Redfall

I wanted to believe. When Redfall was unveiled in the summer of 2021, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It didn’t look like the Arkane games I knew and loved, and the trailer didn’t reveal about the gameplay. Yet despite all the unknowns, I felt confident that Arkane would make it work.


As launch day approached the particulars came into a hazy, pseudo-focus. Redfall would feature co-op like Left 4 Dead. It would boast an open world à la Far Cry 2. And yet it would still retain the hallmarks of the immersive sims Arkane had made its name on. This combination of disparate elements sounded incredibly ambitious, and I had no idea how Arkane Austin was going to pull it off, but still, I wanted to believe.


Now Redfall is here, having crash landed between Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom [ゼルダの伝説 ティアーズ オブ ザ キングダム]. And gosh, did it crash hard. It’d be easy to write it off as a complete loss and move on, and yet here I am, digging through the wreckage, trying to ascertain if there’s anything of value among the smoldering remains.


Before I discuss the game itself, though, here’s my take on the pre-launch marketing and the backlash. From the initial reveal until launch day, Redfall’s marketing never made it clear what the game was supposed to be. A looter shooter? An immersive sim? An Ubisoft-like open-world? The marketing was gaming’s version of a Rorschach inkblot test, in which everyone saw what they wanted to see.


When Redfall launched, it became clear that it was a Frankenstein’s monster of all the promised features. Yes, technically it’s a co-op open-world immersive sim, but the individual elements all feel at odds with each other. The game offers neither the immersive depth of Dishonored or Prey, nor the pulse-pounding tension of a horde shooter. It aims for too many targets and misses all of them.


It was also in the unenviable position of being Xbox’s first major game release since Halo Infinite, which came out nearly a year and a half prior. Yes, Microsoft launched many other games in that span – Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush, Minecraft Legends, a few ports from PS5, and whatnot – some of which were quite excellent. But none of those are the kind of huge AAA game that can draw everyone in. By closing its 2021 summer showcase with an extended trailer for Redfall, Microsoft gave the impression that Redfall was supposed to be “that” game – the one that would stand toe-to-toe with Sony and Nintendo’s offerings.


Needless to say, Redfall is not that game.


As a shooter Redfall is passable. The shooting mechanics feel solid enough; the problem is with the people and creatures you’re tasked with taking down. Human enemies are little more than cannon fodder. They come in different varieties, like snipers who do more damage and engineers who set up turrets, but these enemy subtypes never significantly changed how I approached combat encounters. The only way they could overwhelm me was with sheer numbers.


Vampires, meanwhile, are supposed to be more imposing opponents but prove to be one-trick bloodsuckers. Once you internalize the timing of their swipe attack, you’ll defang them with ease. Occasionally other types of vampires appear, and they do put up more of a fight, but they also never forced me to change my tactics in an interesting way. Siphons and Anglers can kill you quickly, but are easy to dispatch from a distance. The Shroud is a nuisance more than anything. Even the Rook, Redfall’s take on Resident Evil [バイオハザード]’s Tyrant and Mr. X, is easily disposed of with the right combination of special abilities and a stake launcher. Far from striking fear into my heart, encounters with the Rook quickly became little more than glorified gold-tier weapon drop events.


So Redfall fails to impress as a shooter, but what about its immersive sim pedigree? Here, as well, it falls short. Immersive sims derive much of their fun factor from the invisible hand of tight level design, which is the antithesis of an open world. Although on some missions the level design does narrow its focus, recalling Arkane’s past triumphs, even then it usually feels like a pale imitation. I chalk this up to the fact that there are four different characters, each with their own abilities. Arkane had to ensure that every obstacle could be overcome by each character, either alone or in co-op, thus necessitating a lowest-common-denominator approach to level design. If Redfall had been built from the ground up as a co-op only experience, it could’ve had some very smart puzzles, I’m sure. Likewise, if it was a purely solo experience, with a singular protagonist like Morgan or Corvo, I’m confident the developers could’ve sprinkled clever environmental puzzles throughout the open world. As it stands, however, they tried to cater to every playstyle and the results do not impress.


