Redhell - Review english

Redhell

Release date: 1994
Developer: Castleworks Gameware
Publisher: Cyberdreams

Game language English
Screen texts and manual German

A review by slydos 29th July 2003

Redhell is a little known 3rd-person adventure game of the year 1994, which has a very well-founded, even if fictitious, political background story. The developers of Castleworks took great troubles to rewrite world history after World War II. We not only get to know that the USSR meanwhile, in the year 2020, became the dominating super power but also how this could happen. Decisive was, that they won the arms race around the first A-bomb, since they somehow got access to the secrets of the so-called "Manhattan Project" in New Mexico. At the beginning we are in 'One Main', the headquarters of the North American Democratic Alliance, NADA in short. It's placed in the former Capitol of the United States and is today domicile of the bureaucratic top echelons of the Soviet state and a frequent target of attacks of the resistance. First secretary is Leonid Loginow. The society is partial of futuristic nature (flying cars, high tech electronics), but the Soviet bureaucracy holds cultural and intellectual developments in the stranglehold, so that you experience a picture of the early 70's in America. This imaginary society is leading a ' diversion' war with the far east and faces the total ecocide - about which the public however doesn't know anything. The Soviets fight the Japanese Imperium and look for ways to boost the production of military supplies at any price.

We experience this situation as Marks Constantine, the CEO of Envirotek, an enterprise, dealing with the employment of biological agents against the ecological disaster. Since some years private businesses are allowed again, and the Envirotek is very successful and our main character a privileged, respected biochemist with a grown up son.

Very fast after he landed his glider in 'One Main' we get to know, that the manager leads a double life: On the surface he collaborates with the Soviet regime, but in reality he is the head of the underground group ' The Unknown', whose goal it is to destroy the state machinery. Many doors are open for him, and so he learns by a coincidentally accessible fax that his son's name stands on the hit list. He must act immediately, because they make short work with traitors. His son contacts him from Los Alamos by CD ...

Installation

Redhell is a DOS game, which however also functions under Windows 95. The installation is done from 7 disks and ends in a setup of the sound card, like in most games of this time. Therefore you must know the sound card settings. (if you don't know it exactly, you should open a DOS-window and enter the command 'SET', then you get the appropriate information with the following system answer.) The manual gives of course also help and if necessary, tips to produce a boot disk, so that one can adjust all necessary pre-settings without changes at the own system.

Redhell needs, to run perfectly and without crashes, as many other DOS Games too, a certain amount of free memory in the lower DOS memory area. (tip: you would like to know, how much of this memory is still available on your computer? Enter the DOS-command 'MEM' at the prompt - the line 'max. size for executable program' informs you.) For Redhell this value should be more than 590 KB. It runs by the way with less free memory too, but then here and there unforeseeable crashes occur. Red hell is also playable without sound card. You then will of course miss sound and speech but can save some valueable bytes. If we've finished the setup, we can start Redhell by input of the program name ' redhell' in DOS or more comfortably in Windows 95 e.g. through the menu option "execute".

If we've correctly installed the sound card, the intro is accompanied by typical military marches. We watch the amazing newspaper headlines of the last 70 years in short succession, which end in a brief outline of the current situation. A left-click with the mouse stops the intro at any point and the game begins.

Handling/control

Redhell is totally mouse-controlled, but also allows shortcuts by keyboard. There is no text display at hotspots when driving the mouse over. Thus we control our hero also with the mouse. Unfortunately he doesn't always react as directly as we wish, because he's not capable of diagonal movements. So we must move him horizontally and vertically around obstacles, what really can't be called comfortable. Because we must place him always as near as possible to hotsports, in order to cause the correct reaction, otherwise we always get the appropriate sentence: "Can't see the object XY from here exactly!" or a similar saying. The cursor has always the shape of an arrow, it doesn't make any difference, which action we select.

In the always visible interaction bar at the bottom of the screen we find the 4 action buttons for speaking, walking, looking at and manipulating. The selection is done by clicking the left mouse button, with the right mouse button we can scroll through the different actions, while a colored border indicates the respective icons. After selecting an action we must click somewhere on the game screen - without action selection Mark doesn't walk a single step and also casts no eye over nothing. But since our hero must always stand directly in front of an object, in order to look at it, the compulsion to constant action changes can be quite nerving.

