Redfall: Game Review

Redfall is clear evidence that the gaming industry has sunk to the bottom. The quality of the final product no longer depends on the name of the studio behind it, and the developers care more about not offending minorities and respecting the political agenda than about their reputation.

Redfall isn’t bad, it’s apocalyptic horror. On the one hand, this makes the work of the critic easier, but often even bad games can be praised for the story, design, gameplay elements, or at least the music. But this is not the case.

Perhaps it’s the big name of the studio that gave us Dishonored and Prey – you expect more from Arkane than the design that is already boring in Deathloop – or high expectations and the hope that with the support of Microsoft’s bottomless wallet, talented developers will come up with something worthwhile. In any case, CD Projekt proved that a name is worthless if there are lazy people behind it, and Arkane’s talent has long been lost somewhere. If you wanted to get a kind of open-world variation of Left 4 Dead, you’ve come to the wrong door.

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A little about Redfall

The game Redfall takes place in a town on an isolated island, which is pressed to the nails by hordes of vampires and their crazy minions. The bloodsuckers eclipsed the sun and created an impenetrable wall of water around the island so that no one could leave it. The player is assigned the role of one of the four vampire hunters. He has to save poor people, destroy vampire nests, shoot sectarians, clear the map, equipping shelters for himself and his comrades. In addition to the main missions that move the boring story forward, there are additional ones in the game: fix the popcorn machine or find the missing relative of the poor survivor.

The developers did not even try to make the story interesting. Instead of cinematic cutscenes, in Redfall the plot moves a cheap joke in the form of comics, where the protagonist’s voiceover inflates hip-hop pathos. There is no dispute about musical tastes, but in Redfall it sounds like Arkane did not record tracks specifically for the game, but bought stock ones from a special site. After a few plot inserts, you want to get into the menu and turn off the music to hell, until your ears start to bleed.

As noted above, there are four main characters in the game, and each has unique skills. I chose sniper Jacob, who roams around with a ghostly raven that can be used for reconnaissance of the area. Another ability is to become invisible for a while in order to make legs in case of trouble. Jacob’s ultimate skill is a sniper rifle that deals catastrophic damage to enemies. The hero is suitable for a single passage and is practically useless in a team, since his abilities are selfishly tailored for him. Even a scout raven is of little use due to the hopeless stupidity of enemies.

Vampire hangers-on constantly lose sight of heroes, get stuck in the ground, do not know how to use shelters, do not react point-blank to dying comrades nearby and pass through walls, often remaining in them. You can shoot a gang of sectarians, run around the corner after 10 meters, lose your pursuers, and after a couple of seconds return and repeat the process. The bots will not even try to catch the intruder and will forget that some buffoon with a translucent crow just practiced his accuracy by shooting at their partners.

Bloodsuckers in Redfall behave a little more aggressively and try to chase the player. Their main “advantage” is teleportation over short distances. But often tricks with jumps in space end up in a wall or between two boxes, which become an insurmountable obstacle for vampires.

Arsenal Redfall

Redfall also has an extensive arsenal: pistols, shotguns, assault and sniper rifles, ultraviolet emitters, and also pole throwers. But using it is uninteresting and boring. Most of the enemies are trying to get closer to the hero, so the shotgun will be an effective solution to any disagreements – both with vampires and cultists. From time to time, the game still unleashes new opponents on the hero – they keep their distance, hide behind power shields or plunge the world into darkness, forcing them to switch to something long-range – but this does not happen so often.

There are no grenades or gadgets in the game that could add variety to the battles with opponents. Even sneaking up on enemies from the back will get boring exactly when you realize that the developers did not bother to animate the finishing moves – the hero can send enemies to the forefathers (!) Only with an elbow strike on the shoulder blades.

Some kind of outlet could be the advertised variability, which allows you to complete one mission in several different ways at once, but even here Redfall is disappointing. The point is to try to climb through the window or look for the key to the back door, if it’s faster and easier to open the front door with your feet, stick the most tenacious vampire with stakes, and then finish off the rest with a memorable shotgun.

However, the biggest drawback of Redfall can rightfully be considered disgusting optimization. It’s hard to imagine with what spirit the developers decided to release a shooter on the Xbox Series X that does not work at speeds above 30 frames per second. And it would be okay from a visual point of view, Redfall was something amazing, pleasing to the eye with high detail and bright special effects, but no. The game looks ugly. The environment is not impressive, and the characters look like goggle-eyed clowns in big shoes. The PC version also surprises with frame rate drops even on high-performance systems equipped with flagship video cards.

Diagnosis

Redfall can easily be called the most disgusting game of the year, not living up to even part of the expectations placed on it. Although it is in Game Pass, downloading and running it is not even worth a minute of your time.

It’s much more interesting to watch paint dry or nails grow than to play a new Arkane project.

Pros

• The game is available on Xbox Game Pass

Cons

• You need internet traffic to download it.
• All the rest