Red Solstice 2 dropped a brand new playtest on executors just a few days ago, with a weekend Red Solstice 2 Survivors test giving a few select recruits the opportunity to get int and try out this upcoming tactical adventure.
Unleashed by the minds at Ironward, Red Solstice 2 is a Sequel to the best-seller The Red Solstice that takes players back to After Earth. This time, we begin 117 years After Earth and the STROL mutant invasion is still something of a problem. Eager recruits ready to do battle against the STROL mutants grouped up for the fight of their weekend between 12 March and 15 March 2021. Kicking off the carnage on PC, this top down strategy follows on from the 2015 hardcore co-op, elaborating on the same think, shoot, and don’t bother asking questions mechanics with some slick new improvements.
Six years on and Red Solstice 2 has made some significant generational improvements from its predecessor. While the same bloody aesthetic casts its shadow across the fog of war as the original, the abandoned area that plays host to the Red Solstice 2 Survivors Playtest benefits from better lighting, more detailed character design, prettier explosions, and some visibly improved textures that allow you to get close enough to the action to almost smell the mutant scum.
Lay Of The Land
While it may have looked gorgeous, developer Ironward and Publisher 505 Games still only offered up a limited glimpse at Red Solstice 2 when we descended into battle. Alongside a basic tutorial, the inclusion of a limited skirmish mode served to give us a good overview of the upcoming class systems, tactical loadout, combat, and progression mechanics without revealing too much about the wider tale of destruction that you’re likely to weave. The Executors are the purveyors of destruction in Red Solstice 2. With what’s left of civilization in this game overrun by mutants, monsters, and genetic abominations, you and a squad of equally overpowered warriors can select from a massive array of weapons, mods, and enhancements before decapitating whatever gets in your way. Red Solstice 2 might be brutal, and it is utterly unforgiving, but it provides plenty of ways to take on this challenge. Class types available for us provided players the option of blowing stuff up as a soldier or healing compatriots and blowing up a little less stuff as a medic. What might feel like incredibly restrictive class archetypes are given a huge degree of freedom in Red Solstice 2. Players can pick from an overwhelming array of offensive and defensive abilities, support skills, and buffs but you better be prepared to carry them all. Every additional component slotted into place requires power to lift or operate, meaning that there’s only so much mana to spend. This loadout resource ensures that everybody can craft a role without making low-level players redundant.
Progression
Even as you progress, completing a mission and unlocking new abilities, you’ll find that you can only use a limited amount of energy. This creates a definite split between progression systems, borrowing from MOBAs to give characters extra power during an active mission and additional horizontal progressions tiers throughout their wider campaign. This ties into the loadout system effectively, rewarding teams, of as many as eight players, who synergize their skills rather than pug and pray as I did for a vast swathe of this playtest.
When I finally found my calling as a field medic, it quickly becomes clear that Red Solstice 2 isn’t going to let you sit at the back and spam heals. While things begin easily enough with a little bit of loot and shoot added to the real time strategy components, things quickly get ugly. Tasked with locating survivors, setting off a nuke, recovering tactical information, and pushing back waves of enemies we had plenty to do in each 20 minute engagement and there are always enemies on your tail. Gigantic monstrosities creep out of the darkness, teammates get decimated, and if you haven’t spent the first few minutes stocking up on ammo, which is a depletable resource, then you’re going to have a bad time!
Ammo isn’t the only finite resource, and that loot doubles down on Red Solstice 2’s action-orientated approach. Once in the field, you might find mines, taunts, flares, med packs, stimulants, or more. All of these fit into an itty bitty bag so picking your loot is key because grenades might seem great at first but med packs are far more useful.
Thankfully, even if you’re totally out of ammo and feeling useless, there are still a few skills left on any Executor’s bag of tricks. Check along the bottom bar of the screenshot above and you’ll find a set of skills. Selected as part of the initial loadout, these are largely a straight copy from traditional MOBA combat systems, even levelling up while you gain experience and allowing players to add points to these powers as they see fit.
As I hope is clear by now, Red Solstice 2 looks likely to be far more than a simple click to shoot top down ARPG and more intense than X-Com’s clinical approach. Ironward has managed to keep many of the high adrenaline hardcore mechanics you might expect from a bloodbath like Red Solstice and added nods to MOBAS, RTS titles, and more. This is something of a genre mash up and it is as chaotic as it sounds. The thing is, it works. Yes, Red Solstice 2 is utterly unforgiving to new players but with a control system that doesn’t deviate far from traditional strategy maps, a bleeding gorgeous aesthetic, and a class system that has the potential for millions of permutations I really want to go back to and shoot some more!
