Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Platform: PC, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PC
Redfall – Review
Redfall is one of those games that was probably on the wishlist of many gamers. The game promised Looter Shooter mechanics in a dark and gloomy semi-open world setting where your enemies would be creatures of the night. We ourselves were intrigued by the general setting of the game, and we were even more curious to see how Redfall performed when playing with a full team of vampire hunters. While we did find a lot of things go bump in the night, our biggest foes were a horde of crashes, a murder of bugs, and only a few drops of content to actually experience.
Story
Redfall takes place in the titular island town which is currently infested with vampires. Most of the remaining human residents are either cultists or military operatives who don’t really care about the innocent civilians who are caught in the crossfire or who are used as food for the earlier-mentioned vampires. To make matters worse, the island is currently surrounded by a massive water wall, making it impossible for anyone to leave. You’ll play as one of those stranded survivors trying to fight the creatures of the night.
Truth be told, Redfall does try to tell a story via poorly made cutscenes and a lot of notes you find scattered across the town. It sadly fails to captivate, and you’ll quickly just go from one mission to another, often not really paying any attention to what is going on. We do commend the creators for adding a story to a looter shooter game, but it feels too barebones to remain interesting throughout the course of a playthrough.
Graphics
Graphically Redfall isn’t an ugly game, but it also plays things too safe. A lot of the world’s assets are overused and you’ll encounter the same things over and over again. The open world doesn’t truly feel that open, as you cannot explore most houses and buildings. Inside the structures you do get to explore, you’ll encounter the same items scattered all over the place. The character designs are quite neat, and even the enemies look cool, but there’s a lack of enemy variety and most monsters have nearly the same skin. This is most noticeable when you’re getting swarmed by what seems to be a vampire octuplet.
We did encounter a lot of graphical bugs, with doors not spawning, clipping errors, random vampires being rendered who were not actually spawned in the game, and so on. There is still quite a bit of polishing that needs to happen when it comes to the graphics.
Sound
The sound design of Redfall is actually quite good. While the music doesn’t exactly stand out and it’s often out of sync with the events unfolding onscreen, it’s mainly the atmospheric sounds and the random voiced lines from enemies that add a lot to the game’s dark and gloomy mood. We were sometimes quite surprised by the eerie lines that were spewed by the Hollow Man, one of the game’s evil entities. The sound effects are also decent, and your weapons give great audio feedback.
Gameplay
Redfall is a pretty straightforward looter shooter. The game drops you in a small village-like surrounding where vampires and other ghoulish fiends are now in control. You’ll be able to choose between four different characters to start taking back the night (quite literally). After this, you can just go from mission to mission gathering supplies, experience, and new weapons. The world is quite limited in terms of exploration, but eventually, Vampire Nests start to spawn, and these will become an important source for finding new weapons.
Each of the characters has its own skill set, and these skills can be further enhanced by investing skill points in them. How you distribute your skill points is up to you, and you can also reset skills (for a cost) in case you want to try different builds. The game is fairly limited in this aspect, and the same can be said about the gear system. You can equip three different weapons, as well as two off-hand items. In many cases, the game is a bit reminiscent of Borderlands, albeit on a much smaller scale. Overall, we did enjoy the general gameplay loop and the game is also rather easy to pick up and play. You can play for half an hour and still feel like you have accomplished something.
Even though Redfall can be very entertaining with a group of friends, there’s no denying that this game is a very barebones experience. Not only is exploring the world a bit pointless, as there is no real crafting system in place and thus you’ll just recycle everything you find into supplies (which is basically cash), but you’ll find ample weapons in Vampire Nests anyway. Of course, there are merits of finding extra lore or the occasional side-quest in the game’s world, but these often don’t really reward you with anything worth mentioning either. We would have loved to see a crafting system, a more interactive base, fun stuff to do in the safehouses, and so on.
On top of the aforementioned remark that the game feels like a hollow husk of something bigger, there are so many bugs still present, which is downright shameful and upsetting for a full release. During multiplayer sessions, players would constantly experience desync problems where they wouldn’t see quest items, weapon drops, or even doors, blocking players in their tracks. We had issues where the Escape key would not work anymore, as well as our melee attacks. This was always triggered when we received a quest complete screen and we were still in combat. When we then pressed our melee attack button, we were not able to use said ability until we rebooted the entire game. The quest complete screen was probably also one of the poorest design choices we had seen in a game in a very long time. Why would someone want a pop-up that takes up a third of your screen, for which you need to hold down a button to have it disappear? Imagine this constantly happening during combat.
Conclusion
Even though we had quite a lot of laughs during multiplayer sessions, this had more to do with random bugs instead of actual good gameplay. Don’t get us wrong, the game does have a fairly decent foundation but it does nothing with said foundation. We did moderately enjoy playing through the game, collecting some very basic new weapons here and there, and seeing how the different characters evolved, but the game simply does not have that much content on offer. This is one of those games that feels like an early Alpha, rather than a finished product. Even so, we are still giving Redfall a passing grade, simply because of its high pick-up-and-play factor, making it a rather okay game for gamers who don’t have that much time. However, this game is not worth its current asking price, nor is it close to being a finished product.
Redfall - Review,
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