In Defense of Redneck Rampage (1997)
In 1996, the game Duke Nukem 3D was released, showing the capabilities of the Build Engine and was distinctive as being an FPS game where there was a bit more in the way of interactivity compared to something like Doom. Sure, it was mainly a game where you shot things and collected key cards but one of the core selling points of that game was how there were these more lived-in environments, as well as a distinct charm and character which heavily differentiated it from Doom. Although not the first Build Engine game (predated by 1995's Witchaven and William Shatner's TekWar), it was the game that showed the capabilities of the engine to a great potential.
Naturally a bunch more games followed it and there's three of these games that are cited as must play FPS games which are Duke Nukem 3D, and 1997's Blood and Shadow Warrior, which respectively stylised themselves after testosterone fuelled action movies, horror and splatter films and martial arts films. Sometimes this list is expanded to four games which presents the black sheep of the bunch known as Redneck Rampage, which seemed stylised after things such as Beavis and Butthead and very explicitly styled after exploitation films such as the films produced by Troma Entertainment, and lots of other things that aim towards exploiting tastelessness and stupidity. Some people love this game and some people hate this game, it was something that got mixed reviews at the time and exists as this weird anomaly of something that was produced back in the late 1990s.
Redneck Rampage has gameplay elements that feel directly like they're creating a bizarre parody of FPS mechanics. Your starting revolver and shotgun are both quite powerful to use but also pretty unwieldy considering the respective slow rate of fire of the revolver and the wide horizontal spread of the shotgun, and the weapons in general do feel like comedic variations of things you'd find in other FPS games. Dynamite is quite powerful but the throwing trajectory can be imprecise - and later you get a crossbow which launches dynamite at people, as well as an automatic assault rifle (humorously treated as this trusty little rifle you have), an explosive powder keg that you place down and ignite, a device which launches saw blades at people. There's also a very powerful but unwieldy Alien Arm plasma gun which decimates targets with ease, and a Teat Gun - a powerful alien chaingun that looks like a pair of breasts. The humour in this game is quite crude, especially with its pervasive scatological references, and its abundance of stereotypes, but often times the humour can be funny. There's a clear love for its main characters even if it delights in showing them to be total idiots, which is juxtaposed with the very absurd and nonsensical alien invasion plot.
There are also quite a low variety of enemies in this game (I believe under 10 types) - basically explaining away that the enemies are a string of alien clones, some of whom imitate people. There's an interesting enemy in this game called the Alien Hulk Guards who soak up a lot of damage, you have to incapacitate them first and then blow them up with dynamite before they get back up - which gives off feelings like that one scene in the movie The Thing where Kurt Russel torches an alien before blowing it up when it tries to put itself out. There are also benign NPC chickens, pigs and cows as well as Bubba who appears at the end of the level - who you have to whack with a crowbar in order to end each level.
I also feel that special mention should also go to how this game handles its healing mechanics. Alcohol and food are your main sources of health, and these replenish both your health as well as filling up respective 'alcohol' and 'gut' meters which effectively act as the game's armour mechanics. If you fill these up too much then your character becomes either inebriated or filled up which winds up affecting the gameplay, so you have to balance your usage of these items. Eating food also decreases your alcohol meter as well, and both of these meters decrease overtime as well. Quite a complicated system when you compare it to standard health kits or automatic health regeneration mechanics.
Something that I think is very interesting about this game is that there are a lot of interesting flaws, clearly a game that was made by talented developers who could make a good game but weren't all there yet. So, you have weapons that are powerful and inventive but impractical to use, game mechanics that are quite sophisticated yet also across as pretty unintuitive and unlike most other FPS games, and the same can be said about its puzzles which can be pretty obtuse in how they are implemented. In fact, I think this game can be summed up quite well as a game which is quite sophisticated, yet also just lacking in the way of intuitive design. Precision aiming, in particular, is also kind of impossible in this game because, despite an aiming reticule, the game seems to favour an automatic aiming system like out of Doom, which does take some time to get used to. But it also clashes with moments where, say, you have to precisely shoot a button to solve a puzzle.
Speaking of the puzzles in this game, the first level has a section where you blow up a silo with a bullseye drawn on it - which is something that should be really obvious, but it's made obscure by how open the level is. The first level in particular is interesting because so much of it was made to be fleshed out and showing all these exploitables, like with a hit and run driver, various dive bars and houses with a tonne of interactables in them - where it encourages you to explore the entirety of the map. Yet this also has an effect where it turns the very first level into this unnecessarily confusing and labyrinthian design that becomes frustrating when you actually try to progress through it. Another puzzle that I found frustrating was a button pressing one in the sewers where you have to look up to see the buttons, which would sound simple, if not for the fact that looking up is simply not intuitive in the Build Engine.
But I think there's a lot to this game where certain mechanics were meant to be funny with how frustrating and trollish they are and how counter-intuitive some of them can be. One such level starts with you directly next to a bunch of explosive kegs where you can die quite quickly, which I found amusing but that would otherwise be a bad design choice in any other game. There's a mine cart which can crush you and kills you instantly if you so much as touch it, despite the fact that it moves at such a snails pace - and there's a lot of design choices like this that are in abundance in Redneck Rampage. Subsequently, there's also video reviews from the likes of Civvie11 and GmanLives that also express explicit frustration at mechanics like this, which I think is quite amusing. Either you'll hate this game for its mechanics or you'd find the humour in it.
Redneck Rampage is a game of great ambition but it's also the sort of thing where it feels like the developers were making it for fun, without really that much consideration into how people interact with it. I think I've referred to this as a "so bad it's good" game before, but it's a game where a lot of talent and effort was put into it, it's often quite sophisticated, yet it also demonstrates flaws that are very interesting from a game developing perspective - which I think makes it a must-play. It's also not the worst game I've played, or even the worst FPS or Build Engine game I've seen. It's functional enough and there's enough charm to it that it can be quite entertaining despite itself.
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