Redfall Review – Good Story, Needs Work

Vampires and Maine seem to go together like fish and chips in Redfall. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect Stephen King does. Those nasty bloodsuckers took a bite out of Maine in Salem’s Lot and now they’re at it again with the fictional town of Redfall in Massachusetts.

Redfall is a tale of science in the wrong hands inevitably going very, very wrong. Somehow a group of scientists have managed to transform themselves into Vampire Gods. Not content with this new taste of power and immortality, they explode outwards into the town of Redfall, turning neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother. Finally, they block out most of the sun’s harmful light and cut Redfall off from the rest of the world. Now the vampires have their own little playground to roam around in,  cultists looking to join their ranks and survivors hoping for someone to come along and save them.

And you are the answer to their prayers in Redfall.

Redfall is the latest game to come from Dishonored developer Arkane Studios. It’s also a game that seems to suffer from a personality crisis. Redfall is, you see, an open-world, one to four-player co-op first-person shooter. It’s also a single-player game that weaves Arkane’s distinct development styles into its blood which left me feeling, a fair amount of the time, as though the game wasn’t entirely sure what it wanted to be.

Redfall puts you in the shoes of one of four characters, each with their own distinctive power sets, skill tree and play styles. Who you choose to play as will go a long way to determining how you brave Redfall’s crimson-coloured streets. The game gives you a bunch of slave slots so that you can play as each of the game’s characters without losing a character’s progression. Just bear in mind that each character starts the game right from the beginning. There’s no hot-swapping between them in the campaign sadly and if you choose to play solo, you’ll be on your lonesome.

The mean streets of Redfall are structured like any other open-world game that’s out today. Redfall is a massive place to explore, full of nooks and crannies, secret areas and hidden collectables that flesh out the world, the history of the town and how everything went to hell in a handbasket. You can, after the opening mission, go anywhere you want at any time through main missions must be picked up from your safe house.

Side missions can be found by exploring the world as well, along with fast travel points and more safe houses in each district that also come with their own set of missions. The town of Redfall is quite large and getting from one end of it to the other can be very time-consuming, making those fast travel points a godsend.

Arkane’s distinctive style of “play-your-own-way” design is also apparent here, though it feels somewhat stripped back compared to their previous titles. You can play stealth or guns blazing and there are multiple ways to tackle missions, but there isn’t the same level of dynamic play that Dishonored enjoyed. Especially as Stealth seems geared toward sniper rifles and hit-and-run tactics. You can sneak up on enemies but there are no takedowns or stealth kills to make it worth the effort.

Redfall’s gunplay is quite meaty and the sound effects and recoil on your weapons give out a nice sense of power, especially when hitting headshots with a silenced sniper rifle. The game has no shortage of guns for you to pick up. There are really only a few types such as Flare Guns, handguns, shotguns, sniper rifles and assault rifles and they come in a variety of levels and rarity with the rarer guns throwing out more damage and perks. You can only equip three weapons at a time and can hold a limited amount of inventory. You can swap out a weapon for something else at any time, usually depending on the situation at hand, but bear in mind that the game doesn’t pause when you go into your inventory.

Once you get into the open world, you’ll come across the first of Redfall’s idiosyncrasies; the size of the map and enemy encounters. Redfall, as I’ve said before, is incredibly large and there’s a lot of ground to cover. The problem is that the maps are also sparsely populated by enemies. There are certain areas in which they’re a constant but in the rest of the world, there’s an element of randomisation at play. This is fine when geared towards solo play but feels very barren if you’re playing with someone else as there’s a lot of time where nothing is happening but you running from one location to the next, while looting whatever you find.

The other thing to note is the difficulty of combat for solo play. Yet again the game feels designed for solo play but the difficulty says you should have brought a friend. On the standard difficulty, Redfall’s encounters are quite challenging. That isn’t to say you can’t make it through on solo, only that it’s a tougher fight that way. Yet again though, enemy encounters and mobs aren’t so large that it would give four players a challenge either unless your mates are under levelled.

Environments are full of hazards to use against the enemies such as exploding barrels and fuel spills so it does add a little bit of depth to your combat options.

If you go solo, you can cheese the enemy AI into kill boxes. Vampires move at super speed and zip around the battlefield making them difficult to hit but they only do so when in close to you. If I didn’t have any stake ammo left – the Stake Launcher is overpowered as hell – I’d simply pop a vamp with a headshot and then pepper them with lead as they, strangely, chose to run straight at me. Once staggered, you have to stake a vamp otherwise they’ll just heal up and start the attack all over. The A.I. not choosing to use its abilities is just bizarre as, if you observe them before engaging, you’ll find them super-speeding from one point to the next.

Procedurally scattered across the world are Vampire Nests that have a sphere of influence which gradually grows over time. Enemies within that sphere get buffed. The only way to deal with the Nest is to jump into a psychic subspace, find the literal heart of the nest and destroy it.

Once you’ve gained the ire of the Vampire Gods, they keep an “eye” on you. Effectively this means a little meter builds up with each of your hostile actions in the world. Once you’ve done enough damage the game triggers a special vampire to attack you. With the right loadout and cheese tactics you can, yet again, take it down, but it’s another moment, along with the Nests, that says the combat content was designed with MP in mind.

If you plan to engage in the game with friends, bear in mind that Redfall only comes with two options; Solo play and game hosting. That means you have to invite friends into your world or be invited by them to yours. While there is cross-play between PC and console, there’s no joining up with randoms or searching for a game to join. It must be noted that due to this issue, I was unable to test out the games co-op components during the review period.

Visually, Arkane’s distinctive stylised design is on full display. The environment looks absolutely fantastic while the characters have that Arkane cartoonishness to them that is one of their trademarks. Redfall is a beautiful town to look at, whether during the day or night. The game is running in Quality Mode at the moment, which favours higher resolution. As near as I can tell, there’s no RT going on and reflections are handled by SSR.

Now a little bit about one of the gaming community’s contentions over the game: the frame rate. Yes, Redfall on Xbox runs at 30fps. And outside of maybe two moments of stuttering, it’s a rock solid, super smooth and super-fast game on console. Performance in SP mode is pretty fantastic. There are some of the usual UE issues such as texture and model pop-in and some bugs where enemies were unresponsive, but if you’re concerned over how many frames this is hitting and how smooth the playing experience feels, I certainly found nothing to complain about.

While I enjoyed Redfall’s overall story and gameplay when I could exploit the A.I., the balancing for co-op play in the SP campaign and the empty world left me feeling a little cold. Slaying vampires and bringing some light back into this world was, overall, a fun experience, but it feels like the game could have been much more had the developers decided on one style of gameplay and stuck to it. Redfall isn’t terrible by any means, but it does fall just that bit shy of being all that it could be.

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