Immortal Redneck is a fast paced procedurally generated roguelike first person shooter set in Egypt. If that isn’t a mouthful already, then I don’t know what is. The pyramids have levels that take place on different floors where you need to make your way to the top. On your way, you’ll stumble across chest rooms filled with all the goodies you need to survive the next room. Entering a new room closes the door behind until you cleansed the room of all the pesky enemies.

While most of it is pretty standard, there are these “Trial Rooms”, and in there you either need to get to the chest in a few seconds, or don’t take any damage while you do it. Sounds easy, but Immortal Redneck is throwing lava, enemies and flames from each direction at you. That said, these rooms won’t be a challenge for most players. So far there seems to only be two or three variations of these rooms, and that’s something you’ll notice throughout the game. Even after the second attempt at the pyramid, you’ll notice that the rooms repeat themselves. It wouldn’t really be an issue if the rooms themselves had some sort of randomly generated textures or lights to make them somewhat unique. But all of that could be a whole different story once the game is actually finished and released on Steam of course.

What could make each playthrough unique though, are the scrolls. With those you can basically alter the gameplay, for example, you can increase drop rates of items or your movement speed when you jump, you know…the basic stuff. But it lacks uniqueness or the wackiness that would give it a personality. This feeling continues somewhat with the 9 playable characters. They do have different active skills, like a few seconds of invulnerability or a hook that will propel you towards anything you’ve aimed at. But most just give you a, albeit really useful, unique weapon with different basic stats. The skill tree suffers from the same thing too, a lack of something different. The money you pick up in your playthrough can unlock various skills in your, well…skill tree. Most of these will just increase the basic stats or improve the perks of a playable character. Which, by the way, you need to unlock in the skill tree as well.

One thing the developers did nail down however, is the movement, and that’s pretty much the thing that really carries the game. It’s fast, frantic and fun. You’re always on your toes trying to avoid the enemy’s attacks and constantly jumping 50 meters over a sea of lava while shooting at all these insanely dry mummies. You’re still able to control your movement mid-flight which opens up a lot of cool ways to avoid incoming fire.

Weapons on the other hand, well…I guess they are alright. They’re neither bad, nor really good, just alright. You will come across all kinds of interesting weapons in your run including pistols, shotguns, magical…hand…magic, that shoots magical stuff. I even found an AK-47! And these machine guns are usually your best bet, since each hit will freeze enemies in place for a few frames, giving you just that little time to get out of the way from their melee attacks. One thing that did annoy the living hell out of me though was that, once you hit that reload button, you’re committed to that. You can’t change to another weapon mid-reloading.

Personally I can’t wait to dive back into the game once Immortal Redneck is released on April 25th. I’m certain the developers will address some of the pet peeves I have with the final version of the game. The foundation for something great is already in place.