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A cinematic dark fantasy Tactical RPG experience | Full Review - Redemption Reapers

3K View2023-02-25

Redemption Reapers is a dark fantasy Tactical / Strategy RPG game with heavy narrative elements and a challenging turn-based tactics gameplay.

🟩Pros

+Intriguing story, characters, and premise

+Lots of CGI and cinematics to tell the story

+Deep and rewarding tactical combat elements

🟥Cons

-Awful voice acting and audio mixing

-Graphics are bad to average quality

-Steep price for what it offers ($50)

Redemption Reapers contains melodramatic and bleak narrative tones, gruesome violence, and a fitting soundtrack that is surprisingly captivating and helps to create a cohesive atmosphere. The characters and graphics look inspired by Final Fantasy with anime-looking characters and armors, set in a medieval fantasy era. The frequent CGI cutscenes, dialogues, and narration all contribute to making this game a story driven cinematic experience.

The story is about a world suddenly invaded by orc/goblin-like creatures called the Mort and it's up to our band, Sarah and the disreputable extremely outnumbered Ashen Hawk Brigade to wage guerilla warfare against the forces of Mort. Your party is composed of five playable characters, skilled warriors each with their own contradicting personalities and backstories. All of which come into play into this intriguing family dynamic.

Presentation

Voice acting is inconsistent, the lip syncing and facial animations are horrendous, and emotionless. The audio mixing is too out of place with most dialogues sounding like they were recorded in a personal room using an amateur microphone.

The in-game presentation of the dialogues are a little bit underwhelming and almost something you would see in an amateur 3D visual novel, far from the flashy and action-packed CGI cutscenes that it throws you off, especially when these two things happen in a back-to-back manner.

The quality overall of the art is inconsistent. The graphics, both CGI and in-game lands somewhere between bad to average. The CGI sometimes looks decent, sometimes looking like it came from early 2000s CGI or something that was made by Source Filmmaker.

Three control options

Redemption Reapers offers three control schemes, keyboard, mouse-driven, and controller support. While these options are nice to have, they can be unconventional and it may take some time to get used to them. Quality of life shortcuts and hotkeys could have been added to make the control schemes more intuitive.

A neat little feature that I’ve never seen before is the ability to “move” your character around using the WASDs control scheme as a preview of sorts before making it a final move and confirming it.

Gameplay Analysis

The game and story are divided into multiple missions that you can clear by completing the objective — where in some circumstances you have a choice on what to do, maybe just passing through is enough, maybe you need to wipe all of them, or maybe you need to save someone. Aside from enemies, you will also encounter loot and collectible relics scattered.

In between the missions, you can customize your characters’ skills, items and purchase goods from the merchant. You can also “train” your character to further level them up. Each character has their own weapon type to equip and these weapons break in time, requiring repairs and replacements.

Depending on the story progression, beaten maps are converted to skirmish maps that allow you to replay them again to grind for EXP and items. Gaining EXP and leveling up will increase your characters stats and give them more SP, used to unlock more skills.

Against all odds

Redemption Reapers's combat is highly tactical, Your group is extremely outnumbered and it's up to you and your tactics to ensure victory over the enemies. There is no Fog of War, and you can pan around the camera to observe enemies even from across the map. However, Almost all of the characters wear black or dark outfits, making them hard to stand out from each other, especially with the inability to zoom and rotate the camera.

In chess-like fashion, characters and enemies will have different ranges depending on their attack, some can only attack to their surrounding grids, one can attack diagonally and a longer distance, one can attack ranged distances.

Positional advantage is key to winning. The players and enemies alike can participate in co-op attacks when in the right range and vicinity, although for the player, it requires a simple quick-time event to initiate the co-op attack.

Each attack will mandate a counter-attack from the defender, requiring you to monitor your HP as well when attacking on your turns.

At the same time, enemies attacking on their turns can die as well if they get counter-attacked by your units. Some offensive skills can affect this counter-attack mechanism as a side-effect, like the ability to avoid them, reduce the damage you receive from them, or launch an immediate riposte move for the enemy.

It’s a compelling tactical game

The skills and effects that each of the characters have in their arsenal synergize very well. The progression element of unlocking new types of skills that can turn the tide in battle is a rewarding experience.

It encourages ingenious and clever combinations of skills and smart positioning to beat the enemies that heavily outnumbers your team. Constantly changing your strategy and adaptation to what the game throws at you is a fun element that is challenging, compelling to do, and gratifying to pull off.

To top it off, the combat animations are cool and flashy. Sure, it gets repetitive eventually, but the killing blows are always satisfying to see — as long as your characters are not the one dying. Dying characters will be incapacitated from the remainder of the current battle, so you need to be extra careful in managing their HPs, especially when ending turns.

Overall, Redemption Reapers could take you around 30 hours to finish this game, with the option of replaying it again at a higher difficulty. However, I don’t see any convincing reason to replay this game at all, once the story is done.

Technical Performance

The performance is stable, especially because of the fact that it doesn’t support any resolutions above 1080p, and it’s a bit lacking when it comes to the graphical options.

Conclusion:

Redemption Reapers is a good enough Tactical / Strategy RPG game that features an intriguing story that feels like I’m watching a fun new dark fantasy anime series. While the presentation could have been more fleshed out and the price could have been cheaper, the game's combat is highly tactical and offers a lot of depth, challenge, and satisfaction. If you are a fan of the genre, then Redemption Reapers is definitely worth checking out, especially on a sale.

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