Redfall (2023)

Since getting an Xbox Series X last year, I have been curious about Redfall as I love Bethesda FPS games that lean towards the immersive sim genre. I don't know if this is that or not, but as a casual gamer who plays on the easier levels to enjoy the story and not get stressed over the various challenges, this game was exactly the kind of game I like. I played since the last patch and didn't do multiplayer so perhaps that is why I didn't have any negatives.

First I tried Jacob which was okay but after doing a handful of missions I started over with Dev and greatly preferred his powers. This game was really fun, it was like a spooky mystery. Sure it was not complicated or super deep, but just a fun romp in that world unraveling the mystery of what was behind it all. I will say the developers could have done more to flesh some things out but I just chock it up as a short game that had development issues but that they addressed most of it in the final patch.

If you want a fun shooter that you get cool powers, has a decent simple story, is fun on the easy levels, and has a nice immersive environment and atmosphere, give it a shot, you may find you like it.

I played a bit of Redfall, and it's quite an interesting beast.

Am I gonna be the contrarian and say it's a misunderstood masterpiece? No. Something with this game is just... Wrong. In a AAA way. Characters don't feel right for the world they're supposed to inhabit... Kinda like in Terminator Resistance where the game's set in LA and nobody had a Californian accent. (That one was funny when the obviously-British actors sometimes let the wrong accent slip). This one just has a hodgepodge of people and dialects from all over America, and it doesn't feel cohesive. The human character models look stupid too, with these huge hands and feet in a world that otherwise looks pretty normal. The soundtrack also leans hard into this sort of "spooky hip-hop" sount font, and that could be really cool... If the style and aesthetic of the game was there to match. But they're going for this sort of intersection of vapourwave neon and small town New England vibe, and it doesn't pair well.

BUT. I think it would be a ton of fun as a co-op PVE shooter. The mechanics are surprisingly tight, and I was actually having... Fun? Like I was told this game was unmitigated trash, and it certainly isn't. The character I chose, Devinder, is like this smart-ass British cryptid hunter internet personality. That premise for a protagonist is excellent! I would play a whole game with this guy as the lead. Throw him into a horror scenario when he's used to peddling bullshit shock content, and set him up as someone who learns to be a necessary hero using improved ghost hunting tools, that could be an excellent game!

Playing solo as an open-world, mission-based shooter? I think it does enough well to be thoroughly mid. And they have very obviously cheaped out on the narrative presentation to facilitate easier co-op play. At times though, I can see through the cracks and see the game Arkane Austin wanted to make here. And I wish they'd been able to make it.

But this is not one of the worst games of 2023. It's just not worth $90CDN. I paid $13, and I think it's a great option at that price. Grab a couple of cheap copies (or just play it on Game Pass), grab a friend, and go shoot some vampires.

It's clear that this was an assignment for the devs, not a passion project. The game is void of any intrigue, style, emotional depth, compelling gameplay, etc. It's nice that it has a functional multi-player and the weapons and abilities are fine enough, but the game itself on a very basic level is not particularly entertaining. I really really loved Deathloop. It was my first taste of Arkane. Then I loved Prey. Then I liked Dishonored. I've been eagerly awaiting Redfall, and like most of the gaming community, I feel a little duped.

If devs were able to fix all the bugs and optimize the enemies this could be a decent f2p online coop looter shooter. But without a major overhaul of the story, cutscenes, characters, and missions, I don't see Redfall ever becoming the AAA title it was marketed to be.

When Redfall was released on May 2 I caught a glimpse of the leaked gameplay that came out before the masses could get their hands on it. It was a short clip of someone fighting some vampires. Later in the afternoon, my friends installed the game, played for literally 20 minutes and uninstalled the game saying you should not play Redfall. We all know how the reviews came in, but I still wanted to give it a try.

Incase you didn't know, Redfall is a play on Farcry, and a looter/shooter with supernatural vampires. Open world, get quests from people in hubs, go fight vampires, get better loot, level up, and keep going. Initial criticism of the game included it was boring. The gameplay loop sucks. The loot sucks. The open world is dead etc. It had me thinking, did anyone actually expect a re-invented wheel here? Ubisoft has been pumping out the same shit for years and people eat it up. This format is not so far removed from Fallout or Skyrim, beloved series by millions of people. I couldn't wrap my head around it.

So I play Redfall. In fact, I put in close to 7 hours. At first it was the obvious defects that got me. Textures didn't render properly, the capped 30 FPS, and the absolutely fucking horrendous human AI, like oh my god, its so damn bad. But I didn't see what everyone else hated at first. The vampire AI isn't great either, but it's not as simplistic as everyone makes it out to be. Especially fighting two at once, you start to get a challenge on your hands.

There was also a lot of complaints about the open world, and the game looking poor. The map is small. It doesn't need to be, nor should it be chalked full of stuff in every, single, nook and cranny. And the art style? I feel like people are confusing graphical content and actual art style. The game looks pretty great, WHEN THE TEXTURES ACTUALLY LOAD and render properly. The gunplay was fine and honestly the gameplay loop isn't horrible either. Its a bunch of strung together fetch quests, and gathering loot, but that doesn't make it bad. Like I said, Redfall didn't re-invent the wheel, but no one should of expected it to.