Having read this far, you may think that I despised my trip to Redfall. Yet surprisingly, nothing could be further from the truth. Though the enemies aren’t going to win any awards for ingenuity, gunning through packs of them still had its charms. Once I tweaked the controls to my liking, I was able to pull off slick moves, like sliding past cultists and mercenaries while shotgunning them in the face. Was this any more effective than running past them while shotgunning them in the face? Probably not. But it sure was fun!


And how about the game’s namesake? The town of Redfall exudes a distinct sense of place, one that is rarely found in games. It reminds me of the small towns I’ve visited on the coast of Lake Superior. Boutique shops, lighthouses, hilly hiking trails, cargo docks, churches – it’s all there. When I hike up to one of Redfall’s peaks and look down, I see a real place. That many of the homes are fully explorable and filled with the journals, diaries, and other documents we’ve come to expect from an Arkane game is just icing on the cake.


Yes, Redfall does feel rather empty. Sometimes you can run for minutes without encountering any enemies. While this isn’t ideal, I must say that simply increasing the enemy density is not the right solution. I played Far Cry 2 a few years back, and my lingering memory from it is the ridiculous enemy respawn rate. Having to deal with the same encampments again and again was torturous. I’m glad that Redfall offers quiet moments of respite and largely allows me to explore at my own pace.


There’s also the matter of the narrative. Simply put, the backstory of Redfall is more interesting than the story in its present. As you work your way through the game, uncovering scraps of evidence and watching phantasms replay past events, it often feels like you’re chasing ghosts. The real story has already happened and the missions you go on are essentially McGuffin quests that help you uncover the truth.


As is the case with the world design, the reason for this rearview-mirror narrative design comes down to the game’s open-world nature and the presence of four player characters. It’s hard to craft a compelling, forward-moving narrative when you need to tell it nonlinearly through the eyes of four characters. That being said, I did enjoy hearing the tale, even if the flashback scenes felt long-winded at times. And if you squint, you’ll still spot inklings of classic Arkane environmental storytelling. The most memorable bit for me was in a scene featuring Charles and Claire Beck as children. Go search by the fireplace and you’ll see what I mean.


Yes, Redfall is a disappointment on nearly every level. Making a four-player open-world immersive sim would’ve been a tall task for any studio, and I’m not surprised that Arkane Austin’s stab at it fell far short of expectations. And yet despite all these flaws, I still found myself enjoying Redfall. Staking vampires while going for a hilly afternoon hike, breaking into buildings by throwing my teleporter through the window, and sifting through documents in a church basement were just a few of my favorite moments – moments that are unique to this game. Though it’s not the AAA immersive sim blockbuster I hoped it would be, it does have undeniable charms. My hope is that after the worst bugs have been patched and the game drops into budget-bin territory, more people will be willing to wade through the wreckage of the game’s crash landing and uncover Redfall’s secrets for themselves.

I’m going to get this out of the way: I literally do not know if I can recommend this game. That’s not to say that I do NOT recommend this game. After playing for almost 13 hours, I can say that there is something here, but I also have not played this cooperative shooter with anyone besides myself. Unless you’re a big Arkane fan, a big vampire fan, a Game Pass subscriber, and someone who can put up with jank, I wouldn’t recommend this.

As it is generally a good idea to follow an already hedgy opinion of controversial game with a bunch of defensive caveats, here are a few: I was VERY receptive to this game after consuming a lot of preview coverage of it via Edge Magazine, to the point that I think I know what project lead Harvey Smith was aiming for: it’s a game about mutual aid in the face of soulless hypercapitalism, the vampires are literally pharmaceutical CEOs run amok. I’ve also played just about every Arkane game from Dishonored to Redfall, and I trusted the company enough to buy the game for $70 on Steam even though I have Game Pass.

I also mostly played the PC version on low settings on a gaming laptop equipped with a 1080p screen, which I played after playing the first two hours on the Xbox. I note this because the PC version has an unstable frame rate and keeps re-rendering textures on top of the game’s general technical issues present in the Xbox version, like bad enemy AI and pathing. However, I think the technical problems are the dullest issue with this game to discuss and they’ve been discussed to death.

