Redfall Review — An Utterly Toothless Experience
A co-operative, open world, immersive sim experience where you hunt vampires. Made by none other than Arkane, Bethesda’s resident immersive sim experts; an incredibly talented group of people that helped make Dishonored 2, Prey, and Deathloop.
It sounded like the right kind of ambitious step for a studio that, until now, had barely put a foot wrong. Team shooters are very often some of the most fun you can have in video games, and with Arkane’s level design prowess? It could have been remarkable. But then September 2021 rolled around, and Redfall was subject to a series of leaks that showed off character screens and hints at looter shooter mechanics like gun rarity, randomized stats, and character skill trees. After games like Anthem, Marvel’s Avengers, and more, this set off alarm bells.
Now, in May 2023, those bells have rung true. Redfall is bad. Not just “7/10, it’s fine, but it could be better” but instead, bad enough that it’ll probably go down as one of 2023’s biggest misses in the AAA space. Enough has gone wrong with Redfall that I’d probably struggle to write an interesting review that covers all of it, if that’s all that I had to say. From top to bottom I’d consider this one of the most disappointing video games I’ve ever tried versus expectations.
The first warning comes in minute one, when the major introduction to this town of Redfall and its unfortunate inhabitants is told through a set of shifting, very lightly animated shots, instead of fully animated scenes. I’m no stranger to an artful presentation style, being an unabashed lover of games that invest a little more into their vibe, but Redfall?
This is the same game that was advertised with stunningly rendered, character heavy promotional work, full of personality and charm. It set something of an expectation that Xbox’s latest exclusive would reach for the same storytelling confidence that Deathloop managed in 2021.
Sadly, between these colorful but largely dull scenes, the various notes and radio tapes, and the sparse conversations between you and NPCs, the story here seems to largely be summarized as “this happened, deal with it”.
My character not only wasn’t murdered by an important looking vampire (figures), but she also picks up the ability to project a bullet reflecting umbrella, and generate a purple elevator capable of launching myself and teammates in the air. I think I’ve played six or seven hours, and I’m at the halfway point, and none of the above has been mentioned or explained to any degree. Hell, even the overarching goal is still a myth to me. Besides killing vampires — because obviously vampires are bad — there doesn’t seem to be any big grand goal.
At the moment I’m helping people out via a series of fetch quests that usually amount to a five minute jaunt across an eerie town. Then immediately fast travelling back to the hub because, unfortunately, ‘eerie’ in this sense doesn’t mean creepy, or dangerous, it’s simply because Redfall is devoid of enemies and encounters 90% of the time.
In fact, I’d be willing to lay down a delicious cookie and bet that Redfall was originally designed at some sort of PvPvE or battle royale experience. There’s simply too many buildings that are completely empty, aside from things to loot. Too many examples of level design that amount to opening a locked door, and not much else.
You might expect a creepy townhouse, complete with an attic, basement, two floors, and a dozen rooms, to be filled to the brim with vampires. Think of the skyscraper levels in The Last of Us 2, or the laboratory scenes in World War Z. The kind of environment that has you grasping for breath, waiting for a vampire to hurl itself at you around a corner or stalk you to your objective.
Instead you’ll find yourself running around empty rooms looking for a key into a locked space that contains a giant safe that might contain a gun that you might use for an hour before finding another. It’s bizarre that Left 4 Dead, the 2008 co-operative zombie shooter, managed to craft more exciting combat encounters and level design that an Arkane game released in 2023, but that’s where we’re at. Even the more recent Back 4 Blood (a game I still didn’t love) managed to be more fun, almost all of the time.
I’m pretty convinced that the fingers need to be pointed at the people above the developers, rather than the developers themselves. The people that, five or six years ago, might’ve seen the then-growing open world looter format and decided it would be a good idea to jump in. So much of Redfall is half-baked, poorly designed, poorly implemented, and then repeated ad nauseum over the course of the frighteningly dull campaign that it feels like someone should’ve stepped in long before it was ever unveiled to the general public.
My first instinct was to blame Xbox. Their internal review system must’ve raised a few flags about the state of Redfall, right? Well, according to Windows Central’s Jez Corden, Bethesda studios are still left to their own devices, as the hangover from Xbox’s acquisition of Zenimax is still in effect:
The heartbreaking thing is that not all of Redfall is bad. How could it be? Very few AAA games are completely bereft of any redeeming qualities. Following a blood trail through a hospital, clearing room by room, only to unlock the cremation chamber in the basement and be jumped by a mini-boss vampire is a very cool thing. When focusing on objectives in more bespoke environments, the music and sound design can really pull together an intimidating atmosphere.
The ethereal presentation behind the ocean being lifted up away from the island, leaving abandoned boats dumped in the seabed, is gorgeous. Invading the private worlds of powerful vampires is a very cool feeling, especially when one was presented like the giant dollhouse of their daughter.
All of these examples hint at an alternate version of Redfall that could be excellent. In a different (better) timeline, Arkane manages to channel their immense talent into this open world experience, and it works. I recall Deathloop’s ‘stuck in time’ approach to period décor, with bold colors drawing the eye to 70’s style sunken rooms and paneling. It teases me to think of that attention to detail blown up across a fully realized world.
But that’s not the case here. Even if Arkane manages to patch all of Redfall’s many, many bugs, the biggest issues are entirely unsalvageable. There’s no intelligent AI anywhere, no engaging level design, very little creative enemy or boss design, and no engaging narrative or characters to speak of. I was left shocked at just how barebones the entire experience is.
The few traces of good, like finding strands of hair from the patient-zero and hearing her narration of events, is drowned out by mind-numbing exploration and combat. The rare examples of that signature Arkane level design are ground down by buildings so drab and empty it’s like all the vampires up and abandoned Redfall.
The worst thing is that Redfall is described as an immersive sim in the promotional material, and that could not be further from the truth. Me and my buddies tried, and tried, and tried to create interesting interactions with our abilities and the level design and… there just wasn’t any point.
My purple elevator that launches me into the sky? The only practical use I found for it in almost seven hours is launching us over walls and buildings that were slightly too high to mantle. Why? To get us to the objective slightly quicker, because there’s almost nothing interesting to find off of the beaten path. The bullet deflecting umbrella? The predictably stupid AI almost never shot it because they seem to have been bred from the genes of Stormtroopers, and your own teammates can’t even shoot through it!
The thing is, when you’re playing with friends it’s easy to have a good time. It’s perhaps even easy to ignore the issues, in favor of just kicking back and trying to squeeze whatever fun one can find out of Redfall. More than that, it’s hard for AAA to push out an original idea these days — a Dishonored 3 or Prey 2 would’ve been an easier bet from Arkane, especially when Xbox are still in need of premier exclusives. But still Redfall came out, a bold attempt to lend their hand to something new; and that needs to be credited.
After a near flawless track record of making excellent original games, am I disappointed by Redfall? Immensely, but Arkane have absolutely picked up some grace along the way. So I’m loathe to say ‘don’t play this game’ when Arkane have almost earned a critical failure like Redfall.
But Redfall fails by almost every metric that I hold against a video game when I’m playing. It’s bad, and that sucks for just about everyone involved. But who knows, give it a go on Game Pass; you might like it a bit more than me. Just don’t, whatever you do, pay £70 for this game. That is a price tag that does not reflect the sheer lack of quality that Redfall sports.
