Redout: Wipeout for PC

Games
1

So I found this game the other day on Steam. It’s pretty good. I don’t have a previous experience with Wipeouts but it seems it’s kind of a clone or at least a new entry in that genre of “anti-grav futuristic ships racing fast on neon tracks”.

Graphics and art are good.
Techno music is good.
Performance is good (all ultra, 60 fps).
Speed feeling is good (and I’m still on the first class category of 4, it seems they are faster and faster as you advance).
Controls are interesting, you handle normal movement with one stick/hand and pitch/strafe with the other.


Gameplay wise is focused on racing, but you also pick one passive and one active item, and the active item are things like emp, repair, countermeasures, energy drain, etc, so there a slight vehicular combat aspect, I suppose, but as I say it’s small, some races are classified as ‘pure’ and you won’t have items, and even the others they aren’t the key to win.
There are the typical variety in the career, for now I’ve seen normal races, last man standing races, time trials, pure races, tourneys. It has also contracts where they give you a specific condition (win with this vehicle and this item we give you temporally for free, and you will win the item permanently as a reward).
There is a very simple elements of upgrading ships (5 single upgrades, they are all the same for each vehicle), upgrading items, and buying new vehicles with the credits you win.

It does an interesting thing with vehicle damage, you suffer damage as you grind yours in the sides of the track, it doesn’t affect performance but you will blow up and lose a few seconds if it reaches 0. To avoid it, you have to avoid receiving damage for x seconds, so you will have a tendency to slow down a bit. IMO, it’s a good compromise between arcade games where hitting the sides doesn’t have almost any effect, and sim games where any mistake are super bad and you can forget winning the race.

One thing where you notice it isn’t a $50-60 game is the variety of tracks/environments, 20 tracks with 4 ‘themes’ in total is not much.

Features
Online multiplayer - match against 12 players around the world for a real challenge

Optional VR Support - Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Razer OSVR.

Career mode - 75+ events to race, experience, level up and upgrade your ship

A Diverse World - 20 tracks scattered around 4 locations on a post-apocalyptic Earth, plus boss circuits

Never bored - 7 event types, from classic Race to innovative Arena Race and Score-Based Endurance

Create your story - 6 racing teams, each requiring a different driving approach, and 4 increasingly fast racing classes

Powerup - 10+ racing-focused, upgradable powerups:
additional turbo, shields, self-repair drone, advanced grip system,
slipstream enhancers, and more

Music for your ears - full 5.1 support and a dynamic soundtrack that will drop sicker and sicker beats the faster you go!

2

That’s plenty!

Wipeout HD has 8 + 8 with Fury (a mix of old and new).
F-Zero GX has 25 or so.
Fast Racing Neo has 16.
Mario Kart 8 has 32, 16 of which are old tracks (and that includes the two batches of DLC I believe)

Thanks for the tip, wishlisted.

3

This showed up on the Steam front page for me the other day, and I was looking at it briefly. I’d never heard of it, so I moved on.

Thanks for the write up. One other thing I’m curious about: Do you start every race in last place like in Wipeout, and have to slowly make your way to the front? Or is it more like my favorite racer of this time, Star Wars Episode 1: Pod Racer, where if you do well in qualifying you can start right at the front of the race and stay in the front?

One other advantage that Star Wars Episode 1: Pod racer had over F-Zero, Wipeout and XG3: Xtreme G Racing (and this one from the looks of it) is that the tracks themselves had so much more personality. Normally wipeout type games tend to have very plain looking scenery, mostly just tracks and such, but Episode 1 Pod Racer had various Star Wars worlds that were not just interesting to look at, but more exciting to actually fly past at extreme speeds. Like the Coruscant track, for instance, was really intense since it took place in the dense Capital of the Star Wars universe.

4

Mmm I think you start at the last position in normal races and in tourneys maybe it changes depending of your performance in the last race? I would have to check today later to be sure. There is no classification round, that’s for sure.

I loved Ep1 Pod Racer as well :). Redout has great environments to look, and great distance vision as well, but as I said there are only four distinct ones, Ep1 Pod Racer had a ton, or that’s how I remember it.

5

I can imagine Star Wars has a bit of a head start on the personality front! :-)

Did you ever play F-Zero GX @Rock8man? GX is my favourite of these futuristic racers hands down and I think that did a great job with track and environmental design/variety. Fast Racing Neo does some really fun stuff too, particularly with track hazards. I’ve played most of the Wipeouts and… yeah, I can honestly say I don’t remember many of the tracks.

6

I have not played F-Zero GX. Which platform did that come out for? The only F-Zero I’ve played was the one for the N64.

7

It was on the Gamecube and developed by Sega, running on the Super Monkey Ball engine, of all things.

8

That’s intriguing. An F-Zero game by Sega. Sega makes casual racing games (Outrun) and then balls hard racing games. Did you play F355 Challenge on the Dreamcast? Soooooo hard. I couldn’t make much progress because I wasn’t good enough, and neither were my friends who were playing alongside me. We had a good time losing in that game though. It only featured one car, but that’s the racing game where we grew REALLY familiar with the Suzuka race track in Japan. Also during the 360 era, Sega made a game that they don’t sell anymore on XBLA called Sega Rally. The first round through all the courses is kind of tough, but not too bad, and then the second season starts, and it’s soooooo hard. Despite being someone who got 100% completion in Gran Turismo 3 and 4 and Forza 1 and a few other racing games, I just couldn’t make it through that second season. And the game even has a third season that’s even harder!!! Sega is crazy!!!

