‘Redfall’ Review: A Half-Baked Looter Shooter

Playing Redfall is almost impossible without constantly thinking about what led to its initial release. What combination of behind-the-scenes strife resulted in what is a game that is, if not exactly broken, a clumsy gene splice of competing visions? That such a project has come out of the Lyon-based Arkane Studios, a developer known for its focus on a specific style of game, is particularly troubling, as the qualitative divide between Redfall and imperfect but singular titles like Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop is stark.

Which isn’t to say that Redfall is a total departure for the studio. Like those other projects, it features a protagonist who wields strange powers that facilitate multiple approaches to dispatching (or wholly avoiding) enemies. The setting is dense with detail, and to be navigated in first-person—in this case the New England town of Redfall, where society has broken down in the face of a vampire plague. Cut off from the outside world beneath a perpetual eclipse, the survivors fight for their lives against not just the vampires, but the cultists who serve them as well as the paramilitary group helicoptered in to hush up the whole catastrophe.

But in the scope of Arkane’s work, the powers in Redfall are much more limited, doled out between four distinct characters that the player gets to choose from. There are fewer approaches to each situation, and to such a degree that any of the more elaborate or experimental sections of the game feel out of place. Even the narrative is banal, questionably paced with a take on vampires that feels recycled from the more mystical segments of Dishonored.

All the staples of an immersive sim take a backseat here to the drearily familiar motions of a loot shooter. In addition to the requisite experience points and skill trees, Redfall’s open world is full of containers bursting with color-coded equipment meant to drive you forward, chasing the high of, say, finding a firearm whose purple background marks it as superior to most others.

In other words, where the town of Redfall is overrun by vampires, the game Redfall is overrun by carrot-on-stick progression systems that range from tedious to utterly nonsensical. The combat in itself isn’t terrible, as there’s a surface-level satisfaction to mowing down its brick-stupid human enemies. But the vampires at the game’s center leave few lasting impressions beyond irritation, not only because they require an extra melee attack to finish off, but because their tendency to mob you feels designed around the game’s cooperative component.

Yet despite how central the multi-character, co-op mechanics are positioned, the game’s multiplayer remains curiously barebones. Any progress is locked to the host player instead of shared among the group, and there’s no matchmaking to speak of. Redfall’s mystifying requirement to remain always online feels leftover from systems that are no longer in the game.

Oversights like this are what make the game feel essentially unfinished, even excluding the graphical hitches and other performance issues. Redfall features none of the variety to support its bloated length, in either its slow-to-unfold character progression or its bizarrely thin loot system, which is scant on customization and quickly devolves into finding the same guns at progressively higher levels. In turn, the point of the loot-gathering process evaporates, because there’s really no reason to do anything but scrap any and all equipment below a certain rarity because you’re guaranteed to run into the better versions soon enough.

That’s also not to suggest that the currency you gain for scrapping weapons or scavenging supplies is particularly useful, as there’s hardly anything to spend it on. Out in the open world, you’re practically tripping over ammunition and weaponry, so the only things worth buying are the hacking and lockpicking devices that you encounter less consistently. Even then, locked rooms and containers tend to contain more useless currency and more identical weapons.

Before the utter pointlessness of the game loop sets in, though, we’re at least conditioned to engage with Redfall’s most successful element: exploration of the town itself. The world is detailed and coherent, a brief snapshot in time of a sort of apocalypse-in-progress, some houses hastily fortified and all piled with the evidence of interrupted lives and panicked grocery runs. The more fantastical elements of Redfall fail to impress, but the everyday detail of its setting manages to shine through, surfacing little stories left in the wreckage. The problem is that, even if you’re willing to dig for those moments, they’re still overshadowed by the glimpses of another, larger story: the one that explains how Redfall came to be released in such a state as this.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications on May 1.