The amount of Xbox exclusive video games that will arrive throughout this year is not that it is too big, but among them there are some titles that have captured our attention throughout all this time. Undoubtedly one of the most anticipated of this 2023 is Starfield, but the one that will hit stores much sooner will be Redfall.
The new work of Arkane, the creators of Dishonored, will be the first video game that Bethesda will publish exclusively for Xbox Game Studios. In recent days I have had the opportunity to go to the Microsoft offices in Madrid to test a preview of a somewhat advanced part of the adventure, which has allowed me to get a better idea of what it will be like. this FPS in which you will have to fight against hordes of vampires and it will arrive in a few weeks. Unless it’s late…
A hellish island where danger lurks around every corner.
All the action in this shooter takes place on the island that gives its name to the game itself, where its inhabitants have been trapped without being able to escape after the appearance of a legion of vampires that keep them isolated from the outside world. However, what these beings did not count on is that some of the citizens were not going to give up, much less let them get away with it.
That’s when the campaign offers you the opportunity to play with four different characters, each with their own background stories, personalities and above all what will make them unique are the weapons they use, as well as their special skills so essential to make their way through somewhat hellish settings. Undoubtedly the setting is very well achieved because it constantly gives off an atmosphere of desolation.
The city is characterized by having an open world design, so that you can move freely through it at will. Of course, it does not mean that the enemies are going to consent to it, because vampires lurk everywhere and facing off against them is not always the most advisable thing to do, because it must be recognized that they are quite powerful and do not mess with little ones. the time to attack without stopping, even in a group if necessary.
Still, not all vampires are the same. Among all of them there are some of different types and precisely the first one I encountered during the game turned out to be one of the toughest, because around it it generated unbreakable shields with small holes through which you had to hit to damage it. Ho wever, he kept running at full speed and attacking me with his claws, doing quite a bit of damage, to the point where it’s easy to die from a few hits if you’re not careful.
And this only happened to me with one, so imagine if three or four get together at the same time, because in that case it becomes almost impossible to get out of the encounter alive. At least this serves to make it very clear that the game is demanding and forces you to perfectly control the character you play to take advantage of its capabilities, as well as invites you to explore the environment to find the most appropriate way to take action.
In this sense, it is clear that Arkane is behind all this, because there is no single way to carry out any objective, so you can plan different strategies based on the abilities of the protagonists or by looking for other areas to better flank your opponents. opponents from other angles. To give you an idea, the one I caught had a teleporter, so I threw it far away after taking out an enemy and activated it right after, causing them to not know where the shots were coming from.
In any case, this is just a simple example of the crazy things that can be done, because going head-on against vampires can usually end in suicide. Fortunately, in the case of death, something that is much more frequent than one would like, all the progress that has been achieved up to that point is recorded. The latter is appreciated because when you die you keep what you were carrying at that moment, so you don’t recover the ammunition or the first-aid kits, but it’s not the worst of all…
The biggest problem is money. It doesn’t matter if the population is in a tricky and extremely serious situation, nobody here is going to help you because of your pretty face. This implies that in the main base, a fire station, you have to pay a very high sum of money to get new first-aid kits or to recharge the ammunition to the maximum. Hence the drawback is that you lose a lot of money every time you diewhich further increases the sensation of being constantly between the strings.
Therefore, the adventure has that touch of survival horror and exploration that forces you not to leave a single corner to visit, so in abandoned houses you have to examine every single corner, not leave a single trunk of cars without opening, locating boxes, etc., because it is the best way to obtain enough resources to try to return to action with even more strength.
A quartet of the most diverse characters
As I’ve pointed out before, the four characters, two boys and two girls of different ethnicities, have nothing to do with each other. When attacking they have two basic abilities, with their corresponding cooldowns, and one ultimate which is what causes real havoc. Although the first ones require a waiting time to reuse them, the most powerful one requires the collection of a kind of energy spheres that enemies drop when they are killed.
For its part, in firearms we also find a wide variety between pistols, shotguns, machine guns, sniper rifles, crossbows, etc. All of them are further divided by rarity ranges, as well as their damage, fire speed, and other additional effects, so not all of them are equally useful against all types of creatures.
But if there is something that must also be taken into account, it is that vampires are not enough to just riddle them with bullets, because in this way they will never die. Therefore, the only way to kill them is by using a weapon equipped with a stake to stick it all over the chest when your life is low or also with an ultraviolet light.
On the other hand, each character has their own skill tree with several branches dedicated to each main ability and many others to boost their statistics or other improvements. To do this, it will be necessary to level up to earn skill points that will be used to grant additional and superior effects.
In the end, the gameplay of each character is so different that it is up to each one to choose the one that best suits their style of play. It must also be said that in our test we were only able to try the game alone and it is possible to complete the campaign without the company of anyone else without any problem. However, at all times I had the feeling that the experience would be a thousand times better if it were shared with three other colleagues for the fact of being more entertaining and even more for the combination of abilities of each one to overcome adversity.
Missions, nests and details that must be polished as soon as possible
I have to emphasize once again that the gameplay seemed excellent to me, at the level of the quality that Arkane has already so well used to us. This leaves us with frantic action in spades in each of the main areas of the island, but the situation changes completely in the rest of the places in this open world, and very negatively.
Most of the time that I was going from one place to another I did not meet a single enemy, so at a general level the stages feel tremendously empty. And it’s not like in most places you can do much more than examine the environment, so the activities are somewhat limited. Also, the fights are not always against vampires. The most frequent thing is to run into humans called Cultists, a group that pays homage to these creatures believing that they are their masters who must be served at all costs.
In between these combats, you will have to complete main and secondary missions that you can pick up at the fire station. Sometimes some of the first ones are divided into several paths, having to choose one to follow, but not before thinking about it because until the mission in question is finished, it will not be possible to go for another of the main ones.
Instead, those who do not want to focus on the story can only go to the Nests, some areas inhabited by vampires, which in turn come in handy to obtain a good number of powerful weapons in the case of overcoming them. The problem is that in this test version it was impossible to complete them due to a bug that they had, although unfortunately it is not the only one that I got to witness.
These same nests were duplicated, there were weapons that did not produce the sound that they should, the characters suddenly lost the ability to crouch and in a matter of performance sometimes hit very pronounced jerks. At least the latter was not the most normal, because most of the time the gameplay went like a shot at a constant 60 fps.
Beyond all this, something that fascinated me is the tension that is breathed non-stop by the sound, the soundtrack and by the voices of the vampires that are heard in the background. I assure you that there have been times when I had a really bad time and felt too overwhelmed, because the whole sound section was making me hysterical. And not in a bad way, but it caught me so much that I couldn’t think of anything other than looking for a place to feel safe from any threat.
And there is not everything, because when liquidating the vampires an alert bar is filled that makes these beings become more dangerous. So much so that once the bar is completely filled, a kind of mini-boss appears on the scene, modifying the lighting in the environment and forcing us to do our best to kill him. In fact, the one that came out made me sweat the hell out and left me with minimal resources to crush it.
In short, the first impressions it has generated on me Redfall They have left me wanting to play more, but next time I hope it will be in the company of friends. Despite not having tried multiplayer, I am convinced that the title will be infinitely more fun this way. Nor should we forget that there are a few bugs and aspects that should be thoroughly reviewed, because the fact that the settings feel so empty is something very negative, while the setting and gameplay are outstanding. That is why, just over a month after it goes on sale, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was delayed a little longer to give time to perfect these details..
- Platforms: Xbox Series X/S and PC (played version)
- multiplayer: Yeah
- developer: Arkane Studios
- Company: Bethesda Softworks
- Launch: May 2, 2023
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