Redfall’s developer, Arkane Austin, is previously best known for Prey, a beautifully intricate sci-fi adventure that encouraged players to be creative in their fight against its alien menace. You could activate computer touchscreens by shooting them with a toy crossbow, or squeeze through tiny gaps in the environment by transforming into small inanimate objects. It included a handful of guns, but using them always felt like a failure of imagination on the player’s part.
By comparison, guns are all Redfall has. It’s the same old parade of incrementally more powerful firearms seen in games such as Borderlands and Destiny, striving to excite the player through what they can have rather than what they can do. These guns are not Redfall’s biggest problem, but they symbolise where Arkane has strayed from the path. This might be the studio’s largest and most technologically ambitious game, but its expanse of a New England town and packed armoury amount to modest entertainment at best.
Redfall is named for its setting, a prosperous idyll ravaged by an infestation of vampires. These powerful creatures have used their dark magic to blot out the sun and push back the ocean, isolating the town with a literal sea wall. Playing as one of four survivors holed up at the town’s fire-station, you’re tasked with ending the undead epidemic, one bloodsucker at a time. There are safe houses to unlock, vampire nests to destroy, camps of vamp-worshipping cultists to clear out, and a list of more involved story missions to follow.
There are some hallmark Arkane stylistic flourishes, from the eeriness of ocean waves looming above you in suspended animation, to the loving detail in the town’s touristy fishing wharves and independent record stores. But running around this world feels flat and staid. With everything more dispersed, the game struggles to fill in the gaps, so there’s a lot of plodding along empty roads and through sparsely decorated houses.
The characters you inhabit are similarly diluted. Each colourful avatar has three unique abilities, some better than others; avid cryptozoologist Devinder can teleport and stun enemies with a lightning-infused javelin, which is much more fun than mercenary Jacob’s combination of invisibility and an enemy-marking raven. The reason for this shallow spread of abilities is that Redfall can be played cooperatively, and while joining forces with other players does provide more tactical options, characters still feel disappointingly limited.
Alongside the absence of the broader array of powers seen in Prey and Dishonored, there are also no gadgets, grenades, or melee weapons that might spice up encounters. Most surprising is the lack of proper stealth attacks, with characters sneakily dispatching enemies (including vampires) by … elbowing them in the back.
Maybe this would be less of a problem if the shooting was entertaining, but if anything, combat is where Redfall’s most egregious flaws reveal themselves. The weapons are fun enough, ranging from familiar shotguns and sniper rifles to more eclectic UV cannons and the preposterous stake launcher, which fires lengths of wood and metal highly effective against vamps. But it’s all undermined by the fact that your enemies are total wimps. The human cultists are colossally stupid.; seemingly caught in the headlights whenever you turn up, they’re still calculating whether to run for cover or fight back as you casually pop their skulls. Vampires are more aggressive, but their close-range attacks are easily avoided amid Redfall’s suburban sprawl.
Glimmers of Arkane’s typical brilliance can be found in more authored missions. One example sees players infiltrate a creepy mansion guarded by specialist vampires, and the constrained environment clarifies your tactical options and makes combat more interesting. Yet there are also times when Redfall plays like a parody of Arkane’s previous work. Allegedly powerful opponents that lurk in institutional buildings such as churches and town halls; I eliminated several of these “underbosses” by walking through the front door and one-shot-killing them with the stake launcher, which feels entirely opposed to the nuanced experiences Arkane has tried to bring players up to this point.
Couple all this with frequent bugs and technical issues, like environment textures visibly struggling to load in as you tread about the town, and the whole enterprise begins to feel cursed. Redfall is a poor execution of ideas ill-at-ease with Arkane’s historic design ethos, a sad misuse of Arkane’s a unique developer’s particular talents.
Redfall is out now; £59.99, or included with an Xbox Game Pass subscription
