Nitro Punk is Dead, Short Live Nitro Punk
In Road Redemption you are the kind of traffic that causes acccidents. The first character you unlock is called: Nitro Punk. You unlock Nitro Punk by killing a minor enemy NPC named Nitro Punk. Nitro Punk has 75 health. He begins his short, brutal life with a monkey wrench, which he uses solely as a bludgeon. He knows no other way. He rides his motorcycle at incalculable speeds, really a quasi-fast rubber banding pace consistent with the assistive physics of a Mario Kart game, and swings his wrench at military men in balaclavas, other Nitro Punks, and metallic spiky behemoths in the vein of Store Brand Immortan Joe. Store Brand Joe carries a battle axe and has very little in common with the cybernetically altered soldiers of level 6 or the paramilitary in 10. A strange taxonomy; these different riders share a species in that they have a similar bloodlust, unless you count Santa Claus, who is a pacifist by rule.
In order to play as Santa Claus in this game, you have to unlock him. This is done by drifting your motorcycle in a cumulative way, accruing mileage spent sliding. Understand that this is a rogue-lite, and that you will drift and die several times to unlock Santa. But you do not drift in a vacuum, rather a blender. Santa Claus can only be drifted into existence by a mean motorcycle man like Nitro Punk who has pipe bashed, harpooned, and dynamited his kin. Nitro Punk’s only friend is his Hardley Davidson, a copyright dodge with all the smarm and shame you’d want from a game whose final boss wields an electric katana.
I have unlocked an achievement in Road Redemption called “Nitro Punk Wins!” The description says: Beat the game with Nitro Punk. This was done by upgrading Nitro Punk’s measly 75 health with a skill tree that presents itself with RR’s barebones white-on-black-boxes interface. You choose from steroids that lift your health total, upgrades that turn a pool cue inexplicably into a polearm, and guns.
Guns, in this game, are problematic in that they kill people far too quickly. Road Redemption is at its best when you bonk a biker’s helmet off with a pipe, give ‘em a kick, then decapitate them with a broadsword, all while hauling mean sweaty ass through a blasted apocalyptic hellscape. Guns are too precise, cold, remote and lethal for this world.
The action is fast and loose, all about bumping into. There are flourishes, like drifting into a decapitation or headshot. Lifeless bodies get sucked backward by speed, almost instantly, to a place that does not concern you.