Red Solstice - Review Roundup

Here are some reviews for The Red Solstice.

Armed Gamer

I’m not a fan of numerical ratings, but I will definitely recommend this one to anyone who likes the top down squad shooter genre. Especially if you liked games like Alien Breed or that Starcraft II mod I mentioned. It’s a solid entry into a field that could use more entries in general, and one I’ll probably end up convincing a few friends to buy for some co-op fun.

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Mouse n Joypad, 83%

The Red Solstice is a title that has a gravitas and a weight far in excess of what it should. The story and voice acting has a true B-movie vibe and can come off as a bit “hammy”. The Red Solstice can afford to poke fun at itself in this area as the oppressive and atmospheric gameplay more than compensates for any perceived shortcomings. It has a brilliant artistic design and players will be on the multiplayer mode for a long time to come. In the beginning it can be confusing to equip and upgrade your squad, but once you realise YOU are the hunted and play accordingly, The Red Solstice becomes a fantastic experience.

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Softpedia, 4/5

The Red Solstice is clearly designed to be played with other humans rather than Artificial Intelligence partners, and the fact that missions take one hour and are heavily focused on cooperation means that the experience can be both tense and challenging.

The problem is the fact that eight players need to be involved at the same time, and that there's a limited number of gamers who have that kind of group to connect with on a constant basis, and there's no guarantee that the community will remain engaged with the title in the long run.

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Wasduk

Graphically, the maps are large and lavish enough for a game with The Red Solstice’s recommended specs, but you’re not going to stop and take the time to appreciate them much. Open plazas and tight corridors all start to look the same when you’re hurtling down them away from a pack of rabid devourers, and the same goes for the music. It does its job well enough, keeping up the tension and adding to the overall atmosphere of hopelessness, but it’s not something you’re going to remember later on. The mainstay of the effort in the game has been ploughed into creating an enjoyable multiplayer game with as much replay value as you can handle.

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Co-Optimus, 4.5/5

Throughout my whole experience with The Red Solstice, it never loses focus on what it was built around, teamwork. Players looking for a challenge will be right at home, and anyone who wants to experiment with different strategies will find a wealth of variety here. They manage to succeed in delivering an atmospheric tactical strategy game where friends become allies and allies become monster food. The game is all about maintaining momentum, balancing risk and progress, remembering there is no solace during The Red Solstice.

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PressA2Join

Overall the game suffers a little from downfalls of feeling very dated, that being said I did quite enjoy it despite this not being one of my favourite genres so kudos for that. It may however be tough for most people to get past the “rough edges”. If this style of game is your thing then it’s worth a look otherwise it might be best to give it a miss. Aside from that, this is a pretty good first attempt.

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TerminalGamer, 8.5

Overall, this game has a lot of pros and very little cons. I would consider it a good purchase as long as the developers continue to add more content. The only reasons I wouldn’t give this game a 9 or 10 is because the randomness of the game can make it extremely difficult.

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More information.

Yet another successful Kickstarter I've backed. I'm not seeing the horrific scam universe many people make Kickstarter/crowdfunding out to be. There are exactly 3 projects I backed that ended up being either scams or never releasing/fading away. The rest are either in early access, regular demos/alpha versions or do regular updates showing ongoing progress.

PegasusOrgans said:

Yet another successful Kickstarter I've backed. I'm not seeing the horrific scam universe many people make Kickstarter/crowdfunding out to be. There are exactly 3 projects I backed that ended up being either scams or never releasing/fading away. The rest are either in early access, regular demos/alpha versions or do regular updates showing ongoing progress.

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You take Joxer too seriously.

3 bad ones out of... 10? 30?

Anyway, the game does look interesting. Real time combat but you can slow it down to just 10% of normal speed.

I really like it so far. I've played a few missions - and it's challenging!

It's got a story, but I'd say the game is definitely built for cooperative multiplayer. I'm going to try and persuade my friends to get it, so we can try it during our regular LAN-party thing in the summerhouse that's coming up in a couple of months.

Few cooperative games support 8 players, so this might be just the ticket to spice things up.

Pillars of Eternity should have taken the path of the slow time flow mode. It prevents players from requesting that play is based on "ugoigo" canvas.

While the product has a hefty SP mode, it leans heavily toward MP.
One consequence is that the team of four is not one plus one plus one plus one but one plus three.
Most of the time, it is all about grouping three members so that the squad star member might work his magic. Once it is noticed, SP is based on repeating the pattern.
Unexpected stuff like irrelevant angles and facings, fluff justified as marines are equipped by detection measures giving 360 ° perception. You do not need to cover angles as marines can insta spin around to destroy incoming enemies.

The interface follows, oriented toward control of 1 plus 3, extensive control over one so the guy manages the star actions while the other 3 act as back up.
Individual orders are usually issued in slow mode, no shortcut like 1 select first marine, 2 select second marine etc
Orders are not shift queued but left alt queued etc.

Individual orders issued in slow mode forces to go in slow mode anytime the will to give individual orders appears. It hampers the fluidity you expect from a real time based product.

PegasusOrgans said:

Yet another successful Kickstarter I've backed. I'm not seeing the horrific scam universe many people make Kickstarter/crowdfunding out to be. There are exactly 3 projects I backed that ended up being either scams or never releasing/fading away. The rest are either in early access, regular demos/alpha versions or do regular updates showing ongoing progress.

