After the successful release of Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights, which I loved, I was anticipating what Adglobe and Binary Haze were going to put out next. When they announced they were making Redemption Reapers, a strategy RPG, I was interested on how they were going to make that genre their own. After all, Ender Lilies had some great ideas with its combat that helped it stand out from the crowd. So I was expecting them to bring that same inventive effort to the SRPG genre. Would they be able to strike gold twice?

Redemption Reapers puts you in control of a band of mercenaries called the Ashen Hawk Brigade, and your goal is to fight back the invading Mort army. After an opening cutscene of a village being raided by the Mort, we are introduced to the first two members of the Ashen Hawk’s, Sarah and Glenn. Seeing how large this invaded force is, Sarah and Glenn need to find the other members of the brigade and get the group back together. Soon we are introduced to Lugh, Urs, and Karren, the other controllable members of the group.

The story is fairly basic, but what baffles me is that the game doesn’t do a good job at conveying the group’s backstories and who they are. It’s clear the Ashen Hawks are a powerful group and have a reputation to the point that war Generals are asking the group for help in battles. However, the group is extremely splintered on almost every decision made, and they constantly doubt and distrust each other. There is no sense of comradery or leadership as they often bicker about just about everything. Then at one point, Lugh runs off, almost getting killed and putting the group at risk. They do a poor job at convincing me they’re a formidable group with a long history together.

Unfortunately, this disconnect happens throughout the story as a whole. At first, the Mort reminded me of a rip off of Sauron’s army in The Lord of the Rings. Basic orc based enemies and hounds filled the battlefield. Luckily, as the game progresses there are more unique enemies introduced. However, unlike The Lord of the Rings, the Mort never get fleshed out story-wise. There is barely any history explained; all we know is they want to take over and we have to kill their leader whom is very Sauron-like. Eventually, I just stopped caring about the story all together, since I was not invested in the Ashen Hawks or the villain.

Mission structure is a pretty standard SRPG affair, requiring you to simply kill all enemies or get to the escape zone with all members to run away. The slight variations here are when you have to protect an NPC character, and this is where frustration sets in. I’ll go more into gameplay in a bit, but to back my next point I will say that for the most part Redemption Reapers wants you to play in a very specific way. You’ll mostly play defensively, slowly moving and baiting enemies, as this is how the game trains you to play.

NPC missions in the beginning will have them simply follow you around while you protect them, and this slightly changes gameplay strategy, but not by much. However, midway through the game they will throw you some missions where the NPC runs ahead of you to escape and you have to try and keep up all whilst still trying to protect them from enemies. This was beyond frustrating, and while I was able to pass it eventually, it throws out all the combat dynamics and just doesn’t make sense.

Let’s now get into gameplay and why that mission structure is a nuisance. All of the gameplay relies on carefully analyzing the enemies attack ranges. You’re able to mark enemies and see how far they can move, which is indicated by red squares. Moving too deep into an opponent’s attack range, or even into multiple enemy’s attack ranges, is almost always certain death for a couple characters. This means you’re constantly tiptoeing into the outskirts of enemies in order to bait them away. Sometimes you’ll need to bait enemies, other times enemies will be moving to you. Regardless, your goal is to always limit your fights.

The reason to limit your fights is because your party structure relies heavily on your tank character (Urs), taking all the hits. He has the largest defense, and has the best defensive skill moves. You can then also use Lugh’s skill to block incoming damage to any ally next to him. The idea for every encounter is to set Urs on the farthest red square, and then Lugh behind him, and let the enemies come to you. This is the strategy you’ll use throughout the entire game. Therefore, when you have an NPC that is running away from your Spartan shield wall so to speak, it creates situations where you won’t be able to save your whole team.

Although, the gameplay is not all bad. While it is a bit repetitive in its setup and strategy, as you level up your charactersadditional options and tactics do open up. Each character has their own role, and as they level up they will continue to unlock additional skills. In a lot of ways, besides your tank, the other characters don’t become strong assets until they unlock some of their better skills.

