Arkane Studios is one of gaming’s most insightful, and intelligent creative hubs in the industry. Arkane is made up of several studios that have each brought us some of the best games in the last decade, including one of the best games ever made in my opinion, Arkane Austin’s PREY. The same studio and creatives revealed in an Xbox direct a few years ago a brand-new IP that looked to be a mix of Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” and Left4Dead. But over the course of the next couple of years, came a picture that Arkane Austin was looking to create their take on the modern Farcry games. An interesting sounding concept, and one which I had mixed feelings on but remained quite optimistic that the studio which brought us one of the greatest immersive sims of all time, could bring us a cool, and thought-provoking vampire game.
… it breaks my heart to tell you that, they did not succeed.
What is Redfall?
Redfall tells the tale of a small mid-western town that has been overrun by vampires and the deranged cultists who worship the almighty vampire gods. As a lone mercenary or banding together with three other friends, it’s your role to take on the vampires head-on, kill them, kill their gods and save the town of Redfall and stop the influence from spreading. This is Arkane Austin’s take on Far Cry, featuring a small open world, filled to the brim with glorified exploration, a narrative that progresses in dynamic and interesting ways and compelling combat and character progression.
The most compelling feature of Redfall is of course the inclusion of vampires, and it is a truly welcomed addition. Vampires have never got much screen time in gaming, and for years, the only major games to have them were the Soul Reaver and Blood Omen series. We have so many games with zombies, and while zombies are fine, I love anything with vampires and was stoked to see Redfall come to light.
And while those elements are there, it is very clear that there are plenty of gaps, missing features and a lack of depth for some of the most important core components. I wanted to spend as much time as possible to try everything in Redfall, both in single and multiplayer and to see if things would improve over time from launch.
Salem’s Lot in video game form?
Arkane has been known for its powerful, character-driven narratives which take players to strange, exciting worlds, and in the shoes of strange and exciting people. As I mentioned, PREY is single handily one of the best games in the last 10 years and personally tops the original Bioshock as an immersive sim. While the main plots are usually very well structured and while normally very much akin to any other video game narratives, there are usually neat dynamics to flesh them out, with exciting events and twists added to make them rise above the rest.
Redfall is incredibly simple in comparison but the basis for the story is still quite cool, as we see the coastal town of Redfall besieged by vampires, in order to obtain blood and recruit new followers. The takeover was subtle at first, as the vampires cleverly disguised themselves as a brand-new pharmaceutical company looking to aid those with various blood disorders. Soon enough after recruiting more vessels for the army of the undead, the incredibly powerful vampire gods finally stepped in and took over the town by raising the ocean water and blocking out the sun. Thus, barricading any remaining townsfolk into the town for lives their final days in pure dread.
As one of the few remaining survivors, it’s up to you and possibly a couple of buddies to bite back, take out the vampire menace and reclaim Redfall. Choosing from one of four trendy-looking vampire hunters, each with their own skills, powers and perks allowing them to survive longer than any other human and fight vampires. It is up to you to venture out, kill vampires, secure, and make each district in Redfall safe again, and kill the vampire gods.
It doesn’t have the same level of depth or high integrity as Dishonoured, but the core concept is great and is expanded upon in the right way could mean another smashing great narrative for Arkane. Yet the general plot feels quite disconnected, never evolving in meaningful ways nor having a sense of purpose like Deathloop or PREY.
There are several reasons for this, ranging from middling characters who don’t have a great deal of personality, to the lacking presentation in cutscenes and rush nature of getting from point A to the end within a few main story beats. But I feel the main missions and gameplay framework really hold back any elements of engaging storytelling or plot beats that will imbed themselves into our hearts and souls. It is quite literally like Back 4 Blood of Left 4 Dead where you just go from one point to another, but without any exciting incidents, or massive set pieces and basic missions’ objectives.
