Microsoft's biggest first-party failure yet - Redfall review

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Last week, I shared a rundown of some of the problems gamers and critics were having with Redfall, the new vampire-focused, co-op looter shooter from Arkane Studios. At the time I was around seven hours into the game, and while some of the issues being raised were obviously legitimate, I was still surprised to be enjoying myself and had some hope that maybe I would like it more than the average on the whole.

Well, I’m back a week later and another twenty hours into the game—through and beyond its credits—to let you know: Nah, it’s actually that bad.

The most frustrating thing about Redfall is that it does have potential. There’s a reason I was still enthusiastic in the early hours. Exploring an idyllic little New England town that has been ravaged by bloodthirsty Draculas is a great concept, and the loop of weakening a vampire with gunshots and then running in close to stake them feels awesome. But those good bits slowly give way to a bloated game, full of unnecessarily repetitive content, too few unique locations, and half-baked live service elements. And that’s before even touching on what an absolute mess the game is on a technical level.

The first sign of trouble is right at the start. As Arkane’s first co-op game, Redfall begins by having players between one of four different characters, with more reportedly being added in the future. These characters have different abilities and slightly different skill trees; for example, Jacob specializes in stealth, Remi is followed by a loyal robot buddy who can distract enemies, and Layla can use her telekinetic abilities to summon in a projectile-blocking psychic umbrella.

I went with the fourth option, Devinder “Dev” Crousley, mostly because I liked the sound of his backstory. Devinder is a cryptozoologist who finds himself trapped in Redfall after doing a bookstore signing for his latest volume all about cryptids. He’s the inventor character, which means he has access to fun tools like a beacon that lets him teleport long distances and an absurdly overpowered ultimate where he pulls out a UV light that turns any nearby vampires to stone.

While all four heroes play through the same basic story, they also feature unique personalities and specially tailored introduction videos to each main mission. The first of these, immediately on starting the game, was where I started to wonder at some of the choices made in Redfall’s creation. Rather than pull people into missions through dialogue that might provide deeper characterization for the band of survivors I was holed up with, the game’s mission videos are presented as narration laid over top of mostly static art. Said art is totally fine quality and stylish enough, but it feels like a placeholder, like the kind of thing a developer might put inside a game to let testers play through it with the intent of adding “real” cutscenes later. It feels like a cost-saving tactic I’d expect from a tiny JRPG, not a big, Microsoft-backed, triple-A release.

To be clear, I’m not accusing Arkane or Microsoft or anyone else of cost-cutting. I have no idea what went on during Redfall’s development, and I wouldn’t want to guess. It’s entirely possible that this approach to mission briefings was a very early stylistic choice that they stuck with throughout the game. All I’m saying is that it feels like a very poorly thought out and confusing stylistic choice if so, and it’s far from the only example of this in the game.

Take Redfall’s open world as another illustration. This is ostensibly Arkane’s first true open-world game, and initially it does something very wise: keeping that open world small. The city of Redfall is a compelling locale, but also one that’s not too big; the square footage suggests a population of maybe ten thousand people or less, and I was easily able to navigate from one end of the map to the other in ten or fifteen minutes, if even that.

The (initial) small world also means that Redfall can (again, initially) avoid some of the hang-ups that plague many open-world games. Yes, I had to unlock safehouses and run missions to slowly take over territory. But each safehouse only required one mission and one mini-boss encounter to take it over! I didn’t need to endlessly grind samey content like in a Ubisoft open-world game.

That is, until...around ten hours into Redfall, I took down the Hollow Man, the main villain who had been plaguing me from the very beginning. And at this point I was directed to escape...to the other side of Redfall. Apparently that small area I’d praised was only half of the city, and the other half was still waiting for me and had its own vampiric foes running amok. Once I entered Burial Point, the game’s second region, I was aghast to discover that it was quite a bit bigger than the first area. And as it turns out, shocker, all that space was filled up with content that mostly just felt like rehashing the stuff I’d already done on the first map in increasingly unoriginal and annoying ways.

