It has been a rough week for the folks at Arkane with their recent release of Redfall, a vampire open-world game that has a setup that would make John Carpenter smile. The game is being hailed as something that fell short of expectations, even going as far as drawing ire from Xbox head of everything Phil Spencer. And, to be quite frank, none of what is being said or felt is entirely wrong.
While Redfall has this great groundwork laid down to create an uneasy, claustrophobic atmosphere of fear, the payoff of vampire chaos, expected jump scares, and involved gameplay are at best all over the place. And I’m pulling my review punches in that sentence.
On that note, sit back and relax. Let me take you through the journey that is Redfall.
The strongest part of the game
Probably the only reason people are holding onto hope with Redfall is the story. This is the strongest element of the entire package. The story sets up the player in a port area called Redfall, where mysterious waves have trapped its residents from leaving the area and have also welcomed blood-sucking vampires to pick everyone off as wolves would to a flock of sheep. The entire reason why vampires have come to the area has to do with a determined doctor trying to find a cure for a ‘reason’ and unexpectedly creating a disease that results in a vampire population.
I’m tiptoeing around the whole story because there is far more to it, and some details will give away the whole kit and kaboodle. The story is the strongest part of Redfall’s gameplay, as you’re constantly feeling a sense of being trapped and being hunted. As stated before, this is a narrative that would even please the likes of John Carpenter. There’s so much fear and unknown built into the slow unraveling of the world, especially when you’re told that humans lure other humans to the vampires to please them, having given up all hope of rescuing, it all combines to create a narrative that is sad and terrifying. You’ll travel through the game with all this fear, hopelessness, and terror the entire time. Even when the gameplay fails, the story does its best to make you forget there are issues.
Sadly, the story can only do so much before those issues start to rear their ugly head. If you’re looking to get pulled into the thick ambiance of hopelessness, then the story at a very basic level does this to you. That’s enough to get your attention and keep it.
Needs improvement
At ground level, Redfall knows what it wants to be. It wants to be an open-world game that you can play alone or with friends. It wants to have elements of Dishonored (jumping around, sneaking) and Fallout (guns, side quests, and explorable areas) to make it big and enticing for years to come. It establishes these hopes and dreams at the beginning when your character breaks free from their ship and begins their plight to unravel the mysteries surrounding the town’s recent occurrences. It shows you that there are weapons to be had, different vampire types to kill, and a couple of human groups that you will constantly run into. All of this is beautifully introduced within the first 15 minutes of the game. All these intentions and hopes about what the game could be moving forward are in plain sight. This is the most focused the game gets throughout the entire experience.
Once you find your way to the fire station home base, then the game starts to show its confusing cards. You’re introduced to a slew of survivors in the game. From a priest named Eva to a pregnant woman and her boyfriend who are just simply trying to wait out the disaster. After a long introduction to all the players in the story, your character must go and seek out quests. The main quest is simply to seek, search, collect, and sometimes destroy. Ranging from exploring a cemetery to trying to shut down a radio station and luring people to it. There are plenty of good quests that make the game fascinating and somewhat engaging. Most of what you experience on the main quests, though, can get you a little lost at times.
There were multiple pieces to the main quest where I understood where I should be exploring but was given little to no insight into what I should be searching for and where. For example, later in the game, I was tasked to explore a mansion and unravel a mystery that was a major turning point in the game. For most of the game, I had just been opening doors, pointing and shooting, and collecting objects for people back at the fire station (Eva can’t live without her whiskey – sus). For this mission, I had to find three dolls from a dead child, put those dolls inside a dollhouse, and then transport myself within the dollhouse…which is just a replica of the house I was previously in. Sounds fun, right? I get what they were shooting for, but it didn’t quite hit the mark.
The mission was filled to the brim with vampires. It was also void of any real substantial clues of how to find these said dolls. There were three vague clues, but I had just been introduced to the mansion, so knowing it (especially without a map) made things irritatingly difficult to navigate the mission. Once I got the drift of the mission, found the three dolls, and transported myself into the small dollhouse, all I was doing was finding things called Sins, killing them, and watching a story. There wasn’t anything special about the moment, even though it was supposedly a huge reveal to the story, and not a very impactful one, and all that effort meant that I was on to the next piece of the overall pie. While this is typical of most narratives when it comes to story progression (breadcrumbs to bread), it just was a bland payoff with more solving puzzles I was unprepared for up to this point. There were quite a few quests like this in the main story that felt like they could have had a bigger payoff than they provided. A word to describe the missions is ‘bland’. That’s weird considering how impactful and dramatic the groundwork the game contained underneath to kickstart the adventure. The game seemed like it deserved more than what was given.