There are some cool bits of lore for the vampire gods, showing a rather bleak and depressing transformation from their human origins to what they became, and each of them is quite distinct and memorable. And overall there are some neat daps of environmental storytelling which paint a grim picture of the vampire invasions. But these are few far and few between, with much of the set dressing feeling underdeveloped, resulting in a world that feels more akin to a multiplayer map in a generic hero shooter, with assets plainly put together for the most part.
For example, there is a small apartment over a shop which you can venture into and there are some cool little details. The family here were religious as there are a couple of crucifixes and in the kid's room, a picture was painted of a crucifix. Neat, but other than that, there is nothing.
It would be cool if we saw more houses with painted crucifixes, or physical ones to try and ward off the vamps. Why not garlic in a bid to ward them off? We’re told vamps aren’t affected by the typical deterrents aside from sunlight, but we never fully understand why. Why don’t the vamps talk and mock the idea people still use crucifixes to push them away? Would it be cool to see the apartment with religious symbols painted everywhere and in one room the family dead holding a physical one, which had no effect?
Whenever you do see the aftermath of a vampire attack, it always feels sterile, again just assets put together and with a drop of blood, and quite noticeably a generic NPC in a death pose, covered in blood but showing no real wear and tear of their being. The gore is very tame, with no truly horrific scenes of death or slayings by vampires or the cultists, or anything truly disturbing (for the most part, aside from two moments which were unsettling).
Again, imagine something like an empty school bus covered in blood (no bodies), giving the idea of something awful happening. I noticed every house as well feels too clean, with no smashed open doors or windows, again bringing up questions. Can vampires just enter homes freely, or do they send cultists to break in and enter? In any case, the world feels a little too clean for the most part, lacking destruction, struggle, and horror overall. But most importantly, a sense of character and intrigue.
While I was never a big fan of Deathloop for many reasons, I did really like its main character Colt, how the world would evolve over the day, and how the story beats would emerge over time when solving the riddle of how to kill everyone on the island. But Redfall just flails from subpar objective to subpar objective, until it's time to fight the vampire gods.
Glooming dread and looking quite dead
Best time to talk about the presentation … it’s not good. Redfall feels and looks like a game from a bygone era in gaming, like very early 8th generation, or even before that. There are some nice visuals and creepy imagery, but there are so many oddities and blandness that it’s hard to look away. For every awesome-looking vampire, and creepy nest filled with rotting corpses and giant hearts, there’s weird looking cars, a lack of detail and texture in large chunks of the environment and a sense of emptiness and lack of atmosphere.
Performance-wise, I really didn’t have that many issues and everything ran smoothly for me. But this won’t be the case for everyone. And there were some, arguably hilarious glitches and clipping from teammates and NPCs.
Home grown, mid-western horrorsRedfall is quite far from your typical Arkane game, as previous titles normally focus on strongly woven, linear-level designs, and when they do open up, are still tightly coordinated. This vampired-infested shooter instead has all the trappings of a modern Far Cry game indeed, with a large, seamless open world, various side objectives to complete and an immense sense of reward when exploring and experimenting… sort of. Again, Redfall has a solid foundation and neat concepts, yet fails to flesh them out into more compelling features and mechanics.
Players will be venturing through the town of Redfall gathering weapons, gear and loot, slaying vampires, and partaking in various side quests and content in a bid to better their rank and power level. There is a stable line of different tasks to do in Redfall, from taking out vampiric effigies, killing more powerful lone vampires and helping find any struggling survivors caught in the crossfire. There’s a good mix and amount of side stuff to do and extra smaller missions to help flex you’re A-Game and potentially obtain some great loot.
All of the side stuff is fine, but never outstanding even in a single instance. We’re asked to do the usual stuff we’ve done in so many other games before, like find someone’s relative, kill a powerful enemy, or fix a popcorn machine (yep, that’s an actual mission). And while these are inoffensive, there is never anything truly remarkable or highly memorable. I gage the notion that having A 4 player dynamic could be the root cause of the watered downside (and main) mission structure. Whereas Dishonored would take you to a district overrun by rats, or a massive mechanical mansion that changes form with a tip of a hat. Redfall plays it very safe and asks you to do the bare minimum.