So with this all sounding pretty good, even in my own head, I couldn't understand the hate. Was it the best game? Did it revolutionize anything? No, but it was still fine. And that's the problem, it was fine. Look, Redfall was sold (maybe?) as a AAA game title, but it was never supposed to be GOTY material. I looked at a lot of reviews, lots of negative commentary, and just could not mentally understand why people hate it. But then you roll it all up. Set aside the generic gameplay, I can get past that. But the deeper I got into the reviews, I couldn't justify playing any more.

• The 30 FPS
• The bad texture loading, sometimes taking minutes to come into focus
• The horrible human AI
• The loot is neutered by enemy scaling. A generic weapon found later in the game might be stronger then an epic earlier on. Fine, not a huge deal. But all enemies scale to your level. The incentive is just more DPS, but with whatever tier of weapon. There is no good thought put in to it.
• I have been told no matchmaking. That's right, 4 player co-op, but bring your friends because you can't match with people. I played solo.
• Weak gameplay loop. And I mean this as there is four characters to play as. You beat the game and there is a new game +, but really I can't see a reason you would ever do it. Nothing about Redfall grabs you and says "now do it again!"
• $90 price tag (in CAD). I played it on Gamepass, so it was fine. Full price, no damn way.

Maybe the most important point, if you take this all in context, but the sad realization that there is no way to fix this game. Sure, it might get patched and updated, but without rebuilding the entire thing, there is no NMS or Cyberpunk success story here. The game was released unfinished, and honestly poorly thought out. Even if it was finished with performance, AI and textures 100% sorted, the game would leave you feeling like "is that it?"

I don't give up on games very easily, and also don't rely on others to form opinions for me. I couldn't carry on with Redfall though. Not knowing that I was just doing it for the sake of saying I did. Don't buy it, don't play it. This game isn't going to get saved. It's going to quietly die on the vine.

Played on Xbox Series X.

Quick summary

Given their stellar track record I had high hopes for Arkane's Redfall. I hope this early failure is the fuel creatives at Arkane need to improve their game. I hope Microsoft is serious about their plans to support the game long term. If so, this game could be great.

Frustration: Design that didn't quite get there

Immersive sim and looter sim in a blender is an intriguing mash up but if this is the result of hours of designers iterating on how they best fit together it feels like a couple that decides to do things at the carnival separately rather than work together to win a giant stuffed toy.

I played co-op with some friends and we typically chat over any exposition crammed into a game and just hang out - you know the drill. We also tend to run and gun and loot and shoot - think games like Back 4 Blood or Vermintide. Redfall is at the same time trying to be an immersive sim where you can tackle objectives in the way you prefer, taking time to bask in the scenery and take in some lore sprinkled around in various forms. That way of playing seems diametrically opposed to the running and gunning of a looter shooter and I felt completely at odds trying to play it the way those imsim parts begged me to. It put in me in a crummy mood trying to interact with those aspects while also wanting to keep up with the group and help in a firefight.

Which brings me to another issue - the powers. Maybe my group needs to bump up the difficulty, but at normal none of us were using our powers. We didn't need to. We completely forgot they existed most of the time. Perhaps we would have been pressed into a need to use them if the combat encounters were more frequent or had some challenge beyond waiting for an enemy to charge at you like you're Serious Sam in the middle of a desert.

Frustration: Bugs and Crashes

While a video game as a product isn't as important to an individual as a replacement heart, you can draw some similarities (stick with me on this one). I think we can all agree a replacement heart needs to work 100 out of 100 times. While we wouldn't expect a game to never have a bug or crash, I'm really tired of games launching in such a sorry state. I have already had two instances where my game crashed right before our team completed a quest, leaving me not being rewarded for my part in the adventure and not having that progress saved.

Frustration: map and story progress tied to another player

Why is my story and exploration progress tied to another individual? This decision is so unusual that there is likely a really good reason for it, but it's impact is that it leaves me not wanting to play the game alone or explore other characters because I have to complete the story all over again. I would rather I be at the progress I am with my group, on an account level, and be given the ability to replay missions for diminished or different rewards.

In Conclusion

Ultimately I commend Arkane for taking a risk and experimenting by mashing together two genres in a way I haven't seen before. I am hopeful this game will get there with some love and attention, I'm just tired of games being launched too early - both from a design and stability perspective.

I bought a Series S last year. I bought it specifically to play games that I knew were never coming out for the Nintendo Switch, like Elden Ring. I've had a lot of good experiences with my Series S. However, I'm now wondering if I maybe should have gone with a PS5 instead. It seems that exclusive games are not a focus anymore for Microsoft. That's fine, but if that's the case, then I'd rather get a console like a PlayStation 5, that does have more exclusive games to fill the gaps that need filling by just owning a Switch. I also wonder if Game Pass might not be as good as I once thought. The so many games, so little time syndrome becomes a thing for me, where I see all these games on it, and I know I just don't have the time to play them all. So instead, it's a lot of bouncing around and not investing a ton of time into any particular game. I noticed how the games where I spent money seemed to get my focus, and other games from Game Pass likely aren't getting a fair shake.

