Redcon is a 2016 strategy video game for Windows and mobile devices developed by Hexage. It’s been untold years since the Great War started, culminating in a thermonuclear bombardment that left Fuhrer Adler Grimm‘s Empire State victorious in the ruins. The State now seeks to stamp out the last remaining independent nation, Krux, led by the Traitor General and former mentor to the player, Franz Erhard Kranz.
With technological advancement rendering infantry nearly non-existent, and environmental destruction making most forms of air travel impossible, war now revolves around long-range artillery battles fought out of gigantic fortresses. You play as a Strike Commander, whose guns are spearheading an artillery assault into Krux territory to end the war once and for all.
The gameplay is similar to FTL: Faster Than Light. You build and control a series of progressively-larger battle fortresses, the goal being to destroy the enemy’s fortress before they can blow up yours. You assign targets to specific weapons (which can range from artillery cannons of various sizes to energy weapons and atomic bombs) while balancing ammo, power and manpower to keep your fortress functioning. Your systems are all automated but almost universally receive a buff if manned - and are unable to repair themselves or defend against enemy paratroopers - and juggling your little soldiers around for maximum efficiency serves as the core mechanic. Winning battles provides you with money that can be used to upgrade your systems and buy even bigger and badder guns.
REDCON provides examples of:
- Alternate History: World War I never ended. Or so the marketing says, it never comes up in game aside from one brief reference to “the Great War,” and the conflict revolves around two made-up nations fighting “the Unification War.”
- Armor Is Useless: The gasmasks your mooks wear provide no actual protection against neurotoxin.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Since the AI can have whatever base power and ammo is required to run its fortress without issue, the main purpose of enemies running Nuclear Power Plants is to give the player a target that will take half the fortress down with it.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Omega Capital Destroyer. Capable of levelling a room in one shot, and doing splash damage to neighbouring rooms... but the cannon takes up four rooms-worth of space in your fortress, takes 48 seconds to load, and its shots can be interdicted by kinetic shields or a scrambler relay. Unfortunately most late game levels give the enemy both of those, so your giant gun will just sit there uselessly for most of the match.
- ICBMs have it even worse. They launch even slower than the Capital Destroyer with nearly identical results, are far less sturdy on top of always being exposed (you can at least hide the Capital Destroyer from mortars), and if you do manage to get a missile off it’s helpless against autocannon defense turrets and will blow up your base if the enemy scrambles it. The exception is the troop transport missile since it isn’t prioritized by the AI as much as the others.
- The Bad Guy Wins: By the end of the game you learn that everything you did to get there was just a planned cycle of a never-ending war orchestrated by Fuhrer Grimm, and you continue to serve faithfully to start the cycle anew.
- Boring, but Practical: Just spamming mortars and your heaviest cannons for an Attrition victory will carry you through most of the game better than the cool sci-fi weapons and such you have at your disposal. The game will eventually shut this down towards the end by giving nearly every base shielding and scramblers, forcing you to get more creative to bypass their defenses.
- The sniper cannons are even more boring and practical. Three of them and you can instantly destroy any utility room and personnel inside. Shoot defense room -> invade base will win 99% of levels in as fast as it takes to charge an airship.
- Crapsack World: The air is so toxic that people need gas masks to survive and most methods of air travel are impossible, the seas have turned to sludge, and the ground is ashes upon ashes. That’s ignoring the giant artillery battalions blowing up everything around them on the regular.
- Critical Existence Failure: Your base has a Structural Damage life bar and will just blow up when it reaches zero, even if everything’s in working order and you’ve taken no casualties. If you’re getting annoyed by flak cannons, just point your mortars at some uncovered corner and the whole thing will go up in flames eventually.
- Diesel Punk: It’s World War I if it was fought from gigantic artillery fortresses with laser beams, nukes, and guns the size of city blocks.
- EMPs: There are a few EMP weapons, most notoriously the plasma launchers which drain the power to any systems they hit and can’t be stopped by conventional defense guns; The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard so they never have any trouble powering three or four of these things even without any engines and shutting down your entire base, or keeping their own lights on if you try running one yourself. If not being able to shoot your guns in an artillery game is too much breath-taking action for you, they also stun your troops so you can’t move your soldiers either.
- Evil Counterpart: General Kranz seems as this to Strike Commander. It is eventually averted as Kranz is revealed to be the good guy..
- Fake Difficulty: You have a finite amount of credits earned at the end of every battle which you use to buy or upgrade weapons and such. Once they’re gone they’re gone, and you might find yourself in a borderline unwinnable state in the late game if you didn’t buy the right stuff.
- How much experience you get is partially determined by your winning streak. But you don’t get to look at the enemy base until after you’ve settled on a build, and you’ll inevitably run into some that flat-out cannot be beat with your loadout and necessitate failing the mission. This is especially the case with your defense weapons since they all suffer from Crippling Overspecialization.
- Forever War: The war is essentially a Nineteen Eighty-Four style deliberate stalemate, the main difference being that here the leaders are fully aware of this and one side is actively supplying the other. It only becomes “for real” when Kranz grows disillusioned and attempts to kill Grimm, at which point Grimm’s forces push into Krux and replace him with the player character.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: The empire is a military nation ruled by a Goring-esque Fuhrer who united all nations with exception of Krux whom he needs as enemy for his never-ending war.
- Playing Both Sides: Emperor Grimm supplies Krux with weapons and highly competent commanders so the war never ends.
- Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: The Tactical Nuke is the most powerful weapon in the game… but it still only takes out the target and adjacent rooms as opposed to blowing your base to smithereens like you might expect. One mission with a pre-set fort is actually impossible to beat without eating a nuke (you have one nuke and the enemy has three - you have to destroy one with your conventional weaponry and another with your nuke, but stopping all three is impossible). Granted most of the time it’s so damaging that the battle is all but finished if one lands.
- Three Approach System: There’s three victory conditions you can attain based on how you want to build your base:
- Attrition happens from simply emptying the enemy base’s Structural Damage bar without destroying a significant number of rooms or soldiers.
- Annihilation happens when you kill all their troops and destroy every structure, or blow up the base via Structural Damage after having destroyed half their rooms and soldiers.
- Takeover happens when you land troops in their base, kill all of their troops, and destroy all their guns, without blowing up the entire base. Gives the most experience and credits.
- Zeppelins from Another World: Remote controlled airships, the only safe method of air travel due to how toxic the skies are, can be used to either transport soldiers to the enemy base or drop EMP bombs on it.
