Heavy Fire: Red Shadow

When I reviewed Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear back in 2015, I liked it. I mean, I didn't exactly rave about it or name it one of my favorite games of the year, but I felt it was a solid on-rails shooter that got a lot more right than wrong. I feel it's important to make that clear right at the start, because Heavy Fire: Red Shadow is a crummy follow-up. I went into this game kind of excited for another action-packed shoot 'em up, but what I got instead was a mindless bore that is a massive step back in almost every way possible.

Red Shadow keeps up the tradition of throwing us smack dab in the middle of some of the most volatile regions of the world. We've already fought through Afghanistan, Iran and a couple fictitious Middle Eastern countries, so it's time to set our sights on North Korea. There's a story here that predicts political fallout after the United States installs an anti-missile weapon to protect South Korea. Unfortunately, this fuels even greater tensions, which eventually devolves into a bunch of repetitive missions where the goal is to shoot the bad guys.

The truth is, you don't go to Heavy Fire for the expert foreign policy analysis, because it's mostly nonsense. All you need to know is that something bad happens and it's up to you to jump on a gun turret and shoot wave after wave of bad guys before they kill your entire squad. And that perfectly sums up the entire game. You just stand there firing that gun through eight painfully boring stages and hope it's over soon.

I'm not going to lie; the stationary aspect of this game caught me by complete surprise. After playing some of the previous titles, I went into Red Shadow expecting it to be another on-rails shooter. I suppose the good news is that it's still a shooter, but I'm still shocked that you don't get to move around. So much of what made Shattered Spear so exciting is that it was always on the move and throwing you into crazy situations, and it's incredibly disappointing that none of that is on display in this brand new installment.

"But maybe I don't need to be on-rails for Heavy Fire to be fun" is something I kept trying to convince myself of at the time. Maybe all the changes they've made will be enough to keep the action fresh. I mean, we're now able to call in for back-up soldiers, air support, supplies and more. There are also optional side quests and even a leveling up system. All that sounds like fun, right? Surely the good people at Mastiff know what they're doing and will keep this from becoming repetitive.

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Of course, that didn't happen. Heavy Fire: Red Shadow is an absolute mess that is neither fun nor exciting. It stumbles at every turn and constantly finds ways of shooting itself in the foot. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you look at the eight stages. That's actually a bit of a misnomer, because this game really only has four locations. We'll fight through fifteen waves of enemy soldiers on the beach before jumping into stage 2, which is another fifteen waves of enemy soldiers on the exact same beach, only this time around it's during the day. All four locations force you to play both the day and night versions for no reason, even though battles are near identical.

Whether you want to call it filler or something else, this approach goes a long way to blunt any momentum the game might have had. It actually made me dread each new area, because it meant that I would spend close to an hour firing at the same enemies and the same vehicles with the same weapons at the same location. The game doesn't suddenly introduce new abilities and mechanics, it's just four locations where you stand in place and fire in a circle. Maybe that sounds like fun to you, but to me it feels like a giant step in the wrong direction.

Part of me wonders if this scaled back approach has something to do with the VR support on PlayStation 4. Standing in place and never having to move may actually make a lot of sense, especially given that walking around in virtual reality can be a real hassle. Of course, this may have nothing to do with it, but whatever the reason, it's clear that Mastiff kneecapped this game right from the start. Even by the already low standards of the Heavy Fire series, this installment is a mess.

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It's also incredibly buggy. I ran into a problem at the very start where simply changing my settings froze up the game. Later on, when I was finally able to get in and play, I would run into the problem where I would kill all the enemies, but the wave refused to end. It's as if one of the bad guys was invisible or got trapped behind the geometry. And this didn't happen once or twice, but rather all the time.

On a slightly more positive note, there are times when Red Shadow looks pretty good. The four environments have a bunch of destructible buildings and objects scattered around, and I like the effect of seeing the helicopter fly in or an aerial attack blowing everything up. Sadly, the few nice flourishes can't make up for standing in one place and seeing the same background for an hour at a time. Couple that with the crummy gameplay and this is a massive step backwards for the Heavy Fire series.

Even with modest expectations, Red Shadow left me thoroughly disappointed. The choice to shift the focus away from being an on-rails shooter removes a lot of what I liked about the previous installments. Standing in one place just isn't as much fun as speeding down the river in a boat while shooting at enemies on all sides, which is exactly the kind of over-the-top action we saw in the earlier games. This is a series that should be going bigger and better, not scaling it back to the point of being boring and predictable. This is not how you make a Heavy Fire sequel.