Enter Redfall. This game is one of the few exclusives for Xbox, but it started development by Bethesda as a game for both PlayStation and Xbox. It was when Microsoft bought them that the PlayStation version was dropped. But honestly, you aren't missing much. It's yet another zombie first person multiplayer shooter. There is nothing in this game that is unique, nothing that is a console seller.

Microsoft keeps telling us to wait for Starfall. They better hope that Starfall is their version of Breath of the Wild, Odyseey, Last of Us or Spiderman, because of it's not, this company might want to completely rethink their place in the console space.

So yeah, it is extremely mediocre. The world is very empty and the bad guys so boring and generic. The vampires behave like zombies, and just rush at in a very stupid manner. You have to stake them for the final kill but they are already up in your face so it is just a forced glory kill (ala Doom). Entertaining for the first couple times but it gets old.

I liked the loot shooting well enough but it just felt boring.

This is without a doubt the biggest disappointment of the year for me. I love co-op games, especially co-op shooters, I love spooky cartoony vibes, and while I'm not an Arkane fan and haven't actually finished ANY of their games my co-op partner loves them, I keep meaning to play them all, and I know they are generally well liked so I assumed their track record would ensure something at least good. APPARENTLY NOT.

I have a 4080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D, and yet the game performs like I'm trying to run it on a netbook from 2008. Its not REALLY a framerate problem (although it does dip into the 50s and 60s for me at times), but more erratic frametimes, stuttery bullshit, and visually insane streaming in of assets. Shit in the distance will just flicker in and out of existence, or the textures on buildings will turn solid black. All this despite looking like it actually in fact belongs in 2008. I absolutely ADORE the art direction, but on a technical level these are some of the worst graphics I've seen in a VERY VERY long time. I feel like a whole essay could be done on the lighting, because it's absolutely disgusting to look at. It's so bad it makes you actually notice and appreciate the importance of lighting in other games.

On top of all that, which are things that at least COULD be fixed, there are two things which I know WON'T be. One is the general quality of the animations. Everything feels janky and jilted. There's no fluidity to any of the animation work in this game, it has about the quality of an MMO from the mid 2000s. The other problem is the shooting is either bad at best or entirely unplayable depending on if you're aiming down sights or not. I literally just stopped aiming my guns because it felt SO BAD. This is one of the worst feeling shooters I've ever played. It FEELS like it's NOT a shooter, if that makes sense. Like it's some weird MMO that has a shooting mode in it, like Star Trek online. Your brain just doesn't want to accept that a game studio in 2023 set out to make a shooter, one of the most common and well understood genres as far as how to make them feel decent to play, and came out with THIS. HOW?! You have gotta be a special level of incompetent to make a shooter that feels THIS bad to play in 2023. You picked the easiest dish to make and somehow still fucked it up. Get the hell out of the kitchen and think about what you've done.

Redfall's performance is by far the scariest thing lurking in Massachusetts. For a game that is technically unimpressive, ugly, and prone to popping in enemies right on top of you; it sure does eat CPU resources. I know an i7-9700k is four generations old at this point, but I still don't feel like my framerate should be halved with ridiculous stutter every time combat starts.

Exploration is enjoyable enough, but the vampires are overused (I expected to mainly be fighting cultists with vampires as minibosses, not slaying one every two minutes), visually uninteresting, and have the most annoying movement pattern. I know you can't give them guns, but letting them warp and leap all over the place is not an effective way to create tension, and the game does a terrible job of telegraphing whether or not you're in the vampire's melee attack radius. Combat is weightless, Layla's powers are uninteresting and ineffective. There's enough interesting going on that I don't completely hate it, but wow is this a lackluster release - and not a AAA game in any real sense, or a next gen game in any real sense for that matter. It feels like a $40 AA title.

I hope things improve post-launch, but I'm not really expecting much. If Microsoft weren't willing to invest in continued development of a project that clearly needed more time, they almost certainly aren't going to spend a significant chunk of change overhauling a game which has already bombed and has a dire reputation.

Having played tons of zombie apocalypse games I love that this game is not just doing the same thing thematically. The vampire and supernatural world is interesting, I like the monsters’ look, and the crazy way the water has been drained from the lake and streams makes for some neat environmental effects.

That being said most of the enemies are as dumb and uninteresting as zombies, which is fairly disappointing. All of them just seem to run at me despite when they have guns and can hit me from far away. The finishing move (stake through the heart) is fun and flashy but actually a little annoying as not all guns have stakes on the end. They should have just made this a melee attack.

Finally, this game is giving me major State of Decay 2 vibes and I love that. Your character ventures out from the safe house to find weapons and supplies for the settlement, continually pushing your luck that you can take on (or avoid) one more group of creatures to get just a little bit more loot.