If you consider yourself a completionist when it comes to open-world games, prepare for some serious pain with Redfall. One of the few new mechanics introduced in the second half (technically just before entering Burial Point) was the Rook storm meter. Every activity I completed—from completing main and side missions to even just taking out any slightly more powerful vampires I found while running around—filled up a meter.

When the meter was completely full, a lightning storm would arrive and a big, muscly vampire known as a Rook would begin hunting me down. Rooks could drain my health with just a couple of meaty punches, which made fighting them a serious pain, but since every meaningful activity increased that meter, there was no way to avoid or lessen these confrontations. I ended up going toe-to-toe with around a dozen Rooks before I beat the game, including one who harassed me while I fought the final boss.

Technically, Rook encounters are meant to be rewarding, because when I managed to defeat one, it would drop high-quality loot. As a Borderlands-style looter shooter, I was constantly upgrading my weaponry in Redfall, finding more powerful shotguns, pistols, UV rays, and stake launchers to wield. While getting new and better guns that take down enemies faster is always a compelling formula, most of the weapons here are only differentiated based on numbers. Beyond offering a few different models of each gun type, I didn’t find much reason to swap one weapon out for another besides the damage number being higher.

The lack of excitement in loot also drains much of the motivation for one of the other ways that Redfall artificially extends its play time: vampire nests. These linear mini-dungeons begin popping up around the map early on, and while they can mostly be ignored, anytime one was inside the area of another mission, I felt pushed to take it out; enemies who are within a certain radius of a vampire nest get a major buff to health and damage that can make trying to take on missions much harder than necessary.

Vampire nests felt like a highlight of the experience at first, since they traded in the open world for a more direct, a-to-b level, albeit sometimes with one or two branching paths. They also feature some really fascinating visual design, essentially taking place in a twisted version of Redfall, with locations like the town’s historic movie theater or the docks or even just generic gas stations showing up in nightmare form. But by the third vampire nest I took out, some assets and portions of the level began getting repeated. By the end of the game, every time I entered a vampire nest I was playing through little level segments that I had already seen cut up and remixed in different orders a dozen or so times before.

That’s really the core of the Redfall experience: It has this almost impressive capacity for taking ideas that are really cool or unique or worth exploring and just grinding them down until they’re somehow boring. For example, I loved the idea of this slow-burn story where the creepy vampire cult leader known as the Hollow Man whispers threats right into my brain. I enjoyed slowly exploring the first half of town, getting to know the area and uncovering the truth behind the Hollow Man’s identity, which eventually opened up the pathway to confronting and defeating him. That’s a great story format, and it mostly works!

But then the next fifteen-plus hours of Redfall was just repeating that same story two times over, with new vampire lords murmuring creepy words into my ears. The second batch of antagonists were essentially the same as the first in motivation, backstory, and powers, with very little to help them stand apart. If the game wanted to surprise me by being double the length and introducing new baddies halfway through, it had to earn that surprise. And it didn’t at all.

Let me give a tiny SPOILER WARNING here for a Redfall side story. If you’re planning to play the game, and don’t want to have this terribly implemented subplot ruined, you may want to skip ahead a few paragraphs. But I think the best illustration of my point comes in the form of one of the first characters I met at the game’s first quest hub: Joe Creelman.

Joe was introduced to me as the weapons expert of the ragtag group of human survivors trying to fight back from the city's fire station. He's joined by his pregnant wife Anna, who helpfully sold me ammo, and early in the game, I encountered a side mission where Joe asked me to check in on his brother, an unnamed individual who apparently had been involved with the vampire-worshipping cultists. I searched his brother’s home and was ambushed by said cultists, and when I got back, Joe thanked me for trying and lightly mourned his brother apparently giving himself over to the cult mindset entirely. Not a ton of depth, but alright, fine enough backstory, I guess.

