Redfall is my greatest disappointment of 2023. As a large fan of developer Arkane Studios’ earlier work, from Dishonored by Deathloop, my expectations had been excessive for the corporate’s new launch. Nonetheless, this vampire-hunting first-person shooter is messy, plagued with technical flaws and head-scratching design choices counterintuitive to the sport itself. The result’s an often-bland expertise, made irritating by occasional glimpses of potential, and it’s sucked the life out of me.
The fictional harbor city of Redfall, Massachusetts, is overrun with vampires and their cultic worshippers. Your purpose as considered one of 4 distinctive protagonists is to revive the haunted area to its former state. Standing in your method are the Vampire Gods, a rich group of scientists-turned-monsters whose backstories by no means impacted me regardless of the marketing campaign’s surface-level makes an attempt. That’s about as a lot because the introduction offers you earlier than throwing you into the motion.
After finishing Redfall’s introduction, you conduct story and facet missions from a centralized base of operations. The primary few hours of the narrative observe The Hole Man, a mysterious entity proselytizing from the city’s radio alerts. The Hole Man appears to have been all over the place you go, and his presence is unnerving. This stretch options Redfall’s finest missions and areas, which require you to discover a dilapidated mansion and its ugly previous, combat a strong enemy at a cliffside lighthouse in a lightning storm, and rescue hostages from a boatyard that The Hole Man’s followers management. Sadly, the sport tries to copy its early hours all through its the rest; hard-to-follow story revelations, repeating facet actions, and a second, less-interesting map depart it feeling hole and formulaic. Lastly, Arkane presents the Vampire Gods’ storyline by way of flashbacks wherein you stand in an deserted area watching vaguely humanoid ghosts converse to one another. The result’s largely forgettable.
On a constructive notice, I just like the 4 launch protagonists: Remi and her robotic companion Bribón; a teleporting cryptozoologist named Devinder; Jacob, who’s a marksman with a psychic eye; and Layla, a biomedical engineer who inherited telekinetic powers after a medical trial gone unsuitable. Every character has distinctive abilities you may improve by way of a straightforward-but-sufficient ability tree, however with solely three complete talents per character, you received’t use them practically as a lot as your firearms. The expertise may’ve been extra fascinating if I may choose and select from the sport’s 12 talents to carve my playstyle, however sadly you could choose one character and their pre-determined skillset for your entire recreation.
Redfall’s capturing mechanics and armory of weapons are serviceable, with the heavy-hitting stake launcher and ultra-violet raygun – which petrifies vampires – being the highlights. You’ll uncover new weapons as you discover the world and full missions, every slotting someplace into the rudimentary tiered-loot system. Regardless of weapons having randomized perks, like elevated harm to petrified vampires, I didn’t pay a lot consideration to them as a result of the loot system recycles the identical dozen or so weapons repeatedly, with barely larger stats every time. Notably, it does the identical with enemy vampire varieties, too. I’d typically combat the identical sort of vampire incessantly, however my character would comment that it was a brand new vampire just because it had a distinct identify.
Trying on the world of Redfall, I develop into unhappy by its wasted potential. For each nice location, there are a handful of forgettable ones. The result’s an empty-feeling recreation with a number of puzzling issues, like a scarcity of correct stealth takedowns, a tedious quest and waypoint system, and the shortcoming to pause gameplay in single-player mode. Rampant technical points hinder brighter moments, together with frequent server crashes throughout multiplayer, inputs failing to work, damaged animations, and quite a few different bugs that make taking part in Redfall a irritating expertise. For a recreation about preventing the undead, Redfall feels soulless in all of the unsuitable methods.
