Offensive Combat: Redux! PC Review

Continuing where its free-to-play, browser-based counterpart left off, Offensive Combat: Redux! attempts to take the crude humor and customization while leaving behind the trappings of a free-to-play business model in favor of a Steam release. And it does so in a pretty neat way, having a decent number of obtainable items to customize your character with, all which can be purchased only with currency earned exclusively in-game. You can customize your character’s head, body, arms, hands and legs with items that range from shirts to hot dog and rooster costumes. Semblances of the two most recent candidates in the US presidential race also make an appearance. Certainly, there are a good amount of reskins, but you can get quite a few different themes going on.

Offensive Combat: Redux! comes with five playable modes. Three of them are PvP (Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag), one pits you against the AI, while the fifth is a simple Exploration mode. The latter feels generally unneeded given how the six maps the title currently boasts are small and cluttered. Despite each map having wildly varying themes which include a town beset by aliens, a courtyard with flowers in bloom and slums, none of them stand out in any way. You can go around them fairly quickly and even if some of them have stuff like platforms, beams or stairs leading to vantage points, they don’t influence combat encounters in a significant manner. The visuals also don’t do much for the maps as, while the color work is obviously different, the majority of textures look muddy.

Going up against the AI must be intended to act like a tutorial of sorts, but even then, it’s not a particularly effective one, since the robots you’re facing are very, very clueless. They’re only a threat when they gang up on you, and even then, due to the mode being Deathmatch, they rarely focus you down. If they wound you, they never chase. This translates to a very dry experience of going around and shooting opponents that have just weakened themselves in a firefight or which are too dumb and/or helpless to do anything to you. Couple that with the fact that the matches seem to run on a fixed time limit, and you can see why I found myself quitting out of every vs AI match, past the first one, before they ever finished. There’s really no challenge, nor reason, to bother with these.

As for the PvP side of Offensive Combat: Redux!, things aren’t particularly impressive here either. It’s undoubtedly functional and does seem to have at least somewhat of a playerbase. In my time with the game, I’ve experienced no lag or any gamebreaking bugs. At the same time, I was never able to get into a game of Capture the Flag. I also couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out if there was a way to change teams in TDM (the controls screen doesn’t list any such option), as the game has no balancing of any sort. This can lead to having a team of three or more people going up against absolutely nobody. Offensive Combat: Redux! feels sluggish, both in movement and gunplay. It takes a bit of shooting before an enemy is down, even if you’re constantly scoring headshots constantly. Damage numbers do vary based on the area you’re hitting, so accuracy is, indeed, rewarded. But the overall sluggishness of the combat makes it feel very unsatisfying. This becomes more aggravating as certain weapon models take close to half of your screen. Weapons from the same category also feel largely indistinct due to their shallow feedback. Shotguns have so high recoil that follow up shots are very difficult to pull off. To be fair, it’s easier getting hits with your unscoped sniper rifle than with shotguns, even up close. One of the best weapons in your arsenal is, by far, spawning behind unaware enemies and mowing them down without them being able to react. And then there are the sound effects.

I haven’t heard sound effects as low quality as those in Offensive Combat: Redux! in a good while. Every gun (with the exception of maybe one energy weapon) sounds like it’s sound assets were pulled from a very, very cheap library from ages ago. Listening to repeated fire from the same weapon becomes maddening very quickly and, unfortunately, weapon sounds tend to be quite an important thing in FPS games. The sound design issues go further affecting footsteps as well. Now, there’s a clear intention of making footsteps heard the closer an enemy is to you. The only issue here is that, even when an enemy is two buildings away, you’ll hear their footsteps as if they were right inside your head. The same happens with gunfire: what you might have thought to be distant gunfire may end up raising suddenly in volume if you turn slightly to the left.

Offensive Combat: Redux makes a big deal of its PWNs. Basically taunts, there’s a variety of them to be unlocked in the store. A PWN can be triggered once you’re near to an enemy you killed. This starts an animation that, if finished, can grant a cosmetic item and always gives score. They range from farts to teabags to dances and hand motions, but most of these animations lack any sort of humor or personality. In fact, there’s little that’s truly “offensive” to be found here. Instead, the game pesters players with failed attempts at trashy humor. There’s an Elaine dance PWN, the inclusion of which could deserve a pat on the back, but that would be based on the developer’s fondness for Seinfeld and not the PWN’s actual animation quality or effect. Instead of providing a bit of humiliation to the opponent or any sort of gratification when you get that extra score (or cosmetic item) for completing a PWN, I found myself completely indifferent to these, to the point where I simply couldn’t be bothered to do them. The map size also makes it that PWNs are causes of these very silly chains of people attempting to PWN a downed opponent only to get killed themselves and get PWNed by a player that gets killed and so on.

There’s also melee combat in Offensive Combat: Redux!. The different unlockable weapons are equal in stats so you’ll do as much damage with the starter wooden sword as you’ll do with the rubber chicken further down the line. The main issue here is that there doesn’t seem to be any reliable feedback when you actually hit an opponent, save for damage numbers which are rather difficult to see up close. This resulted in every melee encounter I had essentially being a few seconds of random clicking and hoping it was the opponent, and not me, who died. Upon completing a match you get two sets of currencies: one to unlock cosmetic items with and another to unlock stuff in the weapon tree. The weapon tree contains scopes, magazines and the likes. In truth, it’s a fairly basic, uninspired take on a weapon customization system as most of the available options do similar things (reduce reload time, recoil and so on). The game tries to alter the way weapons are used is in its inclusion of upgrades that reduce one type of damage while increasing another (say you do less headshot damage, but more cockshot damage). This, however, is far from enough to change much with the unsatisfying gunplay. And yes, cockshots are a thing.

It’s commendable the developers aren’t asking money for cosmetic items, especially in the age of orcs-in-boxes. That, however, isn’t enough to justify even its $20 price tag with the quality on offer. I’m not entirely sure why Offensive Combat: Redux! was necessary to begin with, as it adds little to the genre’s landscape. Its muddied visuals, obnoxious sound effects and sluggish gunplay made me want to stop playing after only a handful of matches. In terms of humor, it’s not exactly Postal. It’s not exactly anything, in fact. Offensive Combat: Redux! is just a dull FPS that has little going for itself aside from its approach to character customization.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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