Redfall: Cool Premise Drained of Substance
Another day another spin on the FarCry 3 formula, this time done by Arkane Austin, the studio behind 2017’s Prey, and counterpart studio to Arkane Lyon, who made the Dishonored games as well as Deathloop. In terms of an intro, I’m just gonna keep this brief. The game is not great, even for a Far Cry clone. It functions enough to be completed, but is undeniably unfinished. Those who pre-ordered this got dunked on, and I hope that this serves as a lesson to those people, and sticks with them for the rest of their life (or at least their gaming career).
The Good
Now I know this may come as a surprise, but there are genuinely redeeming qualities regarding this game, so lets get them out of the way super quick. I’ll start first with the setting and title of the game: Redfall. Disregarding the world’s lack of content, and looking purely at the game’s setting and what it entails, the town of Redfall is one of the more unique settings for a FarCry clone. It’s a picturesque town that blends 80s, early 2000s, and modern aesthetics all in one to create a playspace that feels like it’s straight out of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. It’s like a Hallmark Christmas movie town if it got jumped by vampires in October. Now does this mean that it’s fun to explore? For most the answer will be no. But I do think that the choice of setting and its execution was just about the only thing that retained my attention enough to complete this game. Even if Redfall is barren in terms of things to do, and even if the story was complete poo-poo (more on that later), the mere look of the world made running around in it bearable. If the argument is to be made that there is still an inkling of Arkane’s magic in this game, it’s in its setting. While nowhere near as immersive as Dishonored, or Prey, it is still decent for an open world. From the abandoned trailer parks whose white panelled sides flash with the reds and blues of abandoned police cars, to the mist-laden orchards and candle-lit farm houses that sit within them, Redfall’s environmental art direction is overall good (though I wouldn’t dare go as far as to say completely polished).
The soundtrack for this game is also great. It takes a lot of cues from late 19th century horror films with its stingers and lingering strings, and then remixes them with beats and motifs seen in modern trap and 90s pop. Just like the art style, it blends these elements impeccably and effortlessly. If you walk away from this article with anything, it’s that the art direction and music of the game works, and would have absolutely shined if it was complimented by a game that was actually good. If you have Xbox Game Pass and: grew up on Goosebumps, liked the aesthetic of Stranger Things, love retro-horror movies, or are just genuinely interested in how aesthetics are achieved using audio and environmental art, throw this game on easy and screw around for a couple hours in game’s first area. Run around in the streets for a bit. Many of the houses are enterable and explorable, check out how the interior design is achieved. Look at how cool the vampires look when they perch on rooftops, hang off telephone poles and what-not, and then quit once you’ve had your fill. If you’re like me and find a bit of interest in what I’ve described thus far, I don’t think you’ll regret it. Now onto the other, much larger, part of this overview.
The Bad
Getting the boring stuff out of the way first: technical problems. Game runs bad. Pop-in is crazy, framerate is locked to 30 on console, and inconsistent on PC (at least for me, though it seems to be an all encompassing issue with how the game loads and unloads assets). It’s like your classic bad PC port, but if the console version was also tough. The greatest horror element in this game is that nobody is safe from bad performance, no matter the platform.
Gameplay
Gameplay is stale on paper and absolutely broken in practice. The enemy AI is some of the worst I’ve played in an FPS to date, so much so that it’s hard to describe without coming across as hyperbolic. There are two types of enemies in the game: Humans and Vampires. Humans use guns to shoot you and can come in 5 types, all based on their loadout: Pistol, Assault Rifle, Shotgun, Sniper, and Assault Rifle with placeable turret. Humans are braindead and do nothing. They don’t communicate, coordinate, or test your wit in any way. Shotgunners run at you in a straight line. Most just stay put and let you use your abilities on them. Every subtype is dealt with the same: shoot them in the head.
Vampires come in 6 types: Siphons which can draw blood at a distance, forcing you to break line of sight, Anglers which grab you at a distance and force you to use either a stun ability or a movement ability to avoid damage, Shrouds which limit your sight to a small radius around your character, Bloodbags that blow up on you (this type has another variant, thought they are not aggressive, and instead give lore when killed), and Rooks, the game’s only miniboss that is reused as you gain rep (yes this game has rep grinds!). There is only one model and voice for each type of vampire, with the standard vampire having about 6 variants if I’m correct (though they all share the same few lines). Overall the vampire variety is no better than the human variety, further exasperated by the fact that they too are all dealt with in nearly the same fashion: run in a circle around them and shoot them, or place an object in between you and your enemy and mag dump into them while they fail to path to you. The only enemies that break the ‘run in circles’ meta are the Shrouds, who will attempt to stay just outside the sight limit they place on you, and the Bloodbags, who try to close the gap on you and explode. You run at a Shroud to see them and shoot them, you backpedal a Bloodbag. These are the variations in vampires.
Stealth is a joke and is seriously unsatisfying. Enemies will constantly spot you thanks to their bugged behaviour, rubber banding, spinning wildly in circles, or randomly sprinting with no indication. But even if it was viable, there is no stealth kill animation, and bunting enemies in the back does insane damage even if you’re spotted; so there’s no reason to interact with the mechanic in the first place. Even on the second to hardest difficulty, running around enemies and bunting them in the back is a viable option (though on the difficulty you unlock after completing the game, enemies are so spongy that it takes two melee hits instead of one to kill).
