Jose Zagal's Home Page - Games & Game Studies

Home	Talks and Slides	My GameLog	Research and Projects	Publications	Resume	Teaching
Back // GameBreadth Project // Game Ontology Project // GameLog

Immortal Redneck (PC) Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated I started playing this game on Sunday 22 October, 2023 // I stopped playing this game on: Thursday 26 October, 2023
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.
October 26, 2023 11:38:48 PM
I've played some more - unlocked two characters, the store, and some other fun stuff. I even made it past the 1st boss (there's 2, the second is the top of the pyramid, and there are 3 pyramids). So, there's a lot of stuff to do in this game. And the upgrade tree is long, and deep. And there's also a bunch of other things to unlock. And, the game plays fast and is "fine". There's one particular design decision that has been bugging me though - especially since I made it past the first boss and then died almost instantly. The game has scrolls - which are like boons and artifacts from other rogue-like games. This is fun. Some are more useful than others, etc. BUT, some are bad. So bad that they can immediately cost you the game. And this has happened to me multiple times. I understand that the drops are random, and what you get is random, but it really ends up feeling like you're having an experience of empowerment - and then you randomly lose through no fault of your own. I lost because the scroll I got for defeating the boss randomly gave me a weapon - and the weapon was a flare gun with a really slow reload and the first area I wandered into spawned a ton of frogs and there was just no way to defeat them without getting overwhelmed. Game over. That was not a fun player experience for me. And, I think there's an easy fix for this - make the bad scrolls a choice: you grab a scroll and there are two good ones and a bad one. If you want the good ones, you have to take the bad one (sort of like what Shotgun King does - where you choose a good thing and a bad one). That way, you can decide not to take the boon and bad... Here, you just randomly get it as soon as you pick it up and you hope for the best. Either way, time to move on to another game!
October 22, 2023 10:02:07 PM
I've been playing this for my seminar. I picked it because it's supposed to be a "boomer shooter - which I take to mean either (or both) it's an old school shooter for "boomers" (like myself, in the videogame context I'm old) OR it's an old school shooter in the big explosions and lots of enemies (like Serious Sam from back in the day). I'm not sure which it's supposed to be - and the boomer-ness is probably the least interesting thing about the game! So, it turns out it's a rogue-like! Each run is a pyramid - and you must navigate the different floors trying to find a stair case up. I've only made it as far as the 4th floor - but I guess there's a few more and then a boss. And then you can start on a new pyramid. The starting area reminds me of Rogue Legacy - you can go to a place to buy upgrades (permanent ones, small boosts to health and stuff like that) and once you've spent your money whatever is left you lose when you start a new run. So, try to spend to maximize! One of the things I really enjoyed is that occasionally (I think it's random? perhaps it's tied to certain enemies on a floor?) enemies drop scrolls that are mostly good - some are bad - and they serve as permanent modifiers for the rest of your run. My favorite is one that gave me infinite ammo until the next floor! But I've picked up others that are interesting/weird. Take more damage from behind, do more damage in the air, do more damage but only carry one weapon, etc. Oh, you can also find new weapons (my favorite is the machine gun crossbow!) including a HL crowbar and a potato gun. Ha! The levels are essentially small rooms - some are multi-floor, in which you must defeat all the enemies in order to continue (unlock the door). You can also unlock new characters that have different abilities, weapons, and stats. Each character also has a special ability, but I keep on forgetting to use it. Huh.

Immortal Redneck (PC)