In the second half of the game, when I had moved over to a different part of the city and left Joe and Anna behind, I was surprised to receive another side mission involving these characters. Anna needed my help relocating to Burial Point; apparently Joe had betrayed her and joined the cultists. Wait, what? Yep, I guess this character whose only real story up to this point had been having a pregnant wife and having lost his brother to the cult had now also joined the cult. Now that could prove to be a very compelling story too! What could have driven him to this? Did he miss his brother? Did he go mad from stress over the upcoming birth of his child? Good questions, but I couldn’t tell you; whatever went on with Joe happened completely off-screen, and if the game ever offers any further explanation via in-game notes or letters or something, I never found it.

Like so much of Redfall, Joe Creelman’s arc felt like a missed opportunity for the kind of emotional, environment-heavy storytelling that Arkane is known for. The finale added insult to injury, though: In the game’s final mission, as I approached the lair of the last vampire boss I had to take out, I encountered a bunch of enemies. As I fought desperately to take them all down, I killed one vampire and saw a strange achievement notification pop up: “Say Goodbye, Joe.” After I had killed everyone else in the area, I went back and looked at my achievements. Sure enough, this one was granted for killing Joe Creelman. Which vampire was he? No clue. I...guess he just shows up in a big group of enemies right before the final boss. Inexplicably. That’s some approach to storytelling!

God, I’m two thousand words into this, and I haven’t even mentioned how poorly Redfall runs. With the caveat that I played on an Xbox Series S, almost certainly the least powerful hardware the game runs on, I encountered constant framerate drops to as low as 10 to 15 frames per second. Things got even worse once I hit Burial Point; in the second half, the game crashed constantly, with at least one crash to the Xbox home screen every few hours, and I often lost a fair bit of progress when that happened.

From the technical problems to the story structure to some core aspects of its game design, everything about Redfall feels more like an outline than a finished game from one of the biggest publishers in the industry. It reads like a first draft. If this game were presented to me as an alpha version, I’d offer some measured praise. Something like, “Wow, this is unstable, but it has some really cool ideas and could be cleaned up into something solid.”

But of course, it’s not being presented as an alpha. Maybe the future will be kind to Redfall; maybe it will be like other notorious Bethesda titles like The Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76, which launched in rough shape but were patched into something more playable and built up fan bases over the years. Maybe. I’d love to see Redfall’s obvious potential fulfilled. But in its current state, as a $70 triple-A release—or even as a much cheaper Xbox Game Pass game asking for twenty or thirty hours of your time—there’s no world in which this bloodsucker is worth the pain.

SCORE: 2 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The idea of a small, sleepy town that just so happens to be the center of a vampire invasion is going to draw obvious comparisons to Buffy, even if Redfall opts for the East Coast of the United States rather than the West Coast. It’s not just the setting and premise, though; Redfall also employs similarly sarcasm-laden, Joss Whedon-style dialogue. Whether that is a fun draw or a grating annoyance is up to you, of course.

• A steady stream of voices whispering your darkest worries into your ears. If you’re a fan of vaguely threatening disembodied utterances cursing you and reminding you that you’re definitely going to fail no matter what, you’re in luck! All you have to do is get clinical depression. Oh, or the video game Redfall.

• Doom 2016’s glory kills. To be clear, Redfall is in no way as good a game as the 2016 iteration of Doom nor its follow-up, Doom Eternal. Neither is the core gunplay of Redfall that good. That said, one of the best things about Redfall is the visceral joy of the cycle of shooting vampires from afar and then running in close to finish them off with a stake to the heart. It’s a gameplay loop that reminded me of Doom’s glory kills in how satisfying they felt to pull off.

• The blood. THE BLOOD THE BLOOD THE BLOOD THE BLOOD THEBLOOD THEBLOOD THEBLOODTHEBLOODTHEBLOODTHEBLOOD

💬 Are you willing to take a trip to Redfall and take on some vampires despite the major issues I had with the game? Or are you skipping this one? Share what you’re thinking in the comments!