Redemption Reapers Review: Not Quite Enough Redemption

As my husband knows extremely well, I love strategy RPGs, but they do not love me. I have unbelievably horrendous luck when it comes to, well, everything. Extremely poor stat growth, enemies with a 3% of hitting me always connecting, whereas my 98% chance to hit will regularly miss. These games come with a great deal of rage, so you’d think I’d just avoid the genre altogether. Apparently, I’m a masochist and just can’t help myself, so I decided to tackle Adglobe’s Redemption Reapers. Hoo boy.

A Dark, Gritty, Bloody World

Redemption Reapers takes place in a world where hordes of grotesque, at least semi-intelligent monsters known as the Mort have sown death and destruction across the land. Players take control of a small band of mercenaries known as the Ashen Hawk Brigade, upon whose shoulders rests the fate of the world. The story is set amidst a medieval backdrop, and is dark, gritty, and bleak. While I appreciate the dark tones, the bleak atmosphere, and the gritty characters, unfortunately there’s no real depth to the story or the characters. You never really get to understand the why – what’s driving the Mort? Where did your characters come from, and why do they do what they do? Despite the promising setup, both the story and the characters end up feeling flat and underdeveloped.

At least the aesthetic matches the game’s tone. The Mort, though they start to feel awfully repetitive, are well-designed, somewhat feral and orc-ish in design. There are several different types/classes of Mort as well, which at least adds a little variety. Your band of haggard, not-so-merry mercenaries remains small throughout the game, and their character designs are quite nice, each one unique and well-rendered. The cut scenes are surprisingly beautiful, with the sole exception of the longer hair on some characters, which did not look good at all. The voice acting oscillates between good and good-enough, though tends to stay on the good side. The soundtrack is dark and haunting, matching the bleak, eerie map designs.

A Few Twists on the Standard Formula

Game mechanics in Redemption Reapers is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a strategy RPG, with a couple fairly engaging tweaks. Each map is laid out on a grid, and characters have a set amount of squares they can travel each turn. Instead of moving and attacking and having that character’s turn end, you can move, attack, and move again, provided you have enough spaces and AP to do so. Each character regenerates AP on their turn, which is used to either attack or defend. Higher attack skills require greater amounts of AP, while blocking halves damage but prevents you from counter-attacking. This mechanic in particular is key to survival – you’ll need your weaker units sneaking in to weaken or finish off enemies and skipping back to safety behind your more heavy-duty units. Your pool of playable characters is not very big, and you will always, always be greatly outnumbered.

If you ever played Final Fantasy XIII, you’ll know how annoying it is to have large parts of the narrative told to you through files you have to read, and unfortunately, Redemption Reapers took a page right from that book. Scattered across each map are chests, relics, and sometimes recovery points. Chests obviously contain items, and thankfully they don’t need keys and any character can open them. Relics, however, tend to be letters and documents from fallen or fleeing countrymen and are as much backstory/development as you’re really going to get. And you have to obtain them that map or they’re gone forever. Which might not be a problem if the maps weren’t huge and the enemies didn’t greatly outnumber you. Finally, each character has a healing item that can be used exactly once per map, and that doesn’t even heal you all the way (at least, not at first). Some maps oh-so-graciously provide you with a healing spot that will restore HP and allow one more use of your healing item to exactly one character per spot.

Slow Stat Growths and Brutal Early Difficulty

As you defeat enemies, your characters will of course level up, and gain additional stat points, as well as skill points that can be spent on unlocking character-specific skills. Skills are nicely varied and tailored to each unit’s particular strengths, such as increasing the chance of evasion in your assassin-like character with low defense, or increasing the defense of your more tank-like character when they’re standing next to an ally. Unfortunately, it takes time to build up enough points to really feel the benefits of these skills, making the first several hours of the game frustratingly difficult. While there is (thankfully) no character permadeath, should one of your allies fall on the field, your already low numbers are diminished further, making it rage-inducingly hard to complete the mission.

Additionally, the stat bonuses I received on my level ups were, far more often than not, absolutely atrocious. Most of my level ups consisted of my characters getting an additional hit point (which is painfully low to start, and doesn’t get much better), and one more point in attack, speed, or what have you. I very, very quickly found myself being dealt massive damage by enemies thanks to poor growths in defense amongst my more ostensibly tank-like characters, while poor attack stats meant it would sometimes take four or five of my characters acting in concert to take down a single enemy. Occasionally the game tries to throw you a bone by giving you an AI-controlled character to help you, but they’re more frustrating than helpful. For instance, an archer joins you for a couple of chapters, and tells you that you need to carefully skirt around the larger groups of Mort. Except as soon as you try to sneak past them, he runs into the very middle of them and starts attacking. Every. Single. Time.

The Bones Are There, But the Flesh Isn’t

There are some real fault lines running through Redemption Reapers that are hard to look past. The story and characters just aren’t given enough history to make anything feel particularly meaningful; there’s no real driving force. Early difficulty spikes are extreme and frustrating, and poor stat growth, coupled with extremely low hit points for many characters, makes it feel like the odds just grow increasingly insurmountable – at least until you can go back and grind to obtain experience points, which you won’t be able to do for the first part of the game. While the dark atmosphere, gorgeous visuals, and haunting soundtrack are promising, and while the combat mechanics have some real potential, the balancing issues, difficulty spikes, poor AI, and flat storytelling simply bog Redemption Reapers down too much.

Final Verdict: 3/5  

Available on: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 4, PC; Publisher: Binary Haze Interactive; Developer: Adglobe; Players: 1; Released: February 22nd, 2023; ESRB: E for Everyone; MSRP: $49.99

Editor’s note: The publisher provided a review copy to Hey Poor Player.