Reviews

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  Emil K. Winchester

  Nov 19, 2022

  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.
• 

  Zondag

  Jul 26, 2016

  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.
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  Frosty The DopeMan

  Jul 26, 2016

  Holy Crap! I remember playing the demo version of this game which had the first 3 missions of the Black Dogs Campaign. In fact the demo version of this addon/DLC was what got me into Battlezone 1. Anyways, the graphics are updated like in the Battlezone 98 Redux. And Holy Crap this Addon/DLC, which already had the reputation of being very hard, but damn with the improved AI/AI bug fixes it's actually a bit more Hard. I will have to Brush my skills before playing this. I suggest playing this DLC/Addon only after you completed both the campaigns at the Hardest Level in the BZ98 Redux. And then try it out. Also, I wish they could add the original TRO OST. I hope in the future they do that. Other than that the DLC is good but it was/is intended for experienced and advanced players!
• 

  Fallom

  Jul 26, 2016

  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.
• 

  Seqan

  Jul 26, 2016

  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.
• 

  WalksOnPoo

  Jul 30, 2016

  A DLC worth buying if you were a BZ player back in the day!
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  Eric From Discount Tire

  Aug 8, 2016

  Extremely hard campain missions, but extremely fun. Have to think outside the box to win which is something I appreciate.
• 

  necrotech69

  Aug 15, 2016

  Many people who enjoyed playing Battlezone 98 Redux will want to think twice before purchasing The Red Odyssey DLC. Apparently, the developers thought the original game was far too forgiving and so they have made the enemy A.I. in the expansion very efficient at destroying you. The A.I. for the numerous and technologically advanced Chinese side is also very good at negating whatever strategy you might employ on the battlefield even on medium difficulty. They use smaller vehicles which are hard to spot against the background and the enemy pilots showcase tremendous agility at evading your shots. Plus they also have the ability to cloak and sneak up on you. The only tactic I can think of that might see you through the gruelling missions without rage quitting in disgust is prodigious use of the save button. Save frequently after every skirmish and you might make it to the end of a mission but even then final victory is not guaranteed.
• 

  TiasTX

  Aug 27, 2016

  Great continuation of the series, the harder levels are welcomed, as I feel the prevoius game on "Hard" was not hard. However some levels are straight up retarded and frustrating. The game will just spawn enemies in your base bypassing any and all defenses. Which means leaving your base for a minute means that your recycler gets attacked by some random unit that just spawned there.
• 

  LT drone

  Sep 27, 2016

  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 .
• 

  Cpt. Rogers

  Nov 15, 2016

  Whilst the base game is a fun set to the old times. This DLC is just awful in singleplayer so far. The first and second mission were hard then the third one has you baby-sitting the !&^# out of a APC... just no. It's more fun to skip rocks on water than play this so far. I may change this review but for now I'm burnt on this DLC, hold onto your money for the second game. :)
• 

  PerspexAvenger

  Jun 24, 2017

  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.
• 

  Bacon

  Dec 23, 2017

  As a nearly life-long fan of this series, something I've been unable to play is The Red Odyssey. However, thanks to Rebellion, TRO has been updated and remastered, and the result is great. The campaigns contained in TRO are extremely difficult as the developers expected you to have played and mastered the original campaigns in the first game, but the challenge is still satisfying and entertaining. When the original missions in the game have become commonplace for you or too easily completed, TRO gives you more meat to chew on. Strategy plays a big factor (as does the new cloaking ability) and the Chinese units are interesting and fun to play as. Unsure of the reason for so many of the negative reviews. Just because it is "hard" does not make it a bad expansion. Certain missions have annoying sections, but the point of this port is to provide BZ players a remastered and improved copy of an expansion pack many missed out on playing. And the size of this expansion isn't negligible either. You're given two full-sized campaigns including an entirely new set of units. This is a bargain for the asking price (especially in the BZ98R + TRO bundle Rebellion has provided), nearly doubling the content of the original game. I highly recommend The Red Odyssey expansion to any fan of Battlezone, just be aware that it requires you to understand the deeper mechanics of the original game.
• 

