Redfall game review : TechNewsTalks

8 min readMay 2, 2023

Redfall — Review In Progress

We’re still playing Bethesda’s open-world shooter, but the game’s first act is a let down. On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists, each with unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-effective skill tree. Also, a handful of weapons are neat, like the heavy-hitting stake launcher or ultra-violet raygun that turns vampires to stone. A few locations, like a deranged scientist’s mansion, a cliffside lighthouse, and a hangar repurposed as a prison quarter, provide enough challenge to incentivize intelligent pathfinding. Unfortunately, most locations and enemy placements feel haphazardly designed — certainly a byproduct of creating two open-world maps.

Review: Redfall is a refreshing loot shooter, even if it doesn’t play to Arkane’s strengths

The vampire adventure delivers killer combat and an atmospheric setting in which you can easily lose a weekend… Even so, after spending roughly 12 hours completing the campaign, I’m excited to revisit Redfall with new partners to develop Layla’s skill tree further and seek out more of the story. It’s tough to find co-op friends with a love for reading lore, though. This epitomises Redfall’s most awkward juxtaposition between being a fun, frantic co-op shooter and a thoughtful narrative design showcase. A multiplayer Arkane game is not an inherently bad idea, but Redfall often feels like the wrong vehicle for the studio’s strengths.

‘Redfall’ Review: Vampire Hunter 2K23

This could have been a lot better… Redfall certainly gives you plenty of incentive to do and find everything possible. Finding safehouses to turn them into fast travel hubs, closing down Vampire Nests in order to collect their extra rare goodies, and looting everything you come across with the aid of lockpicks and rewire kits provided me with a fun gameplay loop that’s enjoyable via solo and co-op play. But while I was tending to all those activities, I couldn’t help but take note of the ho-hum visuals being presented to me. Playing this FPS on an Xbox Series X at a locked 30fps at launch is a huge letdown. And what’s even more dissatisfying are instances where texture pop-in and visible texture loading take place more often than not. Arkane Studios’ games have a certain look when it comes to their character design. They looked fine enough back then when I came across them in Dishonored, but they look more off-putting and downright ugly up close in Redfall. The stylized look of the vampires makes sense, but the humans simply don’t look all that great in comparison to their supernatural counterparts. I just couldn’t put this Redfall review together without acknowledging some of the game’s uglier visual attributes.

Where Are All The ‘Redfall’ Reviews?

Bethesda has a pretty weird relationship with review copies of its games. Redfall, included. Someone did screw up, however, and a YouTube published an “I’m 20 hours in” review live earlier than they were supposed to. They gave the game a 6/10, which obviously isn’t great, but I have no idea who this reviewer was or what they usually score games. It’s not a great score but it’s one random one out of dozens that are about to come in. Still, I bet Bethesda is real mad about that. (Update: A second review has gone up early, scoring the game a 78/100. I bet a bunch of people mix up 11 AM and 11 PM today). (Update 2: Another early one, this time a 4/10. Yeesh)

Redfall review: A vampiric open-world shooter with a bad case of anaemia

Redfall’s 30 FPS drama seems a bit silly now. Sniping enemies from afar is always fun, especially when you set up traps using distraction tactics like the flare gun. The gunplay is solid for the most part too. If you hit an enemy close enough to a wall with the stake gun, they will get impaled, which is hilarious. Environmental hazards are powerful tools for luring in groups of roaming enemies too. Until the game told me my sniper rifle was useless, I was enjoying teleporting across rooftops to different sniper nests to pick off enemies. And, as odd as it is that you can’t melee with the game’s various stake-endowed rifles, it does feel spectacular and satisfying to execute the various vampiric archetypes this way. It’s slightly maddening how underbaked the game’s melee-range combat is, considering every vampire in the game rushes you down to engage in melee. There’s no dodge button, and no parry button, so the best way to deal with vampires is to exploit their AI by circle strafing, which confuses them into a “repathing” turning-on-the-spot frozen stupor.

Redfall review-in-progress: It’s not great, folks

40 hours with Redfall has me wishing the vampires would win. Every human enemy in Redfall has helpfully gathered around the most explosive object they could find. The town is littered with so many gas tanks, oil spills, and propane tanks that I’m not sure the vampires are its biggest problem. If this had the zany tone of Borderlands where blowing up stupid enemies was the entire point, I wouldn’t mind. But Redfall’s dramatic text logs and side quests are about the horror of the townspeople’s friends and family being turned into immortal monsters. Reading these notes and letters while combing through the town for loot and XP as your character quips about how adept they are confuses Redfall’s tone. It’s like if you dropped an Overwatch hero into Netflix’s Midnight Mass. Characters ask you to return mementos from their loved ones and you go out and slaughter them hoping they’ll drop a rare shotgun.