In terms of feel and gameplay, the gunplay is like 2013’s Bioshock Infinite, only set in a somehow less versatile sandbox. Each character has three abilities, though in my playthrough I was hoping for more. This game isn’t like Diablo or Borderlands where you can switch out abilities and try new builds, the abilities you get are what you get and the net upgrades you acquire later do little to change them. Aside from cars and the occasional ‘hot barrel’ or volatile battery, there is nearly nothing interactable or destructible in the world. The closest thing I ever got to making up my own solution using the game’s sandbox, was throwing my character’s teleportation device through windows to bypass locked doors; and that was it. Other than that, the world is just there. No vehicles. No physics. There aren’t even puzzles, as the game just highlights all the things you need to interact with to progress and that’s it.
RPG Elements
Like nearly every PvE FPS game being made in the current gaming climate, this game has rarity tiers and levels for its weapons. These weapons were usually virtually identical, save for some randomised ‘perks’ and levels. This system is used to drive the loot game; making the game’s many lootbale locations and various “Vampire Nests” look more enticing by offering stat increases in a game that progressively gets harder. Issue is, it’s not fun. The hamster-wheel style drip-feed of weapons does not work in this game. And that isn’t to say it doesn’t fit: I think it could fit, but in its current iteration it’s pointless. No gun feels better than the one you just had, no boost to your health puts you at an advantage over your enemies. Not once during my campaign could I take any more or any less that four hits from a standard vampire without dying. No matter what upgrades I had, or what weapons I ran, the difficulty stayed static. This isn’t to say the gameplay was consistent, it was just consistently easy. Sometimes when I healed myself with a medkit it would give me ⅓ of my health back, sometimes ⅔ or more. Sometimes I could one-shot headshot vampires with a sniper, sometimes it took two despite buying a better sniper from the store. Human enemies took a single bullet to kill in my first two hours, but then fluctuated constantly between three and five as time went on. The RPG elements fall completely flat because there is no gameplay rhythm, no means of mastery, and therefore no sense of progression. When you can’t even predict the health pool of your next target, the meta simply becomes comes down to DPS. The only other thing to worry about is ammo conservation, but what this does is completely alienate all of the guns that aren’t ammo efficient. Weapons that do too little damage with too much ammo (like the game’s few machine pistols) are useless. When the ammo pool for the different weapon archetypes is shared, there is no reason to use a machine-pistol that takes twenty-five shots to do what a hand-cannon does in one.
Story (Spoilers, obviously)
In the opening hours of this game, I theorised that the story, along with the art style, would be one of the few redeeming aspects of the game, even if most of it was average. Like I mentioned earlier, the initial premise is cool, and in the first hour or so things actually look kind of promising. In terms of plot, the game almost immediately hits you with:
An eerie island town entrapped by a wall of water
A blotted out sun that talks to you if you look at it for too long
A vampire that speaks through the radios and televisions, commenting on the things you do and the things you are about to do as you walk past electronics in the open world
Multiple human cults dedicated to different vampires that have their own agendas. These cults also fight amongst one another
An elite private military deployed inside Redfall to kill everything and everyone in an attempt to cover up what is happening
Interactable locks of hair that show snippets into the mind of patient zero, as she comes to terms with how her actions caused the vampire outbreak in Redfall.
I mean, there’s a lot of moving parts to this story, all of which on paper are very cool. The only issue is, none of them go anywhere. At the end of Redfall, you find out what happens to patient zero, but without all of the locks of hair, you’ll have no idea what exactly happened. There are exactly a hundred, and I only got fifteen in my twenty hours of play, so I never got to know how she ended up in the place she did. It is stated that the different factions have conflicting motivations, but this is never shown. You mow down these factions, and the vampires they worship, without any consequences to the world or story. Everything moves at a million miles a second. You kill just about every antagonist in this game in the same hour you’re introduced to them. The final boss shows up in a single cutscene at the beginning, and then again about 40 minutes before you ice them. There are no motivations for any of the vampires other than the classic ‘we are the next step in evolution’ trope, so killing each feels as pointless as the last.
And I haven’t even gotten into quest design. This game has MMO levels of bad objective structure (not that Thate Online will have bad quests. We would never make bad game design using your crowdfunding). Not even two hours in and I’m doing a quest that revolves around taking a pocketwatch from a man I just met, and placing it on his dead father’s grave. That’s it. There is no twist. Take pocketwatch, bring it to grave; and it’s a main story mission. A MAIN STORY MISSION. And you know what’s even funnier? At this point in the story, this character is the last living doctor in town, and not even two story missions after that, he goes back to the grave to take back that watch and dies. The town’s only doctor, goes outside in the vampire apocalypse, by himself, and dies for a POCKETWATCH. I can’t make this stuff up. It’s terrible. Without development, none of these characters are interesting, which is made worse by the fact that just like in FarCry 6, this game refreshes the cast at certain intervals, doing away completely with the initial characters around the halfway mark, and introducing new ones. Now look, at the time of this writing I finished the game like two days ago: I can’t name you a supporting character from the second half of this game. Some of these people don’t even have animated eyes; like no blinking or anything. Back 4 Blood has better characters than this, which says a lot about how much attention this game gives to its characters. Honestly, I wish there was more to say about the story, but there just isn’t. It’s a first draft at best, and other than getting some points for being ambitious, the game’s narrative is a failure on just about every front.
Conclusion
And that just about concludes it. I think that’s all I got on this one. It’s odd, since I was sort of anticipating this one, for better and for worse, but there just isn’t much more to talk about. It’s unfinished, and how much can one really say about a game that isn’t even done? I guess my final statement would be this: if you’re like me and regularly rewatch Michael Doughtery’s Trick-r-Treat for the atmosphere, you may like screwing around in the open world for a bit, but other than that, you’ll probably want to steer clear.