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It was obvious from the start that crowdfunded products would be released. Stories like developpers taking the money and flying to the bahamas popped up to divert from the necessary quality assessment.

Crowdfunding has never been about quality gaming and it is not. It is about something else.
Players usually use different readings when writing about crowdfunded projects and classically poublished projects. Crowdfunded projects score 9/10 even while riddled with issues that usually lead to internet slaughter when published projects exhibit traces of the said issues.

This is what should have been expected from the start: obviously biased treatment in favour of crowdfunded projects.

People who came with tales like taking the money and dropping the project were only blowing smoke to cover the expected outcome.

Not a lot of real-time tactical games enforce rigid facing restrictions. It's pretty impractical to manually turn every dude during intense combat.

So far, SP isn't about repeating patterns, except that you have to be careful and shoot stuff. It's about using your abilities correctly and they constantly switch around and evolve. There's also a significant element of scavenging and resource managment.

You can easily rebind keys and have the "follow me" and "stay put" orders in a comfortable position, so that's not a problem.

I'm not a huge fan of the emphasis on a single character in terms of the main actions, but it's a logical concession given the obvious multiplayer focus of the game.

Not that I'd expect much insight from Chien, as his observations are usually guided by extreme conclusion-jumping.

DArtagnan said:

Not a lot of real-time tactical games enforce rigid facing restrictions. It's pretty impractical to manually turn every dude during intense combat.

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Covering angles is based on planned courses of action.

So far, SP isn't about repeating patterns, except that you have to be careful and shoot stuff. It's about using your abilities correctly and they constantly switch around and evolve.

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Does not look one bit like the pattern depicted previously.

You can easily rebind keys and have the "follow me" and "stay put" orders in a comfortable position, so that's not a problem.

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What has rebinding to do with the fact that the team is divided in 1 + 3...

Not that I'd expect much insight from Chien, as his observations are usually guided by extreme conclusion-jumping.

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Well, if that is not, that would be a sentence guided by extreme conclusion jumping.

I wish you were able to communicate, as I have a feeling you might have a good point or two.

I have a hard time following him as well. I think he is either an intelligent bot, auto-reacting on posts or writes in his own language and then runs it through Google translate, before copy-pasting it here.

Is there a point about writing intelligible texts on this site?
It is not as if it would grant something.

Are you saying it's on purpose?

What does it grant you to write as you do now?

The point is that you really DO seem to have some good points, but you're so obsessed with being omniscient - and you don't even care if people understand what you're saying at all. The exchange is utterly lost in that.

It's like you're writing to yourself and for yourself in public. I guess that's fine, but it's also a little disturbing.

Myrthos said:

I have a hard time following him as well. I think he is either an intelligent bot, auto-reacting on posts or writes in his own language and then runs it through Google translate, before copy-pasting it here.

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The second option would be very probable, but I don't think that Google translating french into english would get you that kind of text. It would probably make much less sense, the phrasal construction is very different. It would be the same as translating my own language (portuguese) with Google. It does not sound bot-like, just non-sense.

DArtagnan said:

Are you saying it's on purpose?

What does it grant you to write as you do now?

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The question is to know what it would grant to write otherwise.

The point is that you really DO seem to have some good points, but you're so obsessed with being omniscient - and you don't even care if people understand what you're saying at all. The exchange is utterly lost in that.

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What exchange? In an exchange, both sides must put things on the table.
When posts are written in a way they seem to contain nothing, the balance of trade as it is found on this site is respected.

It's like you're writing to yourself and for yourself in public. I guess that's fine, but it's also a little disturbing.

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People might find anything they want disturbing. Considering everything going on this site, people might express their priorities in disturbing stuff.
What exchange? In an exchange, both sides must put things on the table.

It would grant that people would actually read what you write and discuss things with you. I stopped reading your posts long time ago. Now when I see a new one, I just glaze over it to see if it is in English and if not continue to ignore them.

Sure, you might say now that you don't care about my opinion anyways but who knows how many people also don't read it or put your on ignore lists because of it and might care about their opinion.

From the few posts I did try to understand (not very successfully) I got a feeling you got more to say than Dart.

Discuss what?

Discussions require a common ground and on this site, people are not even able to determine what they understand as role playing games.

It is not about subjectivity as subjectivity can be shared.

The perception on RPG is based on arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness is not a ground for discussion.

Which also means that my posts are also no different from any other posts on this site. Except they reflect the situation explicitly while some others dress the situation to get it appeared as it is not.

ChienAboyeur said:

Discuss what?

Discussions require a common ground and on this site, people are not even able to determine what they understand as role playing games.

It is not about subjectivity as subjectivity can be shared.

The perception on RPG is based on arbitrariness.

Arbitrariness is not a ground for discussion.

Which also means that my posts are also no different from any other posts on this site. Except they reflect the situation explicitly while some others dress the situation to get it appeared as it is not.

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I don't mean to speak for anyone else, but it does appear that what others are saying isn't about the arbitrariness of the perception on RPGs, but about language itself. About the way you write, the way you comunicate. It's not that we can't understand it. You are writing in english, but still have a way to confuse the reader when exposing your point of view.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not criticizing your writing skills. English is also not my native language, and sometimes I have problems trying to explain things in a way perceptible by both native and non-native english speakers.

Confusing about what?

The only confusing point made so is the promise of discussion as thrown here.

Nothing cant be discussed on arbitrary grounds. You dont discuss whims.
It has nothing to do with the way people express themselves.