And while I would love to say that was all the hiccups and road bumps I ran into, it sadly wasn’t. There were more misses than hits.
Encounters
When a game is struggling with mission content that is compelling to keep the player engaged, it’s usually supported by encounters out in the world that help sharpen your skills for bigger fights. It’s a balance where the spaces between missions mean you’re killing enemies to fill the void. Much like Fallout, where the encounters are random yet plentiful, Redfall wants to throw enemies your way in droves, as there is plenty of space to do so in the game but simply forgets it needs to do so. You will find yourself looking for trouble in the game in 2-4 minute empty spurts. The town is super empty. Even when you do find enemies, they’re easy to dispose of and you’re back searching for more action. You should never have to search for action in a game like this. There should be an overabundance of action thrown at you, especially if things are going bump in the night trying to search for their next food source. Unlike Fallout, the game here is finite with its space because of the story where waves block your exit. There should be no elbow room for your character to work with because enemies should be hunting you the hell down. All the time. Even when there is sunlight. Get those daywalkers going. Sadly, the encounters in Redfall are just unbalanced and too spaced out to keep that horror show going. It’s weird because you can see the environments are built for this scary shit to happen. It just doesn’t happen often enough. I don’t think I have ever seen an open-world game do that to its player. It’s so odd.
Equally, as baffling is how many enemy types you encounter in the game. For the first six to seven hours of gameplay, I encountered a lot of repeating enemies. You run into pro-vampire people, a militia trying to kill both vampires and their supporters, and then just vampires. The latter comes in a small variety, mostly just plain vampires with different skins but the same action. There are a few major vampires that are a pain in the caboose, such is the case of the Rook, who is a brute vampire that is hard to stop. There is also a syphering vampire that can suck out massive amounts of blood at one time but these suckers (pun intended) come at you in drips rather than waves. You will find vampires repeating quite a bit and you’ll sometimes wonder whether there is a true boss out there somewhere waiting for you. The answer is yes, but it’s deep into the story. You’ll find those boss moments, but just not often enough.
Artificial Intelligence
Don’t worry, no ChatGPT is going to show up here. Rather, the AI I’m referring to in that subheading is about the smarts of our enemies. And they might as well use ChatGPT to help them fight. It might help. One of the worst aspects of Redfall is how enemies react to you and gunfire. There was a comedic moment in the game where pro-vamps were guarding a radio station. There were a ton of them. I shot one at the doorway with a sniper rifle in one shot. He went down like a bag of dirt. His friend decided to pop on by afterward, even standing right by his fallen friend’s body, not reacting at all, and I popped him as well. Then his friend’s friend decided to come on out to check on things, he didn’t react to the bodies, so I popped him as well. Seven dead enemies later in the same vicinity and I concluded these are the dumbest enemies I have seen in a modern game. I have played a shit ton of Call of Duty, too! And the AI didn’t just falter with these goobers. Nah, the vampires soon followed.
The vampire AI was equally as comedic as it was frustrating to watch. I had invaded a vampire nest (will get to this in the mission section) and had quickly died by the hands/fangs of these baddies. I died, the game re-loaded me into the nest, and I was put randomly in a building with a jail cell-like door. Outside of that door? Those nasty vampires were snoozing, probably dreaming of elevator scenes. Knowing that I could kill vamps, die, and return with a lower number of enemies, I kept the door closed and fired through the bars. Each shot hit a vampire. The vampires were awake at that point but very confused by the door. So confused that they didn’t understand how to open it. So, I kept firing at them, opened the door to stake them (you must do that every time to finish off a vamp), and retreated into the cell door place and closed the door. They did nothing to open that door. They simply stopped moving. I then washed, rinsed, and repeated the same method until they were gone. I used this technique anytime there was a cell-like door. Every single time, it worked like a charm. It was the easiest way to confuse the enemies and pull off an unbelievable David vs. Goliath-like fight.
That is bad AI. That must be unfinished AI. I’ve never seen AI do this in a game before. It was outrageous and advantageous. Anyway, there were other AI moments in the game where the enemy simply became confused and stopped moving, as was the case with a few mid-tier vamps who didn’t know how to leave a room, so they stayed still long enough to die. If there is any part of this game that feels unfinished, this is certainly the biggest.
