Review: Redshirt

Name: Redshirt

Price: £6.99 / $9.99

Available on: PC (Steam Store)

Reviewed on: Laptop 1

Review:

So Redshirt is a game I looked at and picked up on sale because it was very cheap and seemed like an interesting concept. You're a low level grunt in the galactic federation posted on a station in a volatile region of space. You discover that something is going down and have 160 days and all annual leave for anyone not a senior member of crew has been mysteriously cancelled. You have 160 days to figure out a way off the station without just trying to steal a shuttle. Instead you have to use social manipulation to find a way to get off the station and to do that you have to use the space stations social network called Spacebook.

Its certainly an interesting concept and having loved a previous game where you had to play as a red shirt and try to survive (admittedly from a different developer) I figured this was very much worth a try just for the unique sounding idea.

So before I go on I think I should lay out the good points.

The art isn't awful

The concept of the game is cool

The little animations are really nice.

I got a good couple of laughs.

It gives the player lots of customisation options for how they want their game to go

Yeh I'm kind of struggling here. You see the promise is there with the concept but this really isn't the game that pulls off the concept. Redshirt feels like a game for fans of doing accountancy in excel as their hobby. It does feel like the team knew how to turn the concept into a game and so it just sort of end up like some kind of very basic management game.

Each day you can take 1 action before work then 3 actions after work and on weekends you can take 6 actions. Using those actions you have to work towards one of the many win conditions to be able to escape the station via essentially social manipulations. The issue being an action can be used up by liking a post or sending a message or adding a friend on spacebook but also buying food or going out to eat with others. There are things that require multiple actions with the highest activity I ran into needing 5 actions to do. You can work on getting high enough charisma to schmooze with one of the visiting ambassadors to see if one of them will transfer you off the station. You can try to train and advance your career enough to get to a spot where you are allowed to go on vacation. You can try to get enough money together to buy a shuttle ticket. You can try to end up shagging the station commander to get off the station with them. Or you can try to be able to schmooze your way into getting a ticket for a lot less other ways.



The problem being you can sort of work towards most of them at once as you don't have to focus and on one locking the others out. By about day 90 I could have done any of them pretty much as I: had high enough Charisma that I could have tried to schmooze an ambassador into getting me off; I was the commander's assistant; I'd had the commander try to make a pass at me so could have got in a relationship; If I'd stopped spending I could have easily saved enough for the main ticket outright and I could also accept the other ticket via the special bar option.  The only option I messed with on the customisation screen was to increase quirkiness, which means people are more open to trying different activities (And I made sure to try and put everything else back to where it was at default).

By the time I'd reached around day 50 in the game I was settling in to a fairly tedious rhythm of using the 1 morning action to interact with some-one, then going to the health food restaurant after work and finally either training one of the skills used for job progression or going on a date with the green alien chick I was dating (as maintaining a relationship gives you happiness). Then generally spending weekends trying to spend time with other friends on the crew.

The problem is once you're into a schedule on the game you will keep repeating it until you reach the next step in career advancement to apply for a promotion or better job. The only thing that broke up the monotony was the random chance of being sent on an away mission (which almost always go somewhat wrong resulting in 1 or more horrible deaths). The interaction as such for away missions is sometimes you'll be able to select to survive but end up having to sacrifice a person on the other away team meaning you'll generally pick any person you don't get on with or aren't friends with. Your job will sometimes have random event happen but some of those do tend to repeat after a while.

What Redshirt feels like is, it feels like it should have been something more in the vein of The Yawhg or Monster Prom, a silly sort of party game all about the stories you get and getting to laugh at one another's misadventures. With Redshirt you do get stories but in 6 hours of gameplay I only have three I feel are worth telling. One being the time I decided to break off a relationship, the woman in question then messages me saying clearly we still worked and should give it another go so I agreed only for her to somehow end up busy every day for a week, then complain we didn't do anything romantic together and then spend the next week busy all the time. She then chose to break up with me despite being the one who wanted to get back together, oh and then about a month or two later having removed her as a friend and her attitude to me being rock bottom she got mad because I hadn't messaged her back about a message she'd sent me long ago. The second being a gay guy who kept trying to hit on my character (despite my settings being interested in women only) and after months of getting no response finally got started hurling insults and just got angrier and angrier, until he died horrifically on an away mission that totally had nothing to do with me at all....... The final one being how I'd stayed friends with a one of the green alien girls from the games start, she'd been got into a relationship early on but then ended up single for a while. I'd ended up dating a girl and suddenly I got an invite to something that is normally a couples only event from her. I thought what the hey maybe there's nothing too it and maybe it's a double date or something. Nope turns it out was Zero G couples Yoga and she was my partner, this didn't go down too well with the girl I was dating who promptly dumped me, only for Astra (the green alien chick) to immediately send a request to start a relationship, which I agreed too. So yeh I got to bone multiple green alien chicks during my playthrough and a human, but no-one cares about her, green Alien chicks who don't care about social convention and act slutty seemingly FTW. 

One of the main issues I think with the game is often work shifts and other activities go by without any kind of story, you gain money and stats but it was far more enjoyable hearing about how when I was supposed to be a station youth co-ordinator that the kids escaped into the space stations duct network and I spent most of the shift trying to retrieve them all. You know rather than just being told I got paid, some stat raises and got slight friendship stat raises with work colleagues and my boss.  

Verdict

Redshirt feels like it had a good concept but quickly ended up directionless on how to implement it. It really would have been better going down the route of something like The Yawhg or Monster Prom and making it more of a party game with more events happening or something. As is it's a neat concept that becomes quite dull quite quickly unless you're very much into accountancy as a hobby. For what I paid for it (as I bought it on discount) I'd say it was only OK. However the score reflect the default asking price of the game and not the discounted price so for a game I was getting bored with by just over 2 hours and by the end of the 6 hour first play through I felt utterly fed up with I have to rate to below merely OK. I just felt I saw everything in that 6 hours even being denied a promotion because the supervisor for the role didn't think humans should be alien translators.

Composite Score

 Final Score

Is it really objectification if they keep inviting you to naked zero G yoga session with them when you're not even dating?