With a lot of hype, Redfall is the latest game to come from Xbox and Arkane. In the town of Redfall, the vampires have taken over and you are for some unexplained reason the person in charge to take down the vampires and make Redfall safe again. Find out what we thought about the game by reading our full Redfall Review.
Redfall is developed by Arkane Austin and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released on May 2, 2023, for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
The story of Redfall is a bit of a bummer, most of the story gets told through slideshows in 2 ways, the first one being in engine images and the second one being just drawn images, not really fun to look at if you ask me. You play as 1 of 4 characters who have special powers, how did you get these powers or is there any back story? Nope, you are just put into the world and must defeat the vampires that have taken over the island of Redfall.
I could talk more about the story, but there isn’t much that stood out at all, it ended up being very surface-level. The characters you play as do have some different powers, but I actually didn’t end up using them at all except the ult of the purple girl because they just seemed useless most of the time. The world itself felt lacking and boring none of the locations really stood out and the missions themself didn’t even take you everywhere with some locations just being there for nothing and some of the most boring locations having multiple missions taking place there, for instance, the graveyard.
The gunplay just felt off and clunky at best, aiming didn’t feel right so most of my time I just aimed without zooming in and that worked a lot better. The enemies don’t take cover for some reason, so not having to aim while zooming in actually worked pretty well, and with the vampires just going all over the place, zoom aiming just was something that was more a thing that held me back than actually help. The vampires were just annoying, nothing about them made them feel scary but they were just a massive annoyance and you would die pretty quickly while doing the most basic stuff.
The final thing about the weapons is that the rarity didn’t do much, you will get some different types of weapons but I personally ended up using my pistol most of the time. You would think that there would be nothing wrong with that right? well, every time you would defeat a vampire, I needed to switch weapons because pistols didn’t have a stake, something that isn’t that bad, but being able to have 3 guns slotted at once and not being able to quickly swap ended up being a massive pain.
The game felt a lot like Far Cry, but a lot more boring. Every mission just gets repeated all the time but at a different location, and the neighborhood missions are even worse offenders of this by just copying the exact same mission and same objectives. Some annoyance of mine came with some doors needing keys and having to look for them, and with a lighting issue I will talk about later, the keys just don’t really pop out as much as they should and I ended up walking past them a lot of the time.
After reaching the 2nd part of the map things just went from bad to worse and the glitches really started to shine through, mainly the health bar disappearing like 10 times, for the small human enemies it wasn’t that big of a deal, but when dealing with 5 vampires at once, I just wanted to quit because I didn’t know what vampire was almost dead so I could focus on those. There were a lot of things to collect, but you will get locked out of all of that after reaching the 2nd part of the map because you can’t go back, and you reach that point pretty quickly. Something that didn’t help the game either was not being able to pause, even in single-player…
The game has a bunch of technical issues, some more annoying than others. My 1st technical issue already came up before even playing, the game would not start until a day after launch, even after uninstalling and reinstalling, the day after I got a 77GB patch, and even after that, I needed to delete and reinstall it again, for like the 5th time. This was not the only technical issue, during my time with the game I found a few more, and while the 30 fps was a big downer, it wasn’t the biggest issue for me personally. What I did think was a big problem was the fps dropping to basically 3 when staking a vampire, visuals not popping in, the AI of the enemies just being terrible in general, and health bars disappearing that could only be fixed with a restart of the game. Something that also stopped working at times was the crouch button and it would just make this noise, not sure why it didn’t let me do it, but it was really random, and every time it happened it didn’t seem like there was anything that wouldn’t let me do it.
While the visual style wasn’t actually that bad and I liked the look of the characters, they for sure had the Arkane DNA in it and I could see some things back in it from the Dishonored series. Other visual things just felt horrible, something that really started to annoy me at times was the lighting, sometimes you didn’t see anything due to how dark it was, sometimes it was too light, and sometimes the flashlight just made things look horrible. In the end, the game itself didn’t look current-gen but more like a PS3/Xbox 360 era game with how much behind the most basic things were, like not being able to shoot car windows.
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