More simple the remaining functions of the interaction bar: there are buttons for the main menu, where you can save (100 save slots with text input, umlauts allowed), load, exit the game or options. Besides a special PDA, providing you with general and also private messages and also a button for the description of the current scene. Finally there is also a link to the inventory, which nearly takes the whole screen. The inventory is limited to 12 objects, which we can be looked at with an eye-icon or selected with a hand-icon. Likewise integrated into the inventory a waste-basket, where items irrevocably disappear and so make room for further objects - here experts will already recognize the bad trap, which is connected to it: if we should trash an absolutely necessary object, we can continue the game later no more! Combination of inventory items is possible too.

Puzzles

That points us to the puzzle design: Dead ends are not only possible by the just described trap. We can as well ignore an absolutely necessary item or consider it unimportant from the start and then need it at the end of the game! Unfortunately there is not a scrap of a hint, which of the often useless objects are really needed.

After I got over and done with approx. 2/3 of the game, I could only enter a dark cave by preparing a torch by with a rag from the first scene, instead of using the briefly before found solar flashlight, that I tried to load in vain I in the sunny desert! Also my matches didn't illuminate the cave! Thus I had no choice but to restart the game - a classic example of an illogical puzzle! I must add, that this dead end was surely intended, as the rag especially had to be picked out from a set of different, homogeneous ones. In this case even frequent saves are not much help - grade unfair and frustrating!

Apart from the simple use of objects we also find quite sophisticated object puzzles, where we can even lose items, that we urgently need. But we can find out here ourselves that we must begin from an earlier save. It is important to recognize continuously which objects are important and which are not.

Besides there are decoding puzzles, a labyrinth and also some time limited puzzles: if you don't react quick enough, you die. Likewise during the 'normal' game, if you for example run around in places, where you should better not be seen. Redhell has however no action or skill elements and is nonviolent.

Even if the selection of the taken up inventory objects the game can't be continued sometimes, there is otherwise not much freedom for the gamers. The game is to a large extent linear, so that one cannot solve puzzles in different order (with some exeptions) and also can't change between the different main locations.

If you enter a new location, a special button informs about it in detail.

Copy protection

The game has a nice copy protection in form of a deep red, riddled with bullets cardboard folding in honeycomb shape. When loading a savegame for the first time, we are asked for different symbols, which we can recognizes through the holes, depending on how we've folded the handy cardboard. Within the game the copy protection was also used once to access a terminal, so that it is guaranteed that only legal owners will enjoy the game longer than 10 minutes. I must say honestly, that such imaginative, sensual copy protection please me better than anonymous CD protection. But times change and today we can be glad, if we get something more than the data medium into our hands.

Speech/sound/graphics

Redhell has quite appealing graphics for its age with perhaps sometimes a bit too multicolored, garish backgrounds, which are however affectionately drawn. First we roam around in the NADA headquarters, later we get into the secret laboratories of Los Alamos, visit a Pueblo, where we have a mystic meeting with an Indian chief, and other places of the southwest American desert.

We can move our main actor very near to the monitor screen and also turn him around, what lets the Gentleman actually resemble very much his human model. Because all mono- and dialogues, which by the way run off often automatically and without any choices, are performed by real actors appearing in each case in a window as head-and-shoulders portrait video. Our hero seems to be the most professional actor, while his son, whom we may not experience in the flesh but on a monitor, looks yet more amateurish. Nevertheless the real faces of the approx. 10 NPC's are a welcome liven up and the speech that goes with it, is very remarkable for a DOS diskette game of the year 94. Additionally we can select sub-titles in the options. (which are necessary, if you play Redhell on a newer computer: you are warned in the manual that the characters and animations move too slow and halting if you don't defrag your hard disk, but on a Pentium they only scoot about in such a way that it becomes nearly unplayable fast sometimes and so the dialogues quite quickly past. I could do without it, but who would like it somewhat more relaxed, can help him-/herself with programs such as MoSlow or Bremze - here in the Adventure-Archiv as download.)

In addition, the interspersed cutscenes and animations are accompanied by music, which is not really ringing in your ears but also not disturbing too, the same as the unobtrusive however not mismatching sound effects.

Result

The story is really something different. Nevertheless although so interesting designed, I was missing something. We become acquainted with a set of persons during the game and get curious about their fate with all the suggestions made. But we're finally left in the dark about them, which is rather unsatisfactory. The abrupt end after a detailed developed background story and rising suspense lets assume, that the developers were missing time and money sometime. Anyhow I had wished me another 'reward' for the drudgery. Drudgery because of the controls and dead ends and rather boring and lengthy repetitions of game sections. Unfortunately no more than

Rating: 52%

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