Bethesda faced several challenges during the development of Redfall. As release neared, concerns grew surrounding the game, particularly coming to a head after it was announced that it would not support 60fps on consoles, disappointing many Xbox fans as 60fps is now almost a standard this is what action games on modern consoles are for. While Arkane is a renowned studio and created an intriguing vampire-based narrative, the characters were ominous. Ultimately, the answer to the question of whether you also have to worry about Redfall… Unfortunately, I have to say yes.
Arkane Austin has an incredible track record of developing single-player games, including skillful level design, gameplay, and storytelling in immersive sim titles like Dishonored and Prey. However, Redfall has proven to be a disappointment as the studio has failed miserably on all fronts.
The game plunges you into a mission to save a city under vampire siege. As one of four characters available, you must gear up and venture into the quaint town and surrounding forests to hunt down vampires, uncover the mystery behind their existence as soulless creatures, and help protect vulnerable local people. While there are theoretically many ways to explore with this concept, Arkane has done its best not to keep the narrative interesting.
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The quest design structure in Redfall is boring and uses an outdated format belonging to the early 2000s. This isn’t just about accepting quests and then completing a series of side quests as you travel across the map to the next milestone. like in most open world games. No, in Redfall you must specifically select a mission from a hub that is essentially separate from the main open world. The quests themselves are repetitive tasks involving finding an item, information, or simply killing a specific vampire. What you see in the first 30 minutes of Redfall is pretty much what it offers you for the rest of the game in terms of mission design.
But at least the open world and side quests make up for it, right? Not at all. The side quests follow the same format as the main quests, and the open world is a boring, empty experience. When exploring Redfall, most of the buildings are closed, and the few that can be entered offer nothing of interest. Unless you enjoy collecting lore and scrap (like pliers, tape, wire, etc.) these buildings aren’t worth exploring. Before assuming what this scrap can be used for, it’s important to note that Redfall doesn’t offer any items to craft or upgrade gear, so the scrap you find is simply converted into currency to purchase items from a small selection of to buy dealers.
One of the main secondary mechanics in the game is finding and securing havens, which are essentially places where you can take refuge and rest from the vampires for a few moments. Each shelter is unlocked the same way, you have to follow yellow wires to a generator that you have to activate. Once inside the Vault, you can start the two side quests aimed at reducing the local vampire threat, although once completed there isn’t a significant difference. The first mission can have four different objectives, while the second one is always about killing a slightly more powerful vampire to get a skull that is used at certain times in the main story. Since there’s not much else to do in the game world other than these Shelters, you better get in the habit of completing 15+ of them before you reach the endgame. If you have a problem with Ubisoft and their use of “Viewpoints”, this mechanic becomes very boring very quickly. There are also vampire lairs that you can explore, but in general they’re not much different than being in the open world and killing vampires like you normally do.
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Anyway, let’s talk about enemy diversity, one of the key elements of Redfall: Vampire. During the game I faced about five different types of vampires, each with different gameplay elements, but in the end they all behaved the same in battle: they ran towards me in a straight line. While the angler would occasionally grab and drag me away, or the veil obscured my vision, the truth was that the vampires seemed to have a collective consciousness when it came to dealing damage, attacking like mere mindless drones. Although there were other types of enemies to contend with, such as human factions using different types of weapons, or exploding blood sacs and other types of creepy weapons, most of them behaved like vampires: they charged relentlessly in my direction. This actually makes combat less attractive and puts a lot of pressure on characters and team choice.
However, this is not the solution that is needed. The characters differ only by having three unique skills each, but none of them are really effective in practice, so they don’t really matter that much in the end. When it comes to gear options, you can choose three unique weapons to equip at once, as well as a relic and a vampire blood option to slightly alter a character’s playstyle. Each is defined by a rarity color that adds an odd and unsatisfying loot system to the game. The problem is that all of this is affected by Redfall’s progression, making enemies stronger as the game progresses. However, since there are no gear upgrade options, the game actually forces you to switch weapons as the story progresses for no real reason. It’s a different approach to weapon durability because while weapons don’t break, the lower they go the less effective they become, meaning you have to switch to others. It’s an unrewarding and frustrating game mechanic.
Redfall’s level progression system doesn’t take advantage of the perks that can be purchased to level up each character, as none of them are really effective and they don’t significantly change the way you play. Compared to the impressive skill trees in games like Borderlands 2, where different perk combinations heavily affect the character’s behavior, in Redfall these perks have little impact, making for a very character-building experience. Although there is no endgame phase, the fact that the character build is so bad doesn’t matter that much. Once the credits roll, there are no more activities to unlock or explore: either start a new game with a new character, or start on the hardest difficulty. Considering I managed to finish the game on the hardest difficulty from the start and got it all done in less than nine hours, there’s very little to appreciate in terms of content.
To me, Redfall seems like a game that Arkane had a very clear idea for, but over time the desire to add serious co-op elements has meant that pretty much every other part of the game has been sacrificed. While it can be played with friends, it’s true that this can make the world a little less monotonous, but in reality this isn’t a game that desperately needs co-op support, and Arkane hasn’t done enough to make it an engaging game create experiences that attract players alone or in groups. I firmly believe that this title would have been better if it had been a single player that would have allowed you to build a character combining the abilities of the four characters available, since the characters are uninteresting as they are and their Individuality is so limited it hardly affects the game.
Combine all of these factors with Arkane’s response to the difficulty in Redfall, which seems to simply throw more drone enemies, and the fact that the map and compass are so counterintuitive and outdated that at times (sometimes) it annoys me despite if you have a quest goal you want to head towards, you have to manually place a marker on the map if you want a directional indicator on your HUD compass), there are a lot of things that Redfall doesn’t get right at all. But before we wrap up, it’s necessary to talk about the elephant in the room: performance.
Gamers don’t like it when a title starts poorly in terms of optimization, and Redfall could be the straw for many. On my PC, which has an 11th Gen i9-11900KF processor, an RTX 3090 graphics card, and enough DDR4 RAM to travel to the moon and back, Redfall hit 115 fps in the tight midranges, but fell at 25 fps in the middle open cities of the world. On top of those abysmal frame rates, the game also features popping textures, crashes, bugging enemies, NPCs in T’s stance, and it all adds up to a movement system that hampers you while playing the game, making it frustrating to traverse the vertical parts of the map. I highly recommend playing as Layla as her jumping ability is a great solution for scaling cliffs and jumping walls that are otherwise impossible to cross. Personally, I haven’t experienced the Xbox Series versions of this game, but what I’ve seen of the PC edition is sometimes surprising, which makes me wonder how the game could even launch on a Series S console.
As it is, Redfall is a huge disappointment, especially when some parts of the game reveal the brilliance that Arkane Team possesses. The map has potential but there isn’t much to do while the story has its moments of intrigue and the concept of a small town in deep America with vampires still works. It’s just that the game is a real mess at times. It does almost nothing to get you hooked, and when you find something to enjoy, its sultry performance does its best to remove that glimmer of illusion. In a way, I’m glad they finally got it out because it means Arkane can wake up from this nightmare and focus his mind on something far more befitting of his talents.