Too Many Weapons
In every single survival horror game ever made in the history of survival horror games, guns, and ammo are always in short supply. Ask any Resident Evil fan how that feels. It adds tension, suspense, horror, and uneasiness to the entire experience. It’s as wonderful as it is terrible. And when ammo and guns aren’t in short supply, whoa boy, watch out because some shit is about to go down.
Well, that isn’t the case with Redfall.
For a brief moment at the beginning of the game, you collect weapons from dead people and random spots. Those weapons help you struggle through unlocking the fire station home base. It sets up the possibility that you’re going to go through this constant struggle to find weapons to kill vampires and whoever is lying out there in the vampire ether. Once you get that home base established, well, you better carry a giant backpack because you’re going to be loaded. By the first two hours of the game, I had more weapons than I knew what to do with. I had to dispose of weapons just to make room for more weapons. It was a constant juggle that was akin to Ubisoft’s The Division 2. Tons of color-coded weapons that had different stats on them, which didn’t matter a lot because the enemies were easy to kill. There wasn’t a moment in the game where I felt like I would ever be in danger during an encounter because I was constantly filled to the brim with weapons and ammo.
Having that much firepower at your disposal is cool in this type of game, even if it is unheard of in the genre, but at the same time oddly awful. To make it more entertaining, Arkane also included some creative weapons like a UV gun that just petrifies the enemy (literally) and weapons with glow-y parts that remind you of something you might find in Sea of Thieves (no crying chest included). While it was fun as hell to be this rich with firepower, it also took away some semblance of desperation that generally goes with this genre. Struggling to survive is a good chunk of any survival horror game. There was no struggle here. Again, it was fun, but it was odd. It never let up. It simply got better as the game progressed, which is not a good thing. The fact that the game would allow you to keep everything when you died and put you back in a safer place to try again just added to the enjoyment but not in a good way. You’re playing an action game with this much firepower and not a survival horror. It hurts the horror because you don’t need to worry about surviving.
Missions
What’s good about a bevy of weapons if you can’t use them on anything? The missions in the game allow you to find the best combination of weaponry. You only get a few slots for weapons to work with, so you need some missions to try this all out.
There are two kinds of missions – main quest and side quest. The latter of the bunch is a mixed bag of nuts, though it does teeter on the side of creativity from time to time, while also falling flat on its face other times. The creative part is interesting. The first big side mission I accepted was going to get popcorn machine parts to fix a machine back at the fire station. While the mission was a snatch and grab, having the machine exist in the basement of a theater that didn’t have power was just cool as hell. There was a tremendous amount of ambiance to the mission and the creepy factor was turned up to 11 when you had to fight a mini-boss before retrieving the parts. While that mini-boss did somehow get stuck in the room she was in, it was nonetheless entertaining.
And then there are rescue missions. There was a mission where I was sent out to find a man’s brother. When I got to the location where he was last seen, he was stuck in a barrel. I accidentally set off an explosion that killed him, then I killed other enemies. Once everyone was dead, and a large amount of guilt was acquired, I headed back to the fire station to inform his brother that I did break off a family tree branch by accident. His brother’s response is, “That’s okay. Everyone has lost someone.” (paraphrasing). My friend, I just murdered your brother by accident. You were concerned enough to ask me to retrieve him, but you were okay enough to forgive me instantly? It was a weird bit of writing that ended up being bland. You will find an equal number of throwaways like this to pass the time when compared to meaningful and engaging side quests.
Beyond just side quests and main quests, the game does throw other things your way. A big one is clearing out vampire nests. The nests are underground caverns filled with broken buildings and such, and a large number of vampires have made the underground rubble their home. In the middle of these small towns, there is a literal beating heart. Your main goal is to dispose of the vampires residing in these areas and take down the beating heart. Once you do the latter, you then must race out of the nests in a given amount of time before they fully collapse. The idea here is neat, it changes things up from regular missions, but it also falls short in variety as some nests look remarkably like one another. For example, there was a nest with a Ferris wheel in the middle of the town. After defeating the nest, I went right to another…with a Ferris wheel in the middle of the town. Call me crazy, but it felt like it was the same map with just minor adjustments. Or vampires just love Ferris wheels. It could be the latter, but it felt dialed in. Regardless, it changed the gameplay and gave a short stint of thrilling excitement to the game. It was like a tiny injection of fun when the game needed it. And that time clock thing to get out of the nest? Well, I’m positive that has no barring on completing the nest’s destruction, as I didn’t once get out in time. It does create some drama, though, which is a fun plus to the gameplay. It makes it feel like there is something at stake (pun intended) besides the vamps.
