Also available on Windows Redfall is a game that that had a lot of hype to live up and, according to critical reviews, seems to lived up to almost none of it. Arkane has an impressive resume, so a lot of people had high expectations for this game, but there's one key factor people seem to forget that makes these expectations unreasonable in my opinion - Arkane's games are single player whereas Redfall is a (mostly) open world multiplayer game. Yeah, you can play it solo as I did, but it's definitely a multiplayer game. That's a big difference; a studio specializing in single player experiences is not going to hit it out of the park on their first big multiplayer experience, especially with the turnover and personnel issues that Arkane had with this game The premise of the game is that you're trapped in the island town of Redfall, Massachusetts, a town that suddenly finds itself infested with vampires and cults worshipping them. You have a choice of playable characters each of whom have their own unique traits and skills. I chose to play as Devinder, a cryptozoologist with a gloriously British accent and a badass ultimate skill that sets up a tridirectional pulsating UV light that petrifies any vampires in range. As the vampires have somehow frozen (in time, not in ice) the ocean into massive walls of water preventing escape, the player(s) have no choice but to go on the offensive and hunt down the vampires if there's any hope of escape. The game is divided into two halves with four "vampire gods" that have to be slain numerous sub-bosses, some optional and some mandatory. You start the game in Redfall Commons where your main goal is to slay The Hollow Man. In addition to the vampires serving as The Hollow Man's thralls, you'll have to deal with his army cultists and the Bellwether mercenary company, as well. None of the human enemies are particularly difficult to kill, but they WILL swarm and obliterate you if you give them the chance. The sniper rifle was my best friend. Humans die as they would in any game, but vampires are a little trickier. You can kill them either with fire, by meleeing them while they're petrified, by shooting them with a gun that has a special perk to let you kill them (I only found one in my playthrough), or by draining their HP and then meleeing them with a weapon that has a stake attached (that would be either your shotgun or assault rifle). Anyway, once you kill The Hollow Man, you're going to be thinking "That was way too short. That can't possibly be the whole game." And it's not; you then make your way to Burial Point, the second half of the town of Redfall at which point the game inexplicably locks you out of Redfall Commons forever. This is a bizarre design choice which serves no purpose that I can see and only limits player freedom. Needless to say, it irked me. In Burial Point, you spent your missions hunting down two vampire gods - Bloody Tom and Miss Whisper. Once they're dead, you take on the game's final vampire god boss, The Black Sun. As you're doing all of this, there are numerous side quests, some "campaign side quests" that you take on at the mission table, and some miscellaneous side quests that you either pick up from the world or by talking to a certain NPC. You also have various safe houses across the world that you can secure. These safe houses have three steps to complete. First, you find the actual safe house and turn on the generator powering the UV lamps that protect it. Sometimes this involves just interacting with the generator, but sometimes the generator key is missing, so you have track down the key before you can turn on the generator and activate the safe house. Then you have to complete a random side quest. After that, you have to kill the vampire underboss of the neighborhood. Once all of that is done, you have secured the neighborhood (a misleading turn of phrase as there will still be vampires, mercenaries, and cultists skulking about). Visually, the game looks very Arkane. I don't know a better way to describe it than that. It's definitely not a photorealistic art style but it's not cell shaded, either. Someone more educated in digital art design can probably give you a better description than that, but whatever it's called, I quite liked the art direction. Vampires looked cool, the human characters looked nice, and the world itself was extremely well designed. As for performance, I've heard from friends who tried the game that some of them hit a lot of bugs, but I think they just had bad luck; even with the day one version, my main bug encounters were weird physics glitches - objects floating an inch off the ground, dead enemies ragdolling a bit too much, etc. There was one fast travel point in Burial Point that would spawn me under the world where I'd fall to my death or in the air in front of a cliff instead of on it where I'd fall and take damage about one out of every three times, but that's it. I had one crash in nearly 30 hours of gameplay which I don't consider to be bad. The only performance issue I had was slow down. The game usually runs at 30 fps (they say a 60 fps performance mode is coming later; no clue why that couldn't have been implemented at launch), but I had numerous frame rate drops including some that briefly dropped to what looked to be sub-20 fps. These were all during busy fights, but still, I was playing on a Series X, and this game isn't exactly a showcase of graphical fidelity. Overall, Redfall is okay. It's a fun little vampire romp, but the story is pretty standard and uninspired, the gameplay gets repetitive, and there are only a few truly unique places in an otherwise homogenous world to explore. It would probably be more fun with friends, but if you've got three other friends ready to play a co-op Xbox game, you're better off going with Halo Infinite or Back 4 Blood. There's just nothing that makes Redfall really stand out aside from having vampires instead of zombies, and that's not enough to make up for a bland world, mediocre story, and inexcusable performance drops. My Rating - C |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
May 2024
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