Red Crucible Reloaded
Red Crucible Reloaded is, for all intents and purposes, an archetypical modern military shooter, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It has the bare minimum in every category to qualify as a multiplayer FPS, with almost nothing to give it any sort of identity beyond that.
I first became aware of the game thanks to my brother, as its predecessor Red Crucible 2 was the first-ever online game he got really addicted to. So for me personally, my main motivation for playing was to spend time with him doing something he enjoys. The main perk for him was the ad-watching mechanic that granted him in-game currency for spending time on their website. That, complete with the devs frequently releasing limited-edition holiday weapons, led to my brother having some truly unique arsenals that helped him dominate the server (his favorite gun was the firework-shooting LMG). Personally I was not interested in exploring this particular facet of the game’s business model, so you’ll only be seeing the starter AK-47 in these videos/screenshots. Even the grenades in this game are limited; your account begins with four, and once you’ve thrown them you can only earn more through spending the pseudo-premium currency. Much like in The Respawnables, that pretty much means I never used them, except for a single cathartic kill at 2:13 in the below video:
On the artside, I confess I really enjoy the simplistic map models, but then again I’ve always been a sucker for low-poly 3D environments. In Red Crucible Reload’s case, I’d say they’re are a bit closer to stock Unity assets than any other specific aesthetic I can think of. In my opinion, if the devs wanted to do one single thing to radically improve their game’s appearance, it would be a dynamic lighting system. Payday the Heist has even worse textures and models than Red Crucible Reloaded, but it looks fantastic because the lighting system does all the heavy lifting. Red Crucible Reloaded, on the other hand, I’m pretty sure is using whatever default static lighting came pre-packaged with the engine.
The audio design is nothing to write home about either; everybody has the same death cry, most of the gunfire sounds identical and I don’t recall any map ambiance. In general (as I think you’ve probably guessed just from the screenshots) this game mostly feels like an uninspired cash grab that doesn’t make any particularly bold decisions to either stand out or advance the genre in any way. As my brother demonstrated, the payment model is good for encouraging early fans to stick around and flaunt their legacy loadouts, but the generic gameplay also doesn’t inspire much loyalty to keep them from moving onto something better. When the devs ended Red Crucible Reloaded‘s development cycle in favor of a sequel, Red Crucible Firestorm, my brother jumped off the train and now plays Fortnite instead.