Last month, I wrote about Redfall’s bad press and how the game might face an uphill battle to win fans over come launch. As it turns out, host-only progression, inconvenient as it might be, isn’t even close to one of the game’s worst sins. It feels as though Redfall began life as a smaller project, almost like a stop-gap in development in between Dishonored games—like Deathloop’s apparent beginnings. Only with Redfall, it feels like they were told a year out from launch and decided to pad the experience out with anything but a checklist of things to do in the titular town.
Like a lot of Arkane’s stuff, there is actually a pretty wild story on offer with Redfall, if you’re happy to look for it. With the island under the authoritative rule of the vampire gods, the game does a pretty good job of unspooling their histories throughout the game’s rather cheap ‘live storyboard’ cutscenes that bookend most of the main missions.
Admittedly, there’s more of Arkane’s patented world-building present than I had given the game credit for during my hands-on. If anything, it’s the hero characters that don’t really lap up much focus. Though I didn’t play through all of them, Orlando Bloom, I mean Jacob, is loosely tied to Miss Whisper, the god responsible for “gifting” him his magical milky eye. So, I’d expect all of them to have their own forgettable vendettas.
I had originally pegged Redfall as Arkane’s attempt at a Far Cry game. After spending considerable time in it, I think a lot of its nuts and bolts are modelled after Destiny. For the most part it’s roaming an open sandbox and shooting shit up before returning to home base to top up ammo, spin a yarn with the non-playables, and receive the next thing to do. And like Bungie’s live-service marvel, this vampire-slaying shooter has a similarly quick and snappy brand of gunplay that’s very satisfying. All of the heroes have special powers at their disposal however, unlike Destiny where team composition is an enormous focus, there isn’t any meaningful synergy between them. At certain points it feels like the game’s co-op implementation was an afterthought and not part of the planning, to the point where I enjoyed Redfall as a single-player game much more.
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For a game that lazily guns for Destiny’s mantle with the game’s build, the loot system is pretty uninspiring. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the weapons we’re given, they’re hefty and feel tremendous in-hand, I just felt I was constantly having to leave behind my preferred, tricked out guns to keep up with the power grind. I do wish the game had some form of transmog so that I could imbue my barnacle-covered shotty, plucked from hell’s deep, with another’s power.
The game has three mission types in total: main, side, and safe house, which are obviously collected from the various hole-ups about town. Although you could conceivably juggle several at once as there are several points where multiple are available, the game restricts you to holding just one of each at any given time. The sheer amount of backtracking in Redfall that results from this is a pain in the neck, and I think it’s all a mask for what is ultimately a game that’s light on content. Even small design choices like carpeting parts of the map in an evil red smoke that forces diversion en route to an objective feels like a means to keep the player busy and doing anything other than checking the next objective box.
As if a player’s time wasn’t valuable enough, Redfall feels like a ten-hour game masquerading as a twenty-hour one.
I could take or leave the uninspired mission design throughout most of Redfall’s main story arc, which obviously takes place topside in a seemingly lived-in, yet mostly deserted town. I became considerably more intrigued once I explored the game’s admittedly meagre side content, including the vampire nests. These serve as brief dungeons that explore the “psychic realm” and offer up a twisted Frankenstein’s monster full of the island’s seaside aspects which really let the art team flex their collective muscle.
It’s not hard to tell from first impressions that this game is an Arkane special. The art design, despite being failed in part by the game’s performance, is absolutely incredible. There is so much imagery in Redfall that feels iconic, from the enormous waves, suspended by dark magic, acting as a coastal perimeter for the town, to the blotted out sun—a clear call back to the devious works of Monty Burns. Like their past worlds, Dunwall and Blackreef, Redfall is believable as a town that’s been lived in and left in a hurry as a lot of the residential houses, upended by panic and turmoil, can be picked clean. I love everything about the vampires in Redfall, from their mad science origins to their distinct look, I particularly think whoever designed the gods themselves deserves a pat on the back.
Contrary to my original belief that the game’s four gods might occupy the four corners of Redfall, the game is actually split into two maps. The one you start in is Redfall Commons, and you’ll move into Burial Point after dealing with the first of four gods. They treat this mid-game shift as a ‘point of no return’ moment, however, meaning all of the side content within the Commons cannot be returned to once you move on. It’s an odd decision to gate out half of the game’s content when a transitory load, like an island-to-island ferry or cable car, for example, could take you back and forth.
It’s well documented that, at launch, Redfall would be limited to 30fps. That, however, isn’t the worst of it.
While scouring the island for things to do, I was subject to admittedly infrequent hard crashes, plentiful graphical glitches, and horrible plunges in frame rate during fights with particular vampire specials like Shroud, which blankets the world in a dark veil. Pop-in, which wasn’t limited to simple textures, marred part of the experience, too. I lost count of the times a squad of gun-toting adds would simply appear out of thin air and destroy me in seconds, setting me back to the last safehouse I passed so I could walk through minutes of relatively empty map once more. Put simply, Redfall is a frustratingly unoptimised game.
It’s hard to criticise how Redfall runs when hosting a four-stack of slayers. Granted, the map is small, sparsely populated, and the game doesn’t deliver the hottest textures I’ve seen lately, but a solid netcode is something worth crediting. Of course, things like host-only progression, a seeming lack of level scaling, and persistent frustrating ready-up delays do make teaming up a far less appealing prospect. I think Arkane’s inexperience in developing a co-operative experience definitely cuts through with Redfall.
