Redout Review

There is something truly spectacular about racing what are tantamount to spaceships across beautifully constructed race tracks at ridiculously high speeds, and Redout excels in giving players familiar but highly intense and competitive anti-grav racing. It’s hard not to compare Redout to a franchise like WipEout, because the game pays a very obvious homage to the franchise. However, that’s not to say Redout doesn’t excel in delivering a good futuristic racing experience.

Prior to Redout’s development, the developers at 34BigThings simply wanted to play a WipEout game in VR. Tired of waiting for this to happen, they developed Redout to achieve virtual reality after two years of development. Sadly the PlayStation 4 version of the game doesn’t support VR, but it still makes for an excellent futuristic racer, with 45 career races and over 100 challenges to beat, along with multiple game modes, including local 1V1 split-screen and online multiplayer.

The game handles itself very smoothly with no dips in framerate and the some gorgeous environments that zoom out of view in the blink of an eye – my only critique is that I feel the race ships could have been designed with more detail. The soundtrack is a good fit, but isn’t exactly memorable either and it’s hard not to compare it to WipEout’s licenses to various electronic music artists. It’s beautifully composed and definitely builds a sense of urgency in the competitive atmosphere of racing through tracks across the galaxy.

Redout isn’t particularly hard at first, but this does change quite swiftly. If you’re familiar with WipEout then this shouldn’t be a problem, but new players may struggle to get to grips with how the game plays across its varied game modes. There are different types of race to can compete in and these come in the form of various time attack and races with different stipulations. Other modes include a last man standing mode, which eliminates the last placed racer on each lap of the race until one racer is left, a score mode where players are graded on performance and time. Finally, boss mode sees players race through a chain of five tracks connected with teleporters, which makes for a long, intense and seemless racing experience across a selection of beautiful environments.

On top of all of these modes, there are also customisation options where players can pick between active and passive upgrades for their preferred vehicles. The active upgrades are aggressive and offensive upgrades to your ship include weapons and energy drainers that you’re used to seeing in WipEout. The passive upgrades allow the player to go under the hood and tweak the ships performance and attributes, which comes in handy when trying to shove other racers into their own demise.

Redout definitely delivers a familiar experience on the PlayStation platform because of franchises like WipEout, but for Xbox and Nintendo it’ll feel like something new but equally familiar. Redout is currently available on PS4 and Xbox One, but the game will be coming to the Nintendo Switch in the winter. I must say that despite playing the PS4 version for this review, it’ll be very interesting to see how the developers at 34BigThings tweak the game for the Nintendo Switch in particular, especially for features like the offline split screen mode which we know will obviously have split Joy-Con support, which may help to give the game the identity it deserves.

Redout is an ambitious attempt to recapture the glory of futuristic racing games, while paying homage to WipEout. The game’s controls and responsiveness have been fine-tuned to make the hardest of tracks very interesting and engaging to race across at supersonic speeds. Redout is an example of a game that’s given and old formula another coat of paint, but it could also mean the beginning of another futuristic racer franchise, in the absence of a true contemporary from Sony.

Score: 8/10

Version Tested: PlayStation 4