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Redfall Review — Half-Staked

Arkane takes a stab at infusing the genre du jour with its signature style, but the end results are a bloody mess. While Arkane’s abandonment of its own core design principles is jarring from a fan point of view, you need not have played anything from the team before to be stunned by Redfall’s lack of polish. This game is simply not ready, and yet here it is, meant to serve as the spring showcase for Xbox Game Pass. There’s really no flavor of bug or glitch I did not encounter: game crashes, A- and T-posing characters, oddly duplicating character models, disappearing quest items, incorrect UI information, texture pop-in — and of course the game’s lack of a 60-frames-per-second mode, which was recently a pre-launch headline, too. Redfall sorely misses a higher frame rate, but I saw moments during intensive combat where it struggled to even maintain 30 frames. Prey is six years old and looks better than Redfall. The lack of Arkane’s usual flair is disheartening. The presence of so many bugs is just insulting. This game is for sale, but it shouldn’t be.

Redfall Review — High Stakes Vampire Hunting

Redfall is a new first person vampire shooter from Arkane, a solo or coop game about fighting bloodsuckers in a fictional New England town. Let’s clear up a misunderstanding. Can Redfall be played solo? Absolutely. Is that the best way to play it? Probably not. The developers have been stressing at every opportunity that Redfall is best experienced in 2–4 player coop. Design decisions and the flow of exploration are built around it. While soloing Redfall does have the advantage of being able to snoop in every corner of the map without annoying an impatient friend, it’s also kind of lonely. Combat can be challenging and tense, but there’s a fair amount of real estate in which not much is going on. On the other hand, since enemies don’t scale to the size of the party, larger groups can make encounters trivial.

‘Redfall’ Reviews Are Here, And They Are A Bloodbath

Review scores are coming in for Redfall and they aren’t just middling, they’re poor. For a game of this size from a studio that normally produces solid hits, it’s wild to see Redfall arriving with such poor scores. These poor Redfall scores are about to crater discourse for months about Xbox and its first party ambitions. At least until its next big test, Starfield, which was delayed a year from its confidentially projected 2022 release date, and now has even more pressure on it as something that has to turn the narrative around after Redfall here. I genuinely wonder if Starfield will be hit with yet another delay, this time into 2024, to try to make sure it doesn’t have a botched launch in the wake of this, because Xbox just cannot afford that. I recall some “insider” rumors that Redfall was coming in hot (which is clearly true) and that Starfield was coming in even hotter.

‘Redfall’ review: Good enough for Game Pass

Redfall is not fit for public consumption. The characters represent a bright spot in the game, so let’s start with the good stuff. I primarily played as Layla, a student whose special abilities include a glowing purple umbrella that soaks up bullets and a psychic elevator that propels friends and foes into the sky. Her final ability summons her former boyfriend, a ghostly vampire who shows up to pull focus and deal damage (typical ex behavior). I also spent some time with Remi, a support-class character with an adorable robot dog. Each character has a skill tree with a few dozen upgrade slots, plus a backpack that can be stuffed full of firearms, and three guns equipped at any time.

Redfall Review in Progress

Vanilla missions, vapid enemies, and a lengthy list of other issues is making it hard to sink our teeth into Redfall. During one side mission I died trying to kill a vampire, but when I came back to finish the job he was just a non-interactive blue ghost, rotating to face me but otherwise rooted in place. When I came back again his energy shield was there, but the vampire… wasn’t in it. During a co-op session I found myself (more than once) fruitlessly attacking an enemy who was standing right in front of me but my friends saw as a dead body. At one stage, while playing solo, my crouch and start buttons broke. They just made clunking sounds. My inability to crouch persisted after death, but returned when I fast travelled to a safehouse. The start button doesn’t pause the game, by the way. It’s obviously understandable when playing online co-op, but completely baffling and inconvenient when playing solo.

Redfall is playable on Steam Deck — with the right settings

Default config seems bugged, try this instead. Before you start playing, one more tweak I recommend: pull up the Deck’s quick settings menu and, under Performance, set your Refresh Rate to 40Hz and Frame Limiter to 40fps. That should improve both battery life and responsiveness — you might notice my settings are consuming more energy, but I immediately saw a dip in wattage after locking the refresh rate and FPS at 40 each.

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