Battlezone 98 Redux - The Red Odyssey DLC

Scripted missions that have to be completed in a exact manner. You have to restart missions constantly because of units spawning behind when you are out doing a mission objective, mission constraints are time and starting resources. Highly frustrating as it doesn't takes skill, it takes you to know what is going to happen to pass the missions. Missions are all shit missions so far on the red dog US side, little rts style and more start out with units then you have to do this and this then you pass. if you dont do it exactly right and the way they want you to you fail. Time restraints are silly short and seem poorly designed. This expansion is a great disappointment .

Battlezone 98 Redux is wonderful. If it were a woman, I'd marry it. But, The Red Odyssey? No. Battlezone 98's difficulty was like a boxing match; you're going to get bloodied and bashed up, but the victory is sweet. The Red Odyssey's difficulty is installing a hydraulic pump with a boxing glove under your desk so that it can punch you in the dinger everyonce in a while. The positives are the Black Dogs and CRA; they're cool factions and have neat units. However, they don't save experience. The difficulty is obnoxious and allows for little strategy. It's more like a shell game in which you have to guess what's the right thing to do. If you guess wrong? Eat a bowl of dung, go back to your last save, you lose. You basically have to save and load ad nauseum, firing you out of the experience so fast you're going to reach Ganymede itself. So, unless you really want to get more units, TRO is something best skipped.

NOTE: This review assumes you've played the original Battlezone 98 or Redux. Read my review [url=http://steamcommunity.com/id/Seqan/recommended/301650]here[/url] if you haven't to get up to speed on what Battlezone and The Red Odyssey are. The Red Odyssey is the outstanding expansion to Battlezone, complete with two new playable factions, a phenominal soundtrack, and a campaign to challenge the most advanced RTS player! This is a very well done, albeit somewhat unpolished, redux of the original release that was The Red Odyssey. The missions are tough, the voice acting and story are both superb, and the missions are tougher than ever with the new "Very Hard" difficulty setting (first time I've EVER lost on the first mission of ANY RTS style game). Rebellion has wowed us again with this old time gem of a game. If you played BZ:R or the original but never played The Red Odyssey, do so now. You won't regret it.

Heed the warnings of other reviewers. This DLC is the epitome of bad 90s design philosophy where punishing difficulty and linear spectacle were prioritized over fun, balanced, or engaging gameplay. Completion of the campaign missions will require ungodly amounts of save scumming, intimate mission event and enemy spawn knowledge you'll only gain by attempting these over and over, and following guides. Even on lower difficulties. The expanded Black Dogs and Chinese factions are cool and I suppose offers a lot for modders, but if like myself you're only really interested in the vanilla singleplayer campaigns Red Odyssey offers nothing but anguish to anyone below the most die-hard of fans. Hats off to Rebellion for preserving the DLC's difficulty in its original glory I guess. I picked this up for $0.99 and other than free that's really the only price I could ever recommend this.

I think this is the best part of the Redux by far. The developers didn't merely directly port the original TRO verbatim, which is critical! TRO was released using some modified source (to allow cloaking) of Battlezone 1.3 and with the AI improvements that made it into the Redux due to the unofficial development of 1.5, ... I kinda want to see how impossible it is but it would not be playable for almost everyone. It would be pure brutality! There are some minor bugs but I never encountered anything personally that was a show-stopper. If you run into something strange that prevents you from proceeding, make a post in the discussions board. I recommend failing missions (After saving) at various points so you don't miss some of the better voice-overs... "Hauler Epsilon... where is your escort?" TL;DR I would probably give this DLC a higher score than the base game, personally.

The Red Odyssey is shortly put a terrible expansion for an otherwise incredibly well designed game. The fact that it was developed by a different team than the original title is something that becomes apparent within the very first missions. The campaigns lack a narrative connection, attention to detail and the designers generally force the player to tackle issues in a very specific manner and way - which is quite the contrary of what the original developers intended the game to be. It even gets worse, as the missions themselves are either tedious and boring - or almost impossibly difficult. The philosophy of the level design feels like a bad joke - enemy units spawn directly in front of you, mission goals and beacons are missing or unclear and some map layouts look like they were created by an overly excited thirteen year old. Half of the “newly introduced” units are not really new, as the Black Dogs already exist in the original game as an opposing faction and are a part of the NSDF. The other half - the CPR vehicles, facilities and buildings just lack originality and generally look like slightly altered toy versions of the other factions’ units. One could of course argue that all that was made on purpose to represent some sort of stereotype of that time regarding chinese production - spying and stealing technology and replicating it in a cheap manner - but I personally think it’s just bad design as everything else is in the expansion. The saving grace for the missing originality should have been the Stealth feature, but lackluster appeal, balancing and usability make that feature basically irrelevant to use for yourself and just annoying to play against. Lastly, the voice acting throughout the campaign and the lines of the various vehicles are so terrible, it almost hurts to listen to them. That - combined with bad mixing (having some voice lines be extensively loud while others sound weirdly muted) and a stylistically not fitting soundtrack - ruins the auditory atmosphere for the player completely. To summarize, keep your hands off that expansion! I think it’s very nice that Rebellion also made a Redux version of The Red Odyssey as well - and it’s definitely not their fault - but the expansion in itself is just utterly terrible.

Redux the main game I enjoyed - the difficulty level was just right; some wins and some setbacks in each level, but with a decent strategy you can push forward to a victory. TRO, however, has a difficulty level that's all shot to hell. Get in the sea.

In these 2 campaigns boys will turn into men. If you thought the original game was though well you are in for a rough ride. The nostalgia is real again, i died 4 times already on the first chinese mission So get this if you are up for a challenge.

Just skip it. The original Redux is great, but this expansion is just an example of the worst kind of 90s video game design. Basically, as many others have said, the only way to beat some missions, even on the lowest difficulty setting (which is still stupidly difficult) is to actually know what scripted event is coming up and already be in place to counter it. And not in a 'have a certain unit type ready for a wave of attacks' or something like that. Literally, have five tanks on the far side of the map where an NPC escort vehicle is about to spawn because once it does, it will get attacked within sixty seconds and destroyed within ninety. And your base is two minutes away when you're even told you need to escort something. It's just stupid and lazy as far as design goes, and most importantly, it simply isn't fun. They clearly decided they wanted the expansion to be harder than the main game, which has some frustrations but is overall quite good and mostly fair. But because the AI in the game is painfully stupid, the only way to increase difficulty was to artificially advantage the enemy with sheer numbers and spawning enemies exactly where it needs them to through scripting. Honestly, I bought this even after reading similar reviews, because I played BZ98 a LOT back in the day, and the Redux is really good. I wanted to think the reviews were just people who weren't that good at the game or didn't really like the original, or whatever. Nope, it's just a bad expansion and not worth your time. Skip it. If you want more Battlezone action when you're done with the original two campaigns, use the workshop and get some of the fantastic user-made content which is FAR superior to anything this steaming pile has to offer.

As far as the remaster: no complaints, it looks great and plays just as it should. Now as far as the Red Odyssey expansion goes, it's a monster. The missions are clearly designed to be completed after multiple reloads so the player can anticipate the scripted events the enemies will follow. Your units and the uncontrollable escorts are too weak to withstand enemy attacks without knowing precisely when and where they'll come. I'm not a huge fan of that kind of design, but if you want what the original Battlezone offered jacked up to 11 then this'll suit you.