REDFALL is the latest game from the minds behind Dishonored and Prey, Arkane Austin, and it’s a little bit of a mixed bag.
It’s essentially a co-operative vampire hunting game for Xbox and PC, but you can put everything you know about vampires aside for this adventure, as garlic and crosses won’t help you here.
Redfall lets up to four players hunt down powerful vampires together
Expectations were high for Arkane’s latest game, but there was plenty of apprehension too, as it’s a studio known for its excellent single-player games.
Some have compared the situation to games like Anthem, which was developed by another primarily single-player developer Bioware, and crashed and burned a little bit after a chilly reception.
That’s a bit of an unfair comparison, because while Redfall is far from perfect, it at least manages to be interesting.
Redfall’s reveal trailer accidentally tricked people into thinking it was a lot like Left 4 Dead, another four-player co-op shooter, but it’s actually more like Far Cry.
Like Far Cry, you can choose to play on your own, with no help from other players or NPC characters, or team up with friends in a chaotic run and gun experience.
The objectives in Redfall are all largely similar, and typically involve either killing a special vampire or retrieving a particular item, but the game’s setting keeps things interesting.
Redfall is filled with moments and set pieces that will stay in your mind until long after the credits roll.
There’s things like placing a candle by a window to summon a vampire who preys on children, or trekking across a dried seabed to reach a lighthouse.
Then there are clever world-building moments, like finding a note that mentions someone using a flare gun in a cemetery.
Going to that cemetery and firing off a flare gun, just as the note mentioned, spawned an optional boss encounter, and it’s those kinds of memories that will stick.
The town you explore in Redfall feels like a real, lived-in place, filled with small touches like taxidermy and family photos.
Another strong point for the game is how much freedom you’re given, as you’re free to explore the entire game world as you please, even with other players.
There are bonuses for sticking together with other players in your game, but you can all go to four different corners of the map and do whatever you want, if that’s what you want to do.
You’re even encouraged to take different approaches to each mission, with each character having their own set of tools for tackling different challenges.
Playable character Devinder is a good example of this, as his teleporter device lets him squeeze into places that other characters would never be able to reach.
No matter who you’re playing as, almost every surface in the game is climbable in some way, and while not every surface is made for this, it’s worth a little bit of frustration for the freedom it affords.
Redfall’s gunplay is quite good too, and feels sufficiently powerful in a genre that typically features wars of attrition in their combat encounters.
If your weapon is good enough, a well-placed headshot will take down most human enemies, and killing vampires, while more time consuming, is a fairly straightforward affair too.
Unfortunately the game is missing a bit of physicality typically seen in other games from Arkane, and feedback from weapons is a bit lacking too.
That said, the game’s second open world map feels a lot more alive than the first, as you’re dropped into the middle of a vampire civil war, with skirmishes between factions to stumble across.
There are some aspects to Redfall that fall a bit flat though, and character abilities are one of the main ones that can cause some frustration.
If you’re playing Redfall solo, you won’t get to see how your character powers interact with each other, which can be a bit frustrating if you don’t feel like teaming up with others.
Not every character was created equal either, as some are packed with powerful abilities while others have a few that don’t really do much of anything at all.
Enemy behaviour also leaves a lot to be desired, and it never seems like enemies are working together in a way that makes sense.
If you stand next to a patch of toxic red mist, human enemies will thoughtlessly run into it, choking to death in the process.
On higher difficulties, the enemies just seem to get better at hitting you with their shots, and given they rarely miss on lower difficulties, it feels like not much is changing.
Boss fights are unfortunately lacking too, as most boss characters are damage sponges where the only difference between winning and losing is if you run out of ammo.
Redfall is in a pretty rough spot technically too, being locked at 30fps on even the powerful Xbox Series X.
Even at that low frame rate, there are issues with pop-in and textures not loading until you get very close to them, and enemies not loading at a distance, making long-range combat difficult.
Despite these issues, there is some enjoyment to be found in Redfall, even if it isn’t exactly what many were hoping for from Arkane’s next game.
It’s a solid open-world co-op shooter from a team that’s never made one before, and that shows, but it’s still interesting at the very least.
Written by Kirk McKeand and Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.
