Road Rash Inspired Kickstarter

Right, feedback.


The Good

* It definitely feels like Road Rash!
* For a first alpha, it's very stable - I had no crashes (of that kind, heh).
* Melee combat works well - skill or timing is important.
* Visuals aren't very high fidelity right now, but animations are okay, and it runs fairly well (GTX460 here).


The Bad (but will definitely be fixed/improved/changed)

* Terrible physics - car on car collisions result in hugely ott reactions, yet it's very difficult for riders to crash (only head-on collisions with cars, driving off a bridge or melee combat can unseat you).
* Only one track, which is very short (though winning a race lets you race it again with a slightly changed game mode).
* Handling is a little off and the bike feels "light"
* No mouse/kb support at present - only XInput.
* Sound and music are fairly naff.
* Nitro is plentiful, but it doesn't have much impact.
* No cops, pedestrians, animals yet.
* Only SP for now.
* The manually moved camera is awful - slow, with no quick-look.


The Ugly (game mechanics and design decisions that I just don't like personally - you might though)

* "Unified" health bar - that is, one bar for both bike health and rider health.
* Increase your health and nitro bars in-race by dishing out punishment to other riders.
* Acquire weapons by knocking the current weapon owner out of the race, instead of grabbing them á la Road Rash.
* Rubber-banding - could have been easily avoided, or toned down at least but it's hugely ott. Just not a fan of it in racing games at all, and here it makes the nitro absolutely pointless.
* After becoming unseated, you respawn back on the road, on your bike - no running back, picking up your bike etc like Road Rash.


Now, I realise a lot of the design choices I disagree with above may be actually changed in future versions. I also know that some of them may seem fine to you yourself, which is grand of course. I will however explain why I don't like some of them;

Realism. Road Redemption includes a kill mechanic - you can "kill" a character by eliminating their health bar entirely (how this works in a season mode, I don't know). They've also introduced blood, and there's the obvious heavier use of weaponry. Unfortunately, a lot of the design choices seem to fly smack in the face of realism, so I just don't "get" what vibe they're actually going for.

As regards future changes, it's very hard to find concrete info. RR obviously reached it's funding goal but it seems like there's very little activity on the forums - seems very few backers are willing to give time to offer feedback. Devs do appear from time to time, but they don't answer all questions, and it's hard to find info as to what the future holds.

I did find some info regarding the next build though; kb support, a larger winter track, new weapons, new bike(s), new rider(s), car physics and car damage changes, new vehicles, a new mission type, new traffic systems, and more that wasn't revealed.


TL;DR?

Feels faithful to the Road Rash legacy, but some of the design choices are not what I hoped for personally, though of course many would disagree. Progress is also painfully slow - seems to be a very small team, and I could imagine interest waning from backers over the coming months/years.

Will post this over on their forums, and will update this thread regardless.

That's one of my concerns with it Stone - it feels like Road Rash of the 90s whereas I want a Road Rash of 2014. But it was probably unfair of me to hope for that from a very small KickStarter project. Early days yet though.

A new trailer featuring about 3 seconds of unseen footage for the impending Alpha v0.002.



It's supposed to be with the people on Humble Bundle right now (they're handling distribution atm), so I should be able to download tonight hopefully. Here's the changelog the RR forums;

Version 0.002

8 levels
New Winter Track - it is about 3-4x as long as the desert track
Local Multiplayer - 2 to 4 players in splitscreen mode.
Mouse and Keyboard support
Improved avoidance and combat biker AI
Added Biker Police - they carry a new baton weapon that you can get by defeating them
Added additional enemy rider models
Improved vehicle physics and damage model
Improved crash mechanics - still a work in progress
Deflection Move Added to AI and Players. Deflecting an AI has a high probability of disarming the enemy. It still needs a lot more balancing to increase its utility.
New Vehicles
New Weapons - nail bat, police baton, C4, Pipe bombs, possibly more that I am forgetting.
New Game Types - Survival mode and kill enemy rider missions
Added a bunch of graphical flourishes and effects.
More realistic rider lean animations - still a work in progress
Car Rain


I am definitely leaving stuff out. There have been a lot of changes.

Only played for half an hour this evening, but v0.002 is a huge improvement over the first version. Will do a proper write up tomorrow, but on initial inspection, it looks very promising!

Won't be playing again until this evening, but here's a Let's Play from a guy over on the Road Redemption forums. It nicely illustrates just how far the game has come since version 1, but also shows how raw a lot of it still is.

deathrider wrote: »

Will this be appearing on consoles, or has there been any mention of that at all?

I think console conversions were stretch goals in the initial KickStarter campaign, but I don't know if they were reached or not to be honest.