellites, boxy bases, and asteroid clusters repeated ad nauseam regardless of whatever new system you jump to. Without any unique sights or memorable spectacles amidst the repetition, the locales blur together into a homogeneous mush.
As I weaved through the umpteenth asteroid field and base interior, I yearned for the imaginative planets from Star Fox or moving set pieces from Sin & Punishment that continuously surprise you with inventive sights.
Unresponsive Controls Completely Break the Experience
The foundation of any successful rail shooter is control – the ability to dart around obstacles and enemy fire with precision and responsiveness. Space Assault not only fails here but practically breaks the entire experience with its abysmal input handling.
Direction changes and turns feel delayed and sluggish rather than snappy. There is noticeable slowdown between moving the stick and your ship responding accordingly. It seems like the developers introduced raw input lag to controls likely to compensate for performance limitations.
However, for a fast-paced shooter relying on quick reflexes and nimble navigation, this cripples the enjoyment. You wrestle against the controls making even mundane navigation a chore, let alone avoiding dozens of enemies shooting tracking missiles and lasers.
Increasing the stick deadzone helped alleviate the issue but couldn‘t fix the inherent lag and weightiness. Additionally, the iconic barrel roll that serves as your defensive ace in the hole is bafflingly absent when you need it most. During turret sections requiring precise aim, attempting a barrel roll just triggers worthless drifting motions rather than a life-saving spin. After dozens of hours mastering rolls in Star Fox games, getting caught helpless here makes no sense.
Firing Feels Ineffective
Space Assault grants you an ever-growing arsenal of weapons – from lightning guns to railguns – to blast away hordes of foes. However, rattling off shots rarely conveys any visceral sensation of impact or feedback.
Enemies simply blink out of existence the instant your shots connect with little fanfare. Combined with the numb controls, you feel detached from the actual act of discharging your weapons. The assortment of firearms also lack any creative secondary effects to distinguish themselves. It all feeds into a general monotonous feeling towards combat.
I attempted replaying missions with different loadouts but derived little excitement from the same repetitive combat scenarios – just with a different visual skin on my projectiles. The weapons, like most aspects of Space Assault, feel static and soulless.
Roguelike Progression Lacks Purpose
Persistent progression systems have become commonplace in modern arcade experiences to incentivize replayability. Space Assault allows you to earn credits from completing missions to purchase permanent upgrades for your ship‘s health, weapons, and gear. It seemingly provides incentive to dive back into previous levels to grind more currency.
However, with little gameplay variety across the punishingly stale missions, replaying them hardly feels rewarding no matter your upgraded stats. Outside of bumping up damage output, the lower health regeneration barely offsets the numbness induced by the combat and controls to make the progression compelling.
During my fourth straight attempt at destroying Battleship Xarth’s plasma cannons with slightly upgraded photon torpedoes, I gained no greater satisfaction from downing it quicker. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
Is There Light at the End of the Tunnel?
I tried willing myself onwards in hopes there would be some glimmer of enjoyment yet to discover. However, even the later time trials and boss fights end up hampered by the game’s pervasive issues. One race has you outracing a giant laser beam in a canyon but the lethargic controls sap away any thrill. The massive screen-filling bosses should feel daunting yet end up tedious bullet sponges.
At around the 10 hour mark, as I manually rotated my limp, drifting craft to once again shoot colored weak points off a familiar gigantic battleship, my will finally broke. Space Assault had nothing left to show me beyond recycled backdrops and imprecise inputs. Like an awful B movie, only the game‘s brevity prevented it from wasting more of my precious time.
Space Assault markets itself as a successor to revered arcade space blasters like Star Fox, Sin & Punishment, and After Burner with its explosive barrel rolls, screen-filling bosses, and rocking synth metal soundtrack. However, every attempted homage falls completely and utterly flat. With its pathetically sluggish controls, repetitive environments, and thoughtless progression systems, the experience feels akin to a soulless mobile game rather than a white-knuckle thrill ride.
Rail shooter fanatics desperate for some interstellar action may grit their teeth through Space Assault‘s numerous flaws but nothing I witnessed in the 10 painful hours invested gave me any inkling of hope. This could have been a long-awaited return-to-form for the genre but instead squanders that potential for something utterly forgetful. What a disappointing misfire.