As I am playing this game by myself, I’ve put “time” into three of the characters. On the Xbox, I played the first hour of the game as Remi, a support character who summons a robot to draw aggro and throws a remote controlled C4 charge. I also played a bit as Dev, who can throw out a tesla coil and also has a version of the Blink power from every Arkane game. On the PC, I’ve spent twelve hours playing as Layla, the Black college student who is the “face” of the game. She can create a barrier shield to stop bullets, create a spring pad, and summon her “vampire ex-boyfriend.” There is also a fourth character, Jacob, who can cloak, ping enemies, and summon a ghostly sniper rifle, but I could not be bothered with that power set.

I apologize if you find my description of these characters on a mechanical level to be tedious, but I want to highlight that I think they’re all generally balanced for cooperative play at the cost of some of the characters being awful to play solo. As I’ve put the most time into Layla, I can safely say that she does not offer a great experience for a lone player. Her barrier shield leaves her open on her flanks, and when she deactivates the shield, she cannot fire her weapon for about three seconds. The spring pad has limited combat utility. The vampire ultimate does not last very long and the upgrade that allows him to revive you is very expensive in terms of skill points. However, if I were to play with other players, I can tell you that the barrier shield pairs up with Remi’s aggro-drawing robot well and her spring pad pairs up with Jacob’s ping and Dev’s teleporter. It’s well-designed for cooperative play, but she doesn’t have anything for solo players.

(As an aside, I would recommend solo players choose Dev. Also, if you scroll up and look at the cover art: Layla is the most prominent character in that Gen Z quartet; Dev is the dude on the right, behind everyone else, almost saying, “Don’t pick me don’t pick me.”)

Unfortunately, this leads into another major problem: you can’t switch characters in a playthrough, so my only choice is to restart the game. But also, the game does not randomize any aspect of the story campaign, so I would have to replay the same uninteresting missions, all of which involve attacking an enemy fortification to collect things or fix things. I’d have to imagine this will be fixed, since the game’s season pass offers two new characters and no new maps.
I can’t easily segue into my other complaints about the game, so here’s an itemized list of the most interesting ones:

- “Medical supplies,” the game’s healing items, are handled rather weirdly: they’re rather expensive (they cost about 75% of the price of an uncommon weapon) and unavailable to buy at most spawn points. Enemies will drop them, but they tend to spawn a lot or not at all. This becomes an issue because…

- Enemies scale aggressively to your level, to the point that it seems that their attacks just do set percentages of your life no matter what. This becomes an issue in the second map, where three factions are fighting each other, because they prioritize your death over fighting each other, and they can shred you easily. This is an issue because…

- Leveling up offers no real benefit to the player. You can never find loot that is a higher level than you are (like in Destiny or Borderlands), and since the enemies scale to your level, you basically need to switch weapons as you level up because your weapons have become weaker. You also earn a single skill point per level up, but the skills you can unlock are rather uninspiring and some of them have the gall to cost two points.

- The weapon loots are generally uninteresting, as you will mostly find weapons that have different damage numbers based on their rarity with maybe one or two added perks (like “move faster while aiming”). I would imagine that a lot of players will never use the burst assault rifles, for instance. This also ties into the next issue…

- You can equip three weapons, which feels restrictive only because of the game’s mechanics with dealing with vampires. Vampires can only be killed by a stake (which is a melee attack launched from a weapon with a stake bayonet, which are shotguns and assault rifles OR a stake launcher shot) or by being petrified by UV light and shattered. In other words, if you’re not using a UV light in one of your weapon slots along with a shotgun or an assault rifle, you’re basically playing incorrectly.

I will be very interested to read a post-mortem on this game’s development, because a lot of these choices feel like rushed compromises. I don’t even think that Arkane was forced to make this game by Bethesda or Microsoft, which makes the decisions more puzzling as they seem like they were made by people who weren’t passionate about the game they were making.