9

I had a Dreamcast and I wanted to play that but I think it was around that sort of time that I was starting to realise that those kinds of realistic racers don’t tend to hold my attention like some of the more unusual or larger than life racers do. I spent a lot of time on Wacky Racers and Trickstyle on the Dreamcast! :-D

F-Zero GX definitely falls on the ‘balls hard’ side of Sega racing. My greatest gaming achievement is that I managed to complete the story mode on Very Hard and most of the cups on Master difficulty (with my own custom vehicle at least!).

I watched a guy working his way through the story mode during Games Done Quick and didn’t realise until a commentator mentioned it that Very Hard is almost impossible without using exploits and other weird shit. It made me feel even better even though at the time it turned my hands to jelly and my fingers into wobbly hot dogs trying to nail the last chapter. Imagine a narrow Rainbow Road at around 1000-2000km/h with no barriers. Lunacy.

10

After a pause, I returned to this game. It has some cool moments in later stages, like underwater parts in a track, or races where a good amount of time you are going in vertical or in twisted loops.
And there are more types of races than I believed. I had ‘boss’ races, where you have to show you mastered an environment racing several tracks of the same environment in one go (without pasues, it teleports you from one road to another while racing), Survival which is a time trial winning time crossing checkpoints and having to avoid a track full of mines, Instagib that is a normal race without respawn and extra damage multiplier, Speed is another time trial variation where I believe you win extra time but going above a preset speed, Score that are endurance races of 8-10 laps, apart from tourneys done from other modes, like tourneys of last man standing.

11

Is it possible to win the races? That was my main concern after watching Tom’s stream. He either came in last or second last, and at his best third last, I think.

12

It is possible to win, but it takes a) a real familiarity with the track, and b) the right ship for the right track. I suspect being able to pay for the upgrades helps. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have to come in first place to get past a race, and that some of the events aren’t even about coming in first place. On the contrary, Redout is the kind of game that doesn’t waste your time. You’re constantly earning money, xp, and that all-important familiarity with the track.

All that said, the best I’ve done on most of the tracks is a silver medal, so what do I know? :)

-Tom

13

I’m a pretty casual racer and I’m playing with keyboard (despite how this game works it’s really more designed for controller, but I’m lazy to go and connect it). As I said, casual.

Until now I’ve won 5 gold medals, 12 silvers medals and and 5 bronze medals. So I wouldn’t say this is the ‘Dark Souls of racing’. But right now I’m in the second half of the Class II and I feel the game is starting to say ‘GIT GUD’, because I’m finishing the last tracks from 3rd if I’m lucky to 5th/6th. And we can suppose Class III/IV is harder and harder.

Additionally, the last update actually made the game slightly harder, so yeah, it seems the design of the game tends to the hard side more than easy. And it doesn’t have difficulty selection. Part of the changelog

14

!

-Tom

15

Do you two have a good concept of what it means to “GIT GUD”?

I know what it means in games like Gran Turismo, Forza, Project Gotham, etc. I also knew in Star Wars Episode 1: Racer. In some Wipeouts, like Wipeout Fusion, I had a pretty idea how to get GIT GUD. But in Wipeout on the PS3, I never figured out what I was doing wrong to not be good. In Xtreme G III on the PS2, I never figured out what I was doing wrong.

In RedOut, do you know what you’re doing wrong, and exactly what you need to do to race better? I have to admit, watching the Stream, it wasn’t clear to me what Tom was doing wrong. I thought it looked like he was racing pretty well, and yet coming in last.

16

Well, except a pair of races that I think were unbalanced, the rest has been pretty much like other racing games, usually when you do bad is when you have been making mistakes touching too much the sides of the road and losing speed, and on the other hand when you feel you have done well a segment, racing clean and fast, you can see how the opponent in the distance got closer as result. The usual. Recognize well the apex of the curve and where to turn, know how to drift to take the curve but not drift too much as it makes you lose speed past a certain point. There are some techniques you can employ like strafing in the opposite direction of the curve (instead of the same direction) as it allows you to position yourself in a better place after exiting it.
Additionally there are vehicles with different stats (speed, acc, energy, hp, recharge time, grip, etc) so some tracks can be harder or easier depending of what you pick. They aren’t very expensive so you can buy 3 per class without grinding credits and have a repertoire. I also noticed that I did it better once I bought the upgraded items. Vehicles have a few, one-time, upgrades to improve them, but items can be upgraded 4 times (magnetic grip v4). So for example you buy a very fast vehicle with the flaw of having a poor grip, install the passive upgrade magnetic grip at max level, and you have good well-rounded vehicle. Choosing the right items can also make a difference (turbo boosts for speed trials, repair drone for instagib, etc).

Right now I think I ‘groked’ the game, I can’t explain it but I’m doing it better than before.
I unlocked Class IV already, though I barely had the chance of trying Class III. There are some tricky moments later, like long jumps that end in freefall with a warp game in the middle of the air that teleports you, or curves with guard rail (given that 99% of the track have them, when they don’t, it’s pretty much a trap you have to recognize and avoid) or jumps that tempt you into boost and fly but what you have to do is to keep calm and make the jump shorter than usual or you will crash.

17

Well, I still have to do four races: 3 tournaments and one endurance race, but at this point I think I’m finished with the game, as I’ve really have seen and experienced everything the game had to offer. Recommendable. I would have liked one more world to have less repetition but hey, it’s a $35 game, not a $60 one.
My stats

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18

Cool, there is a free ‘dlc’ with a new environment, with 5 new races in it integrated in the campaign:

19

Old news now but this is the best official patch notes/update video I’ve ever seen:

20

i wishlisted a bunch of these Wipeout-type games on Steam to tide me over until the PS4 remaster of the trilogy. Which are the ones to get during the Steam sale?

If Steam were actually up, I could check and rattle off some of their names even.