  ShowMeTheMonkey

  May 27, 2018

  It's just not fun. The major complaint here is the aggrevating difficulty of the missions. This isn't a "Dark Souls git gud" kind off difficulty, but the one where whomever was designing the levels was a grad A moron. Spawning random enemies behind all of your forces doesn't reward strategy or tactics, only cheese tactics. In one mission they spawn an APC for you to protect on the other side of the map. Several times I couldn't even get there before it was blown up. The only way to get there is to already be there before you're told to go there! Its a real shame that the Devs can't go back and tweak these missions (Redux included) to make them more enjoyable. The difficulty could still be there, but less of the cheesy difficulty. I would not recommend this. A playthrough on "very easy" wasn't even enjoyable.
• 

  Lupe

  Jul 30, 2018

  I played to it just because they talked about the Black Dogs in BZ2 and wanted to have some lore. But damn, what a bad extension. You have two choice to win : either being a mentalist and able to see the futur, because the game will litteraly ask you to do things BEFORE it asks you (mission 3 for example), or a classic die and retry. And I HATE die and retry. See ya achievement, hello BZTNT and BZBODY Edit : nope, even with cheats and a whole squad I can't keep this APC alive because the enemies just swarm it, ignoring anything else. What you wanna do ? Uninstalling this shit.
• 

  GrizzlyOne95

  Jan 21, 2019

  It's awesome they got these missions added to redux, they all play fine while being as frustratingly hard to complete as i remember. Somehow i originally beat the whole campaign with a laptop touchpad back in the day.
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  MiG-21bis Fishbed-L

  Feb 13, 2019

  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.
• 

  Orgunis

  Apr 18, 2019

  *SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH* Like... I can't even... I... WHY?! Who designed this?! This isn't fun, like, AT ALL. Some of the missions are BEARABLE to play while others just keep asking you to do ridiculous tasks like... here's a brief example of what this thing have: • Massively long missions. • Reach a certain spot on the map with a BARE MINIMUM time limit... under enemy fire. • Protect a slow ass vehicle with paper thin armor. The enemy AI will only aim for that vehicle and ignore everything else, they will cloak and their light fighter have a lot of armor. • Hold the line for a STUPID long amount of time... with the detail that they basically gonna be nuking your base twice. Like, the game literally spawns two bombs on your base and there's nothing you can do about it. • You're constantly going against snipers who are always aware of where you are and ONLY aim for the player with 100% accuracy. Cheats can't help you with these, I already tried. • Complete missions ON FOOT... [b]ON FOOT[/b] (with all the snipers mentioned above). If you still wanna buy this go ahead but keep in mind you're not gonna have a good time with this expansion. Whoever developed this originally (Big Boat Interactive just remastered it) clearly didn't cared enough to test the missions and Big Boat Interactive didn't cared enough to re-work the missions so they'd be more bearable, just don't bother with this one.
• 

  TTVV88

  May 3, 2019

  A great single player pack that offers around 20 hours of additional gameplay. It certainly has its flaws... Most of them involve tedious mission objectives that seem to drag on for a long time, such as laying down power-ups or manual scrap collecting for 10 minutes, or hour-long missions that require you to methodically bring down fortified enemy bases which is usually accompanied by lots of down-time while you resupply your health/ammo and rebuild your forces for the next attack. The difficulty can also be a big issue in this mission pack, as it's not only a test of the player's individual combat skills, but also because the mission is heavily dependent on scripted attack waves that will require you to memorize the patterns (and thus making numerous retries) before you can beat the mission with ease. I personally don't find this much an issue, since I've got enough patience to deal with it, like when I did playing Dark Souls (a game which also requires learning patterns). The new factions such as the Chinese bring cloaking technology to the table, which is a well-implemented concept and not that overpowered. But against the AI it can be very easily abused in the hands of the player... The AI in this mod is overly-aggressive in singling out the player even when he has a full squad supporting him and will almost focus all their attacks on them. Having Cloaking ensures that the enemy breaks aggro (i.e enemy AI targeting) and makes them focus elsewhere. The player can sometimes cloak/de-cloak continuously as the enemy units constantly switch targets between the player and his units, making them easy to pick off by the rest of the player's wingmen. Despite its rougher edges (and some very mediocre voice acting), the mod has a very creative campaign design with some novel ideas that will certainly entertain veteran BZ players with its many hours of gameplay. It also has a great dynamic soundtrack to accompany it (compared to the ominous ambient space music found in the original BZ), and is the perfect companion for the difficullt challenges ahead. Definitely get this add-on, but only if you have the patience.
• 

  Herp McDerperson

  Oct 24, 2019

  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.