Redeemer: Enhanced Edition is a simple, fun, over-the-top 3D action brawler developed by Sobaka Studio. The game is reminiscent of simpler times when all a game needed to be was fun and entertaining for a couple of hours. It reminds me a lot of Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks and a little bit of Hotline Miami.
The story is exaggerated good fun and shouldn't be taken seriously. You play as a ex-mercenary called Vasily, who after many years of working for an evil organization called AltaiTech joins a group of monks hidden in a secluded monastery to start a new life. Of course his past catches up with him and he is forced into a war against his past colleagues and mutants... because apparently if your game doesn't have zombie then you at least need to have mutants.
The gameplay is your standard action brawler consisting of a light attack (
), a heavy attack (
), a dodge ([cn_a]), a parry (
) and a contextual input (
) which you can use for environmental kills and for executions. Additionally Vasily can pick up a melee weapon and a firearm. You can level up each attack and weapon by repeated usage. It may seem simple but once the combat clicks into place, it can be quite enjoyable. You can stealth kill enemies which haven't detected you, clean up oncoming ones with your gun and then beat the hell out of the remaining ones. The attacks and shots feel heavy hitting and very satisfying. Especially the shotgun has an awesome kick-back. There is a decent variety of enemies, especially later with the mutants with some of them being slightly more challenging than others, and the weapons and upgrades keep the experience fun until the end.
Presentation wise the game looks okay, but it's nothing to brag about. The earlier levels in the monastery look quite nice, unfortunately the later levels in the AltaiTech facilities look like boring, generic lab rooms. I played the game on both the Xbox One and Xbox Series X, and while it's
playable on both systems, there were some strong performance dips on the Xbox One, especially when shotguns were being fired. There are some graphical settings options to adjust, but those only improved the performance minorly. Of course the Xbox Series X offered a much smoother performance together with a crisper image.
Lengthwise the game takes around 8-10 hours to finish all the achievements and offers 3 difficulty modes. There are achievements for certain level specific tasks and some "
do this X amount of times" achievements, but thankfully no achievements for collectibles. There is also a local co-op mode but unfortunately I didn't get the chance to try that one.
In summary I really enjoyed Redeemer, despite some issues like the boring level designs and the performance issues on the Xbox One. In general the gameplay and the combat are fun and the game doesn't overstay it's welcome. For those who enjoy this type of game I would recommend the developer's other game
9 Monkeys of Shaolin, these games go often on sale for a high discount.
4.0