Review by: Emil Pagliarulo
Published: May 15, 1998

Here’s a frightening question: What do you get when you cross Duke Nukem 3D with Deliverance? If you answered Redneck Rampage, you’re as sick as you are right. Best known as the game that lowered the maturity bar for 3D shooters, Redneck Rampage was also a pretty good (even underrated) action romp. Now, after the mediocre add-on pack Suckin’ Grits on Route 66, Leonard and Bubba are back in an all-new stand-alone adventure. Redneck Rampage Rides Again offers even more white trash shooter action, with all new levels, weapons, and enemies for your gaming pleasure.

The game picks up where the original left off; after an opening cutscene showing the rednecks’ hijacked UFO slamming into the Mir space station on its way to the Earth’s surface, the player assumes control of Leonard, right there at the saucer crash site. Your mission, which you have no choice but to accept, is to travel cross-country and return home to Hickston, Arkansas, once again constantly rescuing Bubba from the clutches of those dastardly aliens. But it’s not long before you make a sinister discovery — the alien influence is much more far-reaching than you had ever imagined, and in fact has spread across much of the country. Oh, the horror.

Redneck Rampage Rides Again offers two new episodes, “Land of the Lost” and “Homeward Bound.” Unlike many 3D games that sort of switch gears with each episode change, such is not really the case here. Instead, the second episode is really just an addendum to the first, with Leonard continuing his trek across rural America. So, whereas “Land of the Lost” begins in the middle of the desert, and “Homeward Bound” starts Leonard off in a swamp, it all takes place in the good old U.S. of A.

Most of the levels fall into the game’s “cross-country” theme, much like the Suckin’ Grits on Route 66 add-on. In this manner the designers at Xatrix have proven once again that specific locations can be just as white-trashy as the people who inhabit them. Indeed, most of the levels have been pulled right out of the pages of the tabloids. “Area 69″ is Area 51 redneck style, a top-secret military base in the middle of the desert, populated by the lowest forms of life America has to offer. The same can certainly be said of “Jackelope Farms,” tourist trap and breeding ground of the mythical half-rabbit, half-antelope. And on and on it goes. There’s the old west ghost town, the deep-south riverboat, a brothel, and even DisGraceland for all those Elvis fans. As has become the Redneck Rampage tradition, your object in most of the levels is to find Bubba and whack him square in the head with your trusty crowbar, which for some twisted reason ends the level and advances you on to the next. There are even some new multiplayer maps, so you and some friends can have a good old fashioned redneck “Pissin’ Contest” (Xatrix’s term, not mine…).