The game starts off well enough, but then they hit you with a level where you can't drop off loot, can't get replacement units without fighting and can't make new supplies. Remember, this is a game where you only get one save and as such you can get softlocked. If you have to quit the game for whatever reason you have to fight through all of those battles again and use even more supplies and health. Absolute terrible design.
Whilst promising, the game is practically unfinished, unstable and incredibly buggy. Your dwarfs have severe pathfinding issues and will get stuck for no reason and the logistics system is absolutely terrible, with it taking ages to finish the most simple of requests because of how inefficient your haulers are. Whilst there is combat and a militia job there is actually no real way to organize them, so if you order an attack command your entire colony fights the enemy one at a time because there's no way to muster them. You'd think that in a game like this there would be at least a barracks, but apparently not.
As of 2023/07/28 the game does not work out of the box. As such, I cannot recommend this game and am forced to give it the lowest possible rating.
Immortal Redneck is a first person rogue like shooter, seemingly taking inspiration from the likes of Serious Sam. This game has some good parts. The combat is fast paced and has a frenetic pace and you do get a wide of abilities. However, it is mired by several frustrating design choices. To start, it's a horde arena shooter and yet they give you very limited ammunition and lengthy reloads. I find this ruins the fast pace of the combat, as you have to wait for a reload every few seconds, and if you run out of ammo your run is basically over, because the devs didn't think you give you a backup weapon like every other shooter ever. Some enemy attacks are hard to avoid and incredibly punishing. There's one enemy type that explodes into a mass of spikes, and a single one can take your entire health bar. There's not much enemy variety either; they just become bullet sponges as you progress in the game. You do get difference character bonuses in the form of Favors which also have their own special ability. However, most of them are pretty mediocre, especially Ammit, which basically punishes you for using her ability. What is perhaps the worst design decision, however, is the scrolls mechanic. Like most roguelikes, there is a random element. However, unlike say, Binding of Isaac, you have no choice in the matter; you don't know what a scroll does until you pick it, and that can ruin your run. Sometimes it takes away your crosshairs, so you can't hit anything due to the lack of Iron sights and the innate inaccuracy of most weapons. And since you can't waste ammunition due to how little you have, you quickly run into ammo problems. Sometimes it'll slow you down to a crawl. Sometimes all of the text on your hud is replaced with fake hieroglyphics. In short, the Scrolls mechanic exist to pad out the game by introducing forced difficulty, meant to ruin your run and force a restart. Immortal Redneck can be fun, but there are better shooters and roguelikes out there.
This game has good art direction and several nice ideas. The concepts of weapon affinity (weapons get better with use) and time-related events are interesting and the combat does have a nice punch to it. The levels are are fairly large with a lot of loot and secrets to encourage exploration, which fits the objective of the game - to acquire data. However, there are game design decisions that can make the game more frustrating than enjoyable. For starters, the inventory UI isn't great. It doesn't provide as much information as it should and you can't even see the stats of equipment you craft. Despite weapon affinity being a core mechanic of the game you can't see what abilities you've unlocked, and you can't even review key codes you've found. Another frustrating mechanic is the platforming. Which isn't bad in itself, but you take fall damage and the jumping controls aren't great, which can quickly get really annoying. The difficulty spikes in this game can get absurd. One minute you'll be dealing decent damage, and then suddenly you'll face an enemy that kills you 2 hits and takes little damage. It doesn't help that the hitbox for some weapons are broken; some attacks will just go straight through enemies and deal no damage. It doesn't help that when you die a special enemy type called a ghost will spawn. This was a novel concept at first, but it quickly grew old when they started to make difficult encounters even more difficult. They don't spawn in boss arenas at least. Overall, this game is ok as is, but it really needs another patch to refine it a little more. There needs to be a rebalance and some QoL changes to make it feel like less of a chore to play though at times. Funnily enough, it reminds me a little of Dark Souls II, but with less polish and much worse UI. Whilst the souls games were frustrating at times, they did enough stuff right to balance it out, a balance that Hellpoint lacks at the moment.
