Redeemer: Enhanced Edition

Is there a beat 'em up character more badass than Mike Haggar? When his daughter was kidnapped by Mad Gear in Final Fight, he decided right then and there to stop being the mayor of Metro City and start beating up every thug his fist could find. Contrast that with Vasily, the elite forces operative at the center of Redeemer. One look at his super-human physique and pissed-off demeaner and you might think that he would give Haggar a run for his money. But this debut release from Sobaka Studio is the perfect reminder that a truly badass beat 'em up character needs to do more than just look the part, they also need a story fitting of their greatness. Sadly, Redeemer is no Final Fight.

Vasily is a broken man with a lot of regrets. He moved to a remote village in the mountains after serving his time in the military as an elite operative, hoping to finally find peace and a new family after a life of wanton violence. But retirement wasn't going to be that easy, as Vasily discovers when the war came knocking on his front door. He's suddenly thrust back into the fight, setting off on an adventure to see who would destroy his peaceful village.

This is all the setup we need to get into a pretty standard overhead beat 'em up. Vasily is able to kick and punch, which is just enough to string together a few rudimentary combos. The goal is to explore the mostly linear stages in an effort to beat up bad guys, find the target and collect hidden scrolls. As we dig deeper into the mystery, we'll learn more about our hero and how this all connects back to his violent past.

When it comes to the action, there's slightly more going on than just punching and kicking. Our hero can pick up a lot of melee weapons and guns, though I hesitate to label this anything resembling a shooter. You can also use the environment to take out your foes, which includes everything from throwing chairs at the enemy to splitting their head wide open with a buzz saw. And if that wasn't bloody enough, Vasily is also able to finish off the stunned bad guy with a number of gruesome fatalities.

The one nice thing about Redeemer is that you'll slowly gain experience with each weapon just by using it. So if you want to unlock all of the shotgun perks, you'll want to kill as many people as possible with the shotgun. This is how we learn longer combos, pick up perks and extend the ammo in our guns. You'll get to the point where Vasily is almost invincible, especially since it's so easy to regain health in the middle of a grueling fight.

As a beat 'em up, the combat is fine. The combos are nothing special and the weapons don't change the game in any meaningful way. This is still a repetitive button masher where the goal is to beat up bad guys, and that's fun for a while. The problem is that the sixteen levels drag on for way too long and don't do a lot to mix things up. There's a turn about halfway through that should have been interesting, but instead it sends us spiraling towards an entirely too predictable twist ending.

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The second half of the game is a real slog, and not just because of the repetition. The graphics in this game are ugly, often reminding me of a higher-res version of Loaded on the PlayStation. We get stuck in a bunch of dark, boring underground corridor stages that use repeating textures and the same three enemies over and over. We occasionally get close-ups of the fatalities and gore, but that doesn't help much. Vasily looks like a poor man's Kratos from overhead and doesn't have very many iconic moves. It's all really generic.

All this is made considerably worse by the horrendous frame rate. I'm not sure how widespread this issue is, but I can tell you that the Switch version is so bad that I had a hard time looking at it after a while. The screen stutters around to the point where it ends up impacting the action. This is easily the some of the worst frame rate I've seen all year. The good news is that the developers are aware of the problem and seem committed to giving us a smoother version in the future, but this game is a mess in its current state.

And it's not just the frame rate that seems broken, but almost every other part of the game. Right from the top, the opening cinema has this problem where it randomly plays music and then drops a lot of the voice audio. And that's not the only time that happens, as I learned when I tried to watch the ending. I say "tried" because I only saw about two seconds of it before the game skipped the entire cinema and rolled the credits. And speaking of which, even the credits are screwed up. They started overlapping on top of each other after a while. If this is the "Enhanced Edition," then I'm afraid to see what the original Redeemer was like.