Redout: Lightspeed Edition Review

If you’re in the market for a new racing game on the Nintendo Switch, you may well have come across Redout: Lightspeed Edition. The game offers a futuristic aesthetic, endless content, and fast-paced gameplay to get your blood pumping.

Redout takes place in the future, when antigravity technology is commonplace. You, of course, are a professional racer. That’s all there is to the background, but racing games don’t need much of a narrative to be fun. Indeed, the game’s focus is on the huge amount of content it offers. There are more than ten distinct event types including time trials, traditional races, and last man standing events. Add in twenty-eight unlockable ships, a series of upgradable power-ups, and a whopping sixty courses, and you have a game that really does feel endless.

Redout offers three game modes. The first of these, Quick Race, allows you to create custom challenges and practise against the AI. This mode also gives you access to the full range of ships from the start which is handy if you’re not keen on grinding to unlock these in Career Mode. There is also an online mode in which you can set up custom races and battle it out online. At least, that’s how it is in theory – the online mode, sadly, is absolutely dead, meaning I didn’t yet find or play a single match.

In contrast to these two modes, Career Mode offers a structured challenge against the AI with events increasing in difficulty as you progress. In this mode, certain events and locations are locked until you reach the appropriate level. With leaderboards available for every event, you can also see how you stack up against players across the world. As for the events themselves, races are incredibly fast-paced, requiring some serious co-ordination. It’s exhilarating to learn each course, zoom around corners, and soar through the air after seemingly impossible jumps.

That said, the lack of a decent tutorial means that you have to learn a lot by trial-and-error, and even once you’ve got the hang of how things work, the gameplay remains challenging. Between the high speeds, sharp turns, and avoiding too many collisions, there’s a lot to keep track of at once. This is going to appeal to anyone looking for a technical challenge; consequently, the game is not beginner-friendly.

As much as the gameplay is challenging and fun, the game unfortunately doesn’t run all that brilliantly on the Nintendo Switch. Loading times are lengthy and the game occasionally fails to respond to input in the menus, which takes some of the shine off the experience. Additionally, the visuals mid-race tend to be mediocre, as the graphics fluctuate between being muddy, grainy, and downright blurry. Playing in docked mode also allows you to see those flaws blown up on your TV, which is something I don’t recommend.

It’s a shame, because Redout’s futuristic aesthetic, colour schemes, and general art direction is fantastic. Admittedly, most of the time you’re moving too fast to be too bothered by the quality, but when you do notice it, it’s a far cry from the crisp visuals the trailer would lead you to expect from the game.

Redout isn’t a perfect game. However, if you’re content to look past the game’s intermittently awful graphics and dead online mode, its fast-paced gameplay and huge variety of content will keep you chasing the highest score for hours on end.