Overall, there are good main missions and somewhere in the middle side quests. The little detours here and there do help break up some of the missions that may not seem meaningful. Regardless, nothing is over-the-top and a must-see, but the content at least keeps rolling with these. The missions do help push things along in the game and give motivation, as well as engagement at times to the player.
Controls and backend
The controls in the game were fine, even if they felt a bit too loosey-goosey when it came to aiming and executing. If I had to complain about anything control related, it was the decision to make the down-directional pad the med kit function. In most games that assign medical assistance to the d-pad, hitting it quickly once means that you have expressed your intention to heal your character. And it quickly does just that (see Horizon Zero Dawn for any details). In Redfall, you must hold the down d-pad and wait for it to essentially charge up the idea of healing your character and then it does so..partially. You might be thinking, what’s the big fucking deal with that? Well, get chased by multiple vampires who can warp-jump to your location while you’re trying to run and shoot and you’ll find out quickly that it doesn’t work well to heal your character. You don’t have that good of finger function to pull that off. Unless you’re an expert builder on Fortnite. Spoiler alert: I AM NOT THAT FORTNITE GUY.
Anyway, this lack of functionality and intuitive intention to heal caused me a heavy amount of frustration, as well as accepting my multiple deaths while doing the absolute best that I could. The ability to reanimate in a safe space and try again almost instantly gave me the confidence to accept such a death because of the lack of finger fortitude to heal and do the other ten things at the same time (not ten, but you get the picture). This was my biggest complaint about controls. It just didn’t feel right when compared to the expected functionality of everything else related to the control scheme.
Beyond controls in the game, the skills tree had a lot going on. You can upgrade your raven (still unsure of what that does – I think he is a scout – his dialogue is hilarious), you can upgrade your ghostly rifle (odd, but fun – big payoff powerup), health, melee, unlock skills (very EOS), and a various number of things to build upon your character. The backend is kind of nice and cool, and it’s impactful when you’re trying to get better at the game.
Related, you must earn skill points to upgrade these areas (duh, right?) and those are acquired through leveling up your character as you progress. The problem is that the leveling-up part has this huge arch upwards early in the game, which makes upgrading these skills slow and taxing at times. The game is trying to push you towards hunting more enemies and completing more quests to acquire those points, but both are finite in abundance, especially the former. Hunting down enemies in large open spaces is not optimal when it comes to speeding up skill point acquisition. It’s a complete uphill climb on a snow-ridden side of the skill points mountain that is riddled with frustration and slow progression. This must change in an update. Of course, it all gets corrected if you have more enemies or more meaningful and rewarding missions. Until then, there’s just a tough climb upward.
For the most part, the controls work, as does the backend. The controls are a bit quirky in some areas, especially healing, but they don’t get in the way of the gameplay. The sluggish acquisition of skill points to use on an extensive skills tree needs to be balanced a bit more. It’s drudgery at its finest.
Overall, the gameplay here is a mixed bag of nuts. Some of the pieces and parts work well when they get going, while others need improvement and updating badly. There should never be a gap in gameplay action in an open-world title like what happens in Redfall. You shouldn’t have constant action, but if you’re trying to create an atmosphere of horror and uncertainty in a restricted environment then bring the scares in a more consistent pace. And bring all of that with improved AI with the enemies. I want smart enemies who can recognize their fallen comrades and panic, which makes my character panic, then it’s just pure panic at the disco with gunfire.
Visually gorgeous most of the time
While the game style going on here is pure Arkane, where there is a bit of panache and simplicity to the character models, kind of like Dishonored, the full power of the Xbox Series X is on display at times with Redfall. The shadows and lighting are amazingly done, as is the draw distance. You will certainly find a bevy of pop-ups as you progress, but the style is ever-present and beautiful. The visuals are fun, scary close-up, especially when you stake a vamp, and very representative of the world that Arkane was trying to create. It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect enough. This is a feather in the cap of a game that is lacking a lot of feathers right now.
We are 4,000 plus words into this review, so let’s wrap this up. You have things to do.
Conclusion
To say that Redfall needs major work to fix some balancing issues would be a bit of an understatement. For a game that had so much hype during its development and was supposed to be the first big game of 2023 for the Xbox family that wasn’t called Halo or Forza, it has fallen short in its delivery. There are quite a few issues with Redfall, lots of unbalance in gameplay, and plenty to correct before it can be considered a permanent and worthwhile IP.