I feel the big problem is that there are moments Redfall wants so badly to be an immersive sim and presents multiple problems/paths for players to engage with. There’s a building you need to enter and turn off a radio broadcast setup by cultists to lure people in. The front is heavily guarded, and the other visible entrances are locked or barricaded, with an open window high up and out of reach. This presents some cool legwork as you can get a character with elevation to jump up to the open window and open the locked doors from the inside. Or work together to fight the enemy's presence, but risk triggering reinforcements. Or maybe, just maybe, use the one door which isn’t locked …
I found this all to often there was a massive oversight, such as a door which is already unlocked, or some other massive hole in the fence, that removed any need to work with other people or to even use one of the skills or cunning to overcome a problem. And when there is a locked door, the solution simply is, to find the key nearby and open the door. It’s incredibly disheartening that the people that made Dishonored, and PREY, which allowed a beautiful sense of freedom in exploration and problem-solving, result in us opening a locked door with a key, or just finding the unlocked door around the corner and avoiding any obstacles and problem-solving.
There are however some solid examples of side content being done right, with the vampire nests. These are areas you can venture into (and will have to) which are almost otherworldly compared to Redfall. A place where vampires thrive and bring back people to torture and use them almost like batteries, or never-ending blood packs. You have to venture to the centre of each nest, which is visually like a surrealistic nightmare, and destroy a literal heart, thus collapsing the structure. The nests affect Redfall by emitting a ring of power that expands slowly and gives common vampires impeccable strength. This is such an amazing idea and cool dynamic, that always keeps you on your toes and rewards you for taking a huge risk.
I also like the general exploration, and while many places are locked off annoyingly, there are still plenty of awesome discoveries and buildings to venture into and loot or meet a new danger to test your wits against. While it would have been much better to access all buildings in Redfall, there is enough to venture through, see and loot, but not enough for repeated playthroughs.
Biting back and drawing blood
As for combat, there again are some fantastic ideas at play, with the notion of fighting vampires really whetting my appetite. Now I have to say that Vampires are splendid, both in nature and design, with their creepy elongated limbs, darkly taunting tones and swift aggressiveness. They look and sound the part and there is a really good selection of vampire classes, from your standard bloodsuckers to the ones who can draw your blood from you at a distance, those with cloaking abilities and create a wall of fog around you, to the most powerful brutes known as Rooks (which sadly is a bit of a joke due to the poor AI of most NPCs)…
This is a great time to bring up AI, as while the concept of fighting vampires is cool, their AI and that of human enemies can be terrible at times. AI is tricky and even the most famous instances of enemy AI (F.E.A.R) were usually a form of cleaver trickery (read my interview with F.E.A.R director Craig Hubbard about this) but will be functioning and evoke compelling combat nonetheless. Redfall enemies will feel aimless at times, or just plain brain-dead as though their brains are on autopilot mode. And often enough fights can feel massively unbalanced as enemies are either too easy or too gruelling to kill. For every time you one-shot a cultist, they can pretty much do the same to you … making it baffling to figure out how a fight will go down.
But I did learn if you’re being chased by vampires, run to a safe house and into the UV spotlights outside, and see those dumb vamps just run straight in and die … they don’t even think twice about it.
Weaponry doesn’t break the bank but gets the job gone. There are a few examples which stand out, such as the UV canon that shoots a beam of light that roasts vamps to a crisp. Or the Stake launcher which really helps out in a tight situation against the vamps or the specially designed, unique weapons such as a shotgun equivalent of Davey Jones. Again, there is some really cool stuff on show, but I will admit, I’m not a fan of the looter shooter mindset of giving dozens, upon dozens of guns with hundreds of different stats constantly. I can tolerate it so long as there are some quality-of-life inclusions to help differ the stats easily.
