Immortal Redneck

The Good
+ Tight, responsive controls
+ Appealing art style and humor
+ Great fast paced FPS gameplay
+ Lots of enemy variety
+ Decent port to Switch

The Bad
- Cheap and unfair difficulty spikes
- Deeply flawed gameplay design
- Humor can be hit and miss
- Gimmicky abilities and weapons
- Loses steam after 15-20+ hours

The Bottom Line
Let me get this out of the way first: I don't like roguelikes. I just think it's a cheap way to design role playing games and player evolution by using randomly generated environments and levels, mostly dungeons. It's why I don't really care for games like Binding of Isaac or Rogue Legacy - not because they're bad, but because they don't appeal to me. And then there's Immortal Redneck, a roguelike FPS. I was admittedly curious when I looked up gameplay footage for Immortal Redneck. It looked like some dumb fun, and lo, it was $16 bucks on the eShop, and wanting to try this game out, I decided to give it a go. My opinion of the game evolved when I sunk some time into it, ranging from "holy crap, this game is fun" to "alright, I'm done with this game". Immortal Redneck is very tight to play and control, and a ton of fun at first, but once you play it some more, it evolves into a cheap, unrewarding and tedious mess.

The premise is that you are this redneck from Kansas (voiced by Nigel Whitmey, who voiced Haggard from the excellent Battlefield: Bad Company games) who gets into a ATV accident while vacationing in Egypt. He is resurrected as a mummy, and to test his immortality or something of the matter, he must prove his worth by blasting everything in his path. Nothing special, but it works. Gameplay wise, Immortal Redneck is a mixture of a variety of FPS and roguelike games - it takes elements from Redneck Rampage, Binding of Isaac, Doom 2016 and Serious Sam. You have three pyramids to travel to, with each run being different than the last. You have dozens of "favors" at your disposal, which grant you new weapons and abilities (and they come from Egyptian gods and goddesses). You'll travel through the pyramids and shoot every single friggin' thing in sight, as well as sometimes finding the lone treasure chest or two, some being locked as a reward behind a mission, namely platforming challenges under the guise of not killing an enemy or not getting hurt.

The game's tone is very whimsical and lighthearted, with cartoonish enemy and character designs and equally cartoony looking weapons. Immortal Redneck has a ton of weapon and enemy variety, and while some weapons are the same despite looking different, there is a lot of diversity in the baddie department. Frogs, ghouls, mummies, Hellboy-like demons, robots, lizard soldiers, the list goes on and on, and they get stronger as you travel up the pyramids. You will face off against bosses, some of which are tough, and some pathetically easy depending on the weapons you get. You also earn scrolls, which give you different perks on your run, some beneficial and some that will be a detriment to your run. Not to mention, you will die - a lot. The coins you earn carry over to your run, and you use the coins to upgrade your abilities, buy new favors or your stats overall. For the most part, Immortal Redneck is quite tight to play, with some excellent controls and fast paced shooter gameplay...at first. Once you clock in 15 or 20 hours into the game, you see the gaping flaws.

For starters, it's quite obvious that Immortal Redneck is a roguelike. At first, it's super addictive to go back to a pyramid, try your worth again, die, upgrade, go back, try again, die, upgrade...and as it goes on, it becomes a vicious, repetitious and unrewarding cycle. It doesn't feel engaging anymore, the roguelike elements become more detrimental rather than unique or clever. Immortal Redneck also suffers from some tough and unfair difficulty spikes, namely by throwing a bone in the form of bad scrolls, a weak, gimmicky weapon with no use, a useless ability or worse. If you fight a tough boss, you need the best weapons, abilities and scrolls possible or otherwise you're screwed. While the deaths are totally going to be your fault in many cases, sometimes the game will just make it harder for you, it feels like the game wants you to die, a warning of sorts, or maybe you'll just get lucky and go through the pyramid without a cinch. The game even admits the sudden difficulty spikes and unfairness when the redneck remarks "oh, fking bullst, what am I going to do with this?!" when given a bad scroll. Lazy way of being self aware, I guess.

And that goes into the technicalities of the game: for the most part, it looks pretty good graphically, with a very unique art style and colorful visuals. The Switch version is capped at 30 FPS, but for the most part it's surprisingly smooth, aside from a few bugs, glitches and crashes. A couple of times, the game suddenly crashed and I had to restart it. There were a few times that a enemy or two sunk into the level geometry and somehow died, and there were a few reload animation glitches on some of the weapons where the weapons' magazine or projectiles clipped through the gun. Docked mode and Handheld mode were universally identical, which is a good thing I think. There were some nitpicks, namely towards the humor of the game. The humor is very hit and miss at times, with some jokes and wisecracks worthy of a chuckle or two, but most of the time the redneck has a mouth fouler than a fired up Bill Burr. Most of the jokes are heavy on excess swearing, and while I'm fine with profanity it comes off as cheap and overused, and kills any semblance of creative jokes. The music is catchy, but not very memorable or well composed.

Overall, Immortal Redneck is a mixed bag, it's not mediocre but it's not amazing either. I had fun at first, but after getting two out of the 3 pyramids in and clocking over 15-20 hours, I was done. Immortal Redneck has a great visual style, fun FPS gameplay, tight controls and even some creative weapons that should belong in a Insomniac game. However, the unfair difficulty spikes, piss simple gameplay design and on and off humor bog down the game. If you do choose to get Immortal Redneck, get it during a sale.