Redfall is my biggest disappointment of 2023. As a huge fan of developer Arkane Studios’ previous work, from Dishonored to Deathloop, my expectations for the company’s new release were high. However, this vampire-hunting first-person shooter is chaotic, plagued with technical flaws and head-scratching design choices that contradict the game itself. The result is an often boring experience that becomes frustrating and sucks the life out of me with the occasional glimpse of potential.
The fictional port town of Redfall, Massachusetts is being overrun by vampires and their cult followers. Your goal as one of four unique protagonists is to restore the haunted region to its former state. Standing in your way are the Vampire Gods, a wealthy group of scientist-turned-monsters whose backstories have never swayed me despite the campaign’s superficial attempts. That’s about as much as the introduction gives you before you’re thrown into the action.
After completing Redfall’s introduction, you’ll complete story and side missions from a centralized base of operations. The first few hours of narration follow The Hollow Man, a mysterious entity proselytizing on the city’s radio signals. The Hollow Man seems to have been everywhere you go and his presence is unsettling. This track features the best of Redfall’s missions and locations, where you must explore a ruined mansion and its gruesome past, fight a powerful enemy at a clifftop lighthouse in a thunderstorm, and rescue hostages from a shipyard inhabited by the followers of The Hollow man control. Unfortunately, the game tries to replicate its early hours throughout the rest; Difficult story revelations, repetitive side activities, and a second, less interesting map all leave a hollow and formulaic feel. Finally, Arkane presents the plot of the vampire gods in flashbacks, where you stand in an abandoned room and watch vaguely humanoid spirits converse with one another. The result is largely forgotten.
On the bright side, I like the four starting protagonists: Remi and her robotic companion, Bribon; a teleporting cryptozoologist named Devinder; Jacob, who is a Sagittarius with a psychic eye; and Layla, a biomedical engineer who inherited telekinetic powers after a medical study went wrong. Each character has unique abilities that you can level up through a straightforward but adequate skill tree, but with only three total abilities per character, you won’t use them nearly as often as your firearms. The experience could have been more interesting if I could choose from the game’s 12 abilities to carve my playstyle, but unfortunately you have to choose one character and their predefined abilities for the entire game.
Redfall’s shooting mechanics and weapon arsenal are serviceable, with the heavy-hitting impaler and UV ray cannon – which petrifies vampires – being the highlights. You’ll discover new weapons as you explore the world and complete missions, each of which fits somewhere in the rudimentary tiered loot system. Although weapons have random perks, like increased damage to petrified vampires, I didn’t pay much attention to them because the loot system recycled about the same dozen weapons repeatedly, with slightly higher stats each time. Remarkably, it does the same with enemy vampire types as well. I’ve fought the same type of vampire many times, but my character realized it was a new vampire just because it had a different name.
Looking at the world of Redfall makes me sad at its wasted potential. For every great place, there are a handful of unforgettable ones. The result is an empty game with several puzzling issues, like a lack of proper stealth takedowns, a boring quest and waypoint system, and the inability to pause the game in single player. Wild technical issues prevent brighter moments, including frequent server crashes in multiplayer, not working inputs, broken animations, and numerous other bugs that make playing Redfall a frustrating experience. For a game about fighting the undead, Redfall feels soulless in a completely wrong way.