In my F-Zero X review, I talked about pretenders, futuristic racers that are not F-Zero. Today, I’ll be discussing Quantum Redshift, a futuristic racer more Wipeout than F-Zero, as it was made by Ex-Wipeout Developers. It was a 2002 Xbox exclusive that never saw a sequel. Its unfortunate because while it is no F-Zero, it is a good game in its own right.
Quantum Redshift Rivalries
There are sixteen racers in total in Quantum Redshift. You start off with eight and unlock their Nemesis through beating a nemesis challenge at the end of the Amateur, Expert or Master campaigns. Your nemesis will appear in every race and generally will finish first if you don’t. For example, I played Tara Vivas:
She lost control of her hover car and killed the parents of a girl named Alicia. Years later Alicia became a racer of own to take down Tara in Revenge:
It is now time for the Quantum Redshift game video, it shows the nemesis challenge itself. I lose here, but that’s because of the rubber-band AI, which I’ll get into in the next section:
The Racing Itself
The racing in Quantum Redshift is very good. Its standard futuristic racing, with futuristic racing tropes, like turbo, weapons and a toggle shield. You keep your finger on the acceleration the entire time, only popping the power slide when necessary.
The weapons, turbo and health can be upgraded with your excess high score. So let’s say you set a high score of 100k, you have 100k cash. Then you set a new high score of 110K, you now have 110k cash, adding 10k to your total.
As I eluded to, this game has rubber band AI. Somebody is always on your tail and you are never lapping the competitors. You can slow them down with weapons, but they’ll be on you before long. You get your seconds of turbo each lap, and they add up. So what I do to win is save it all until the end and zoom past everyone to win. There really isn’t any other way to consistently win. Still, without rubber band AI, races would not be tense, so I get it.
A tip: There is a 2-race novice campaign you can run to build up cash to upgrade your craft before you start the “real” campaigns.
Quantum Redshift in Rear View
There was no sequel to Quantum Redshift. It sold poorly. A planned sequel was cancelled by Microsoft and its developer closed shortly after. Still, I like it, even if I never heard of it until last week, when I subsequently purchased it. It’s a historical footnote in the futuristic racing genre, but one that should be played. I bought a brand new copy off eBay for $15, so it won’t set you back a whole lot of money.