Redfall does an okay job at this, but some fundamentals are missing, and due to certain UX choices, the time for differentiation between better and worse weapons can take some time. Redfall does colour-code weapons but this becomes relevant after a few hours, as new, and better weapons can be classed with lower colour coding and the stats become so minor that it’s a headache to just sort through all these weapons and then find another slightly better or worse one, you have to investigate it’s worth.
Thankfully character skills and perks fare better and while grinding for upgrade points is a chore, there are some really nice core powers that allow for greater ease in combat, or improving general exploration.
What’s interesting about Redfall being akin to a Far Cry game, is that you won’t be dealing with cultist camps, or liberating massive regions on the map over the course of many missions, but you will be indeed clearing neighbourhoods. In order to do so, you find a safe house, discover who the vampire underboss of that neighbourhood is and complete a mission to get the chance to face them head-on.
My big issue with securing neighbourhoods, which really feels like a late addition in design, or there wasn’t enough time to flesh it out. There is only one mission in each neighbourhood and this unlocks the location of the underboss. There are no multiple missions, layers, or interesting legwork. Just do one side mission and that's it, you get to fight the big bad of that area. Once that’s done, the underboss will be revealed and these guys are just the same vampires you’ve seen before with some extra HP. Worse still, is that every one of them has a means to be cheesed, meaning there’s a massive exploit in which you can kill them easily.
There was an underboss who looked like he was meant to have a big, bad cool arena inside a church filled with blood mist, a poisonous fog that will slowly kill players. The idea was to enter the church, see the lights go out and the fight to begin. But nope, I was able to have my guy who has a cool ghost sniper rifle, just pop the underboss’s head through a massive window. And this loophole could be exploited by any character, as you can shoot the underboss and they’ll come outside and attack, where you don’t need to deal with the problems inside the church.
My feelings and experience with Redfall can be summed up with one encounter with an underboss. In one area was an underboss that has the calling card of a vile serial killer. A being that would bloodlet people in a house isolated in an area of Redfall. The lone house stood, all boarded up and all exits sealed. I found an open window on the top floor and made a climb to reach it. Inside, I saw boarded-up bedroom doors, marked with large Xs painted in blood. The rest of the house had various blockades and the only path leading to the basement. Signs of many struggles and just endless horrors. In the basement was a door, and upon opening it, I saw a room where people were drained of their blood. While not visually striking, was still chilling. As I turned around, I heard a door slam and a voice call out, threatening a gruesome death to my person.
As the vampire appeared … I landed 4 headshots and it was dust. And that was it. Nothing more, and feeling so empty by the end I just sighed.
Overall?I won’t lie, this one hurt. Arkane and Xbox have brought us some of the best games ever made, and (I know I’m repeating myself) for the same studio to bring us PREY, have brought us this underbaked mash-up of Far Cry and Left 4 Dead with vamps. This has a promising foundation, plenty of good ideas which could have been made great with refinements and expansion, and the chance to bring a neat mix of gaming ideologies. But Redfall really misses the mark and while nowhere an awful game, it’s not great. It’s in rough shape and lacks a lot of fine detail that made previous Arkane games so masterful.
But … I will say that Redfall can be tweaked and made into a decent game that is worth checking out. While it has its fair share of issues, there are still some good things here, and some of the bad can certainly be improved. But the core experience is still underwhelming and won’t be easily repaired. Redfall is worth keeping an eye on, and playing with friends if you have Gamepass, but this could’ve been so much more.
+ Very cool concept with potential
+ Some great creepy visuals, vampires and story elements
+ Fun to explore and discover
-- Underwhelming story and main missions
-- Bad AI, enemy clipping, and lacking presentation
- Lots of exploits and lack of structure make big events underwhelming
- Certain systems such as weapons are confusing
A review code for Redfall on Xbox Series X/S was kindly provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
