Redfall (2023)

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.

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.