Some people expect reviews to be objective and unbiased, as if the reviewer is little more than a robot programmed to scientifically assess the quality of a game. AI-generated game reviews may be on the horizon, God help us, but in the meantime the best I can do is be honest about my biases as a critic reviewing the woefully underdeveloped Redfall.
I am a massive Arkane Studios fan, and I was not excited about Redfall. When it was revealed, it felt like the last great immersive sim developer, the creators of Prey, my favorite game of all time, were now pivoting to the open world co-op looter shooter genre in an effort to chase a dying trend. I tried to keep an open mind, even as I was dismayed by its rampant bugs and performance problems, which are present and persistent right from the start. After the abysmal launches of The Last of Us Part 1 and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor on PC, I was fed up with games arriving in a broken state before I even saw a single vampire clip through a tree and get stuck running in place while my frame rate chugged along at 12fps. With frame rate dips like that, I would have preferred to play it locked at 30fps on Xbox.
As a reviewer, you have to try and set those things aside. This might not be the game I expected or wanted from Arkane, but I still have to approach Redfall on its own terms. And while bugs and performance issues are a huge bummer, those kinds of things typically get fixed. After all, Prey had a notoriously rough launch too. If you forget about the studio behind Redfall and just look at the game in a vacuum, if you ignore all the broken missions, missing textures, and all the problems that will likely be fixed in time, if you try to look at it through a totally objective lens, you’ll find that at its heart, Redfall is still just a lousy game.
Redfall’s biggest frustration is that it’s full of interesting ideas, but none of them ever materialize into anything unique or interesting. All of its systems feel like stripped down versions of things we’ve seen in other games like Far Cry and Borderlands, without understanding what made said systems work in the first place. Even when it's working properly (which isn’t often), playing Redfall feels like going to a fancy dinner and being served chunks of styrofoam painted to look just like steak and potatoes. Sitting there at the table in your suit and tie, it feels like you’re at a nice restaurant, but what’s in front of you is just a hunk of flavorless plastic.
I could sit here and break down each of Redfall’s shortcomings and pick apart all of its half-baked ideas, so I will. Redfall has terrible mission design. The main story missions will introduce you to each of the Vampire Gods that control the small seaside town of Redfall, Massachusetts, by sending you to dig around in the places they inhabited back when they were human. There you’ll find three enemies called Sin-Eaters, psychic remnants that hold their master’s deepest darkest secrets. Finding all three (a trivial task) will give you an item that unlocks a door to the psychic realm where their boss fight takes place.
Before you can fight the boss, you have to unlock three safe houses by turning on the generator outside, then complete three generic, repetitive safe house missions, then kill three vampire underbosses and collect their skulls, which are like mini-bosses except the fights aren’t hard or unique, then finally open the door and endure a simple three phase boss fight. You do all of these things three times to beat the game, and the process never changes or evolves. Outside of this critical path, optional missions are just basic fetch quests that will send you out into the town to retrieve an object before you immediately fast travel back to your base to collect some cash and XP. I kept waiting for Redfall to evolve, but nothing ever changes.
I’d be more forgiving of the bland missions if the rewards for doing them were worthwhile, but Redfall’s power progression is so flat that I stopped engaging with the skill tree and loot system halfway through. Each of the four characters have their own unique skill trees where they can improve their combat abilities and utility, but the selection is bafflingly low impact. Almost a quarter of the upgrade options are some kind of ammo capacity increase, while the rest are similarly banal incremental upgrades to the character’s special abilities. There’s no variety to the options or ways to build your character that create unique playstyles. Layla can drop a bounce pad that looks like an elevator, and once you upgrade it, it will last longer before it disappears, and bounce enemies away that get near it. If you never spent a single upgrade point, you wouldn’t notice much of a difference by the end.
Cash rewards are similarly useless. The only things you can purchase are health packs, lock picks and hacking tools, and low-rarity weapons that are always worse than the things you find out in the world. All the items you loot and weapons you scrap automatically turn into cash, so the only reason you need lock picks and hacking tools is to get into a place filled with loot, which turns into cash, which you spend on more lock picks and hacking tools. It’s a pointless exercise that never leads to anything more, and once I realized that, I stopped exploring the houses and shops of Redfall altogether. That's a shame, because so much of Arkane's talent for world building and level design comes through in places off the beaten path. There's just not a good enough gameplay incentive to go exploring.
Finding new weapons didn’t matter to me either. I had a nice loadout at the halfway point, and didn’t need or want to replace any of them by the time I finished the game, even though I was almost ten levels higher than my weapons at that point. Chasing higher and higher damage numbers isn’t a strong hook when every weapon feels exactly the same, and the enemies never give you any trouble.
Gunplay isn’t the worst, and I enjoyed the audio and visual feedback you get from landing headshots and staking vampires - even 20 hours in - but the limitations of the AI and the pathetic difficulty scaling makes every combat encounter both trivial and boring after a while. Human enemies stand perfectly still and shoot at you, making them easy targets to pick off with a rifle, while vampires run at you in a straight line. Things are more chaotic in multiplayer, since enemies have multiple targets to focus on, but the AI isn’t capable of putting up any kind of real fight, even on the hardest difficulty. The bad AI is an especially glaring issue on the second map, where turf wars frequently breakout between opposing groups of cultists. Watching bots fail to fight each other because they're all running backwards and getting stuck on curbs really drives home how bad the AI is.
That might be fine if Redfall was all running-and-gunning like Left 4 Dead, but the intention here is to be a lot more tactical. Each character has mobility options that should allow them to take useful vantage points, or find alternate entrances to get the drop on your targets, but there just isn’t any reason to bother. Even the biggest group of enemies is easily dealt with by standing out in the open and shooting them in the head one by one.
The one thing I can say really impressed me about Redfall was the world itself. The premise of technocratic one-percenters taking over a sleepy American town and transforming it in their twisted image is powerful, and I'm impressed by how lived-in Redfall feels. There's an interesting juxtaposition between the authenticity of the town and the imaginative psychic spaces that overlay them that works really well, and I wish this setting and these themes were built into a better game, because they're wasted here. I love a critique of capitalism as much as the next destitute games writer, but there are too many problems in Redfall that overshadow its good qualities.
You can see glimpses of the game Arkane probably wanted Redfall to be, but it just never got there. One of its best ideas is the vampire nests, which appear randomly on the map and grow over time, giving enemies in the surrounding area super strength. When you find the door and go into the nest, you start an instanced, procedurally-generated mission that ends with a timed escape after destroying the heart of the nest. These are obviously supposed to be Redfall’s version of Diablo’s Greater Rifts - a loot run that gives players a mission with endless variety, but in practice it isn’t that at all. There’s only a few unique tile sets so each run feels the same, and there’s no climax or boss fight when you destroy the heart, so it just sort of ends. It’s easy to see what the nests could have become if the studio had more time or budget, but the actual implementation is only half-baked. The entire game gives me that feeling.
Redfall isn’t a total disaster, and there’s fun to be had in slaying vampires, especially with a couple of friends. But to call Redfall a shallow experience would be an understatement. I’m happy to loot and shoot and make my own fun, but there still needs to be something there to pull me through it. Nothing in Redfall, from the loot to the characters to the exploration to the power climb, ever made me want to keep playing, or feel like there was something more to achieve. No amount of bug fixes or updates will be able to improve Redfall’s fundamental gameplay flaws. It’s not just rough around the edges, it’s rutted all the way through.