Your rogue may be able to move around more and get to advantageous spots, but is fairly weak in defense. So until you unlock the skill where she can dodge any counter attack, be ready to only use her if you know you can kill the enemy. As you proceed, your strategies will slightly change depending on the skills you unlock. However, each engagement will still follow that same bait and switch start with you Urs and Lugh.

The counter system and team attack system are the two most important mechanics of the game. Essentially, any time an enemy or a friendly is attacked they will automatically do a counter attack. Depending on stats, the character may be able to dodge it or avoid it with a certain skill, but if the attacked character doesn’t die, they will counter. This creates situations where you need to be aware of how much health everyone has before engaging. Should you equip a better weapon to take them out? Or do you bring over an ally for a team attack?

Team attacks are crucial to succeeding, since for the most part an alone ally won’t be able to kill an enemy with a single strike. Once you’ve lured in your enemies with your tried and true tank bait, your strategy then becomes surrounding an enemy with your party in order to do a team attack. As long as a party member is in range, they will be able to join in on the attack. The only character who you can’t manually do a team attack with is the archer Karren, she will just auto attack if you attack an enemy next to her. Teaming up next to Glenn will boost your attack power so making smart team attack groups is crucial.

As you continue through the story, you will gather items around the battlefield. These can be new weapons, items to sell, and accessories to equip. Trinkets are used to boost some of your stats, obviously you’ll want to pick the right trinkets for the right characters. However, each character can only equip two items at a time. Weapons will range in various stats, but the worst aspect is the degradation.

This is especially bad because the resource balance is way off. Weapons degrade very fast, and it’s very expensive to repair them. Certain weapons will cost upwards of five-hundred to repair and you simply do no obtain enough items to sell to keep up on repairs. At some point it is cheaper to just buy a new base weapon and hope you can grind out old levels to get a little bit of cash. There has been an update to improve drop rates of items, but it still requires grinding old levels.

Visually, Redemption Reapers isn’t impressive at all, especially in the beginning. When I first played the game, they didn’t even have any options to increase resolution over 1080p. Besides that, the beginning of the game is just artistically boring. Characters seem like caricatures of The Lord of the Rings cast of heroes and orcs. Glenn is basically Aragorn, Karren is female Legolas, and Urs may not be Gimli, but is a big muscular tank, all the same. The battlegrounds don’t have great design with drab villages and castle structures.

Luckily, the art design does become a bit better later in the game. Enemy designs start becoming less copies of orcs and become more gruesome creatures with their own style. Getting into the Mort lairs provided some better designed levels, as well as better art work. Unfortunately, what does not get better later in the game is the cutscenes. These feel like they were rendered from PS2 CGI cutscenes. The character models are plain and lack textures, and it’s overall not pleasant to watch.

The sound design does not land well either, and somehow makes the cutscenes even worse. This is due mostly from the voice acting being very stilted. It’s almost laughable watching scenes with mostly the male actors with their forced gruff acting. Luckily, during gameplay there isn’t much voice acting, and instead you get to enjoy its good soundtrack. The soundtrack is certainly pulling its weight, with the large orchestra providing rousing and epic music during the fights.

Unfortunately, Redemption Reapers did not live up to the expectations of a cool genre twist from Binary Haze I was expecting. Instead, I feel like I received a fairly by the book SRPG with a couple of decent ideas, but ultimately feels rushed. The team dynamic is a cool strategy addition, but the balancing of everything else and lack of features like not being able to zoom out the battlefield, make this feel rushed. At $50 I would expect more, and while there is a lengthy campaign, it still feels lacking. 

 

Graphics: 6.0 Human characters are your typical design for their class. Enemy design starts off as The Lord of the Rings rip-offs, but luckily more impressive designs come in later.	Gameplay: 6.0 Gameplay essentially boils down to the same strategy for every encounter, but the team dynamic is good. Balance in resources and weapon degradation is way off.
Sound: 5.5 Sound design is very basic and voice acting is not good all around. However, the soundtrack is great.	Fun Factor: 6.0 A pretty standard tactical game that offers some decent challenge. However, some of that challenge comes from bad balancing.
Final Verdict: 6.0

Redemption Reapers is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on PC with an i7-9700k, RTX 2070, and 16gb RAM.

A copy of Redemption Reapers was provided by the publisher.