Remember Wipe-out? If you were alive and gaming in the 90s, this was a legendary title. It was the first anti-gravity racer all in 3D, that made the Playstation look like the cool new device that you had to have. It was developed by the ex-Psygnosis dream team who ended up being acquired by Sony to become the Sony Liverpool studio. I did enjoy one of their later opus even more, Wipe-Out 2097 along with its excellent soundtrack and daring circuits. A few years later, when I got my hands on my PSP, the first tile I purchased what Wipe-Out Pure, and it was pure madness to see such a title run so well on a portable system. Now it’s 2023, and Redout 2 from 34bigthings is out and plays very nicely on the Steam Deck. Redout 2 is a futuristic racing game that takes the best elements of the Wipe-out series and updates them for modern hardware. It has the same high-speed, anti-gravity racing action that made Wipeout so popular, but with updated graphics and a slightly different approach to controls.

The game is incredibly fast, with speeds reaching up to 2,000 kilometers per hour (at least that’s what the speedometer says), and looking that way when you are in command. The game’s tracks are designed to be raced at an exhilarating speed. The controls tend to be a little complex, as you need to steer up and down as well as left and right, but they quickly become second nature after a little while. Unlike Wipe-Out, there are no weapons in Redout 2, and to win you simply have to be the fastest. You race against 3 opponents at the same time typically, and you get more points if you finish in the lead, naturally. You can’t technically hurt your opponents, so in the end it’s a little like racing against ghosts on the tracks.

One of the best features of Redout 2 is the boost mechanic. While there are some gates on the track that will increase your speed if you manage to go through them, you can also choose to increase the speed of your ship in bursts by expending more energy, but at the cost of incurring damage as your ship overheats. If you keep doing it for too long, your ship will get unstable and brittle – and if you happen to touch the sides of the circuit when your energy left is low, you will crash and explode – and get to a “game over” very fast. The game lets you recover “health” as long as you stop overheating, and as long as you don’t hit anything on the track for a short while.

So the game loop is often something like this:

• bump on stuff on the track
• lose speed
• opponents get in the lead
• go into overheat to catch them up
• ship is about to explode, slow down and avoid bumping into anything!
• ship is recovering
• time to speed up and go into overheating again!
• and so on

This adds a layer of strategy to the game, as you need to decide when to boost and when to conserve or recover your energy. The balance is not that easy to maintain as your adversaries will take the lead without mercy, forcing you to take more risks. The boost/damage mechanic in Red out 2 is a great addition to the genre.

Note that there does not seem to be some rubber-band effect at play here. Once you get far from the others, it’s very, very hard to reach them again, so the game does not make things easy for you. It’s rather unforgiving and you may want to adjust the level of difficulty to keep the game as fun as possible.

The visuals in Redout 2 are among the best in the modern racers. The tracks and surrounding environments are very detailed and the ships are all beautifully designed – while they look nothing like the ones from Wipe-out. You go in places like Neo-Japan, Neo-Cairo and even Mars (where the intro mentions a world of “boiling steam”, I am not making that up!) – all sharing some great visual style, while you certainly don’t have much time to look around when you race. There is some kind of motion blur going on as well, and I don’t think you can easily disable it, at least not from the standard video options.

In the campaign mode, you get points based on your rankings on each race, and as you increase the number of points collected, you unlock new races and new challenges. There is a LOT of categories and events to unlock – and some of them require that you purchase or improve your ship to fit the next category (in terms of power/performance) – which is somewhat reminiscent of Gran Turismo. The game therefore features a variety of customization options for your ships, so you can make them look and feel just the way you want.

You can customize your ships in Redout 2 to make them go faster or steer better, or simply to change their appearance. This part is rather superficial and does not go in the same depth as the afore mentioned Gran Turismo, but the idea is there.

Overall, Redout 2 is a fun anti-gravity racer with a solid racing experience and pretty much nothing else. However, I’m not sure I would play it longer than a few races per day – unlocking new races and events is OK, but it lacks a bit of intrinsic motivation or awards to keep you going. No story, no character arc, no sense of progression apart from unlocking new races and upgrading your ships. This is the main weakness of the game: letting the user face a wall of events to unlock is probably not the best approach for a racing game these days. Tournaments, cups, unexpected events, stuff that unlocks without you expecting it works probably better. While it’s almost a different genre on its own, I really like what Codemasters did with their F1 games by introducing some kind of RPG elements, rivalries and in general a more human touch in what was mostly a F1 racing simulator in the first place.

Since 34bigthings, the studio behind the game, seems to make Redout into a series, let’s hope that Redout 3 keeps the good bits and improves of the flow between races – they are very close to nailing the formula. I have also learnt that 34bigthings is actually from Italy, which goes to demonstrate that there is real and robust AAA production capabilities in the country right now.

Multiplayer

Yes, you can play against humans! The game has a multiplayer mode (apparently up to 12 players at the same time), but I can’t really comment on that since I was unable to find matches in my time zone when I was looking. It looks like amount of online players on that game are very low and have been so soon after it launched. Which is somewhat expected, very few games manage to keep a solid, active player base.

It’s not going to be a problem if you play with someone you know, but if you expected to play against random players online, well, think again. Since you can’t really attack or bump into other players, I’m not sure how fun the multiplayer mode actually is, compared to something like Mario Kart, for example.

What to Expect on the Steam Deck?

The game works very well on the Steam Deck as long as you are willing to avoid going into ultra settings. I find somewhere in the medium range of graphic options works well and is absolutely gorgeous to look at. You will then enjoy 40 FPS at about 8W of power giving you some decent battery life at the same time.

Will the framerate stay at 40 the whole time? No, scenes with explosions or effects will see it drop to 30 or slightly below, but you can live with it most of the time – so yeah, it’s very, very playable on the Deck. Most of the screenshots in this article were taken on the Deck, so this is what you are going to get.