Now, after all that negativity, I do want to highlight that this game isn’t entirely a wash. I think the setting is really interesting for a video game, even if it is a Stephen King pastiche. The way the survivor community in the first map is set up worked for me; much like the hideout in Dishonored 1, you get a sense that you are a cog in their plans to save Redfall, although the survivors are far more altruistic and well-intentioned than the conspirators in Dishonored 1. It is a lesser work by Arkane, yes, but it is a lesser work by some of the best world-builders out there.

I’m probably the most optimistic about this game’s future of anyone, but I think, much like the characters of Redfall, that there’s something worth saving here. I hope they figure out the right solutions and are able to do so.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

When Redfall was announced it looked like it was Left 4 Dead and it didn't really grab my attention much. But as time passed it was revealed that the game wasn't that at all and was rather a multiplayer open world co-op shooter action rpg immersive sim and I think that puzzled everyone. But it's from Arkane Austin and they had done Prey, so hey it's possible that it was going to work. As we were getting closer and closer to release I was getting more excited to play the game, really thinking it was going to be an amazing game. And yeah... it's perhaps not.

While 5-6 years in development, the game does feel undercooked. I'm not just talking about performance and bugs (the 30 FPS at launch is the least of its worries actually), it's just that so many systems are underdeveloped. During my first few hours I was having fun as the movement and the shooting is really good, this is pretty much the things that is done well the most here. It's what holds the game down and makes it an enjoyable experience. However there is nothing that Redfall is the best at. It's trying to be Borderlands, but Borderlands is better. It's trying to be Fallout, but Fallout is better. Even Ubisoft is able to knock out better with its open worlds. It's trying to be have "Prey" elements with multiple ways to clear an area but it's really used at the lowest level possible. The story is whatever. The skill tree is unimaginative and doesn't allow for much different builds and flexibility. Even the skills from the characters have such long cooldowns that it doesn't add much to the combat, it's pretty much all about your guns. I didn't try the multiplayer co-op, but it's so weird to have that in a single player story game where you cannot replay any of the missions.

The game wanted to be everything at once. There's lockpicking and hacking for whatever reason, but they are barely used all game and only to find some loot and perhaps open a door here and there to break in from somewhere instead of the front door (this is about where the Prey elements end). The currency system is not great, you can purchase bad weapons or refill your ammo and health kits... if you die you lose like 10% of your wealth, and you will die a shit ton of times. But even if you are rich, there's pretty much jackshit to buy and the good weapons have to be found in random crates with some luck required. The equipment system is barebones too, just guns, a vampire blood thing that boosts your health and some vampire god power that you get later in the game (very minimal effect actually). There's not much strategy at what you are equipping, just keep the gun with the highest damage. There's a variety of 6-7 guns only and all you get is higher-levelled versions of them. You can only equip 3 at a time, and there are some parts of the game where I wish I had a few more slots as the Stake Launcher and Sniper are situational but they are always unequipped when you need it (and this is always online, so no pausing to fix that).

It's not that Redfall is horrible, but it's more like how the game overpromised so much and the ambition was through the roof, and most of the features are undercooked. The graphics, environments, shooting and movements are pretty good and that makes it a decent experience, but everything else on top is just fluff that didn't need to be there or should have put more work into it. Borderlands 3 perhaps had the most annoying story, but at least it was able to execute what is was doing very well. There's also no post-campaign end game here (well you can raise the difficulty, but that's about it), so even if you are teaming up with friends you won't have anything crazy like Destiny raids to do when you are fully geared up. I really wanted to like this better, I believed in the game but that's what mostly Microsoft overselling the game when it perhaps just needed a quieter launch and it wouldn't have all this controversy. It's a shame that it takes 5-6 years to release a game from a studio now, so much work into the graphics that these little ideas and risk-taking games are going to cost so much resources to pull out and a failure is just the worst that can happen to a big time studio. Not that Prey was carrying Xbox back then, but the lack of 1st party exclusives for 2023 kinda pushed Redfall into the limelight when it shouldn't have. Arkane (especially the Austin studio) will have a lot to prove on their next projects... Bethesda is a powerhouse, but not every game is a hit, and this is one of their weaker titles.