Redfall Review - IGN (2024)

An undercooked looter-shooter by every metric, Redfall’s chief problem is that it’s simply not ready to be played. By the halfway mark of the story – when it shifts to the second of its two separate open-world maps – I was already thoroughly underwhelmed by the bland missions, weak combat, and repeated technical problems I’d seen. Of course, I’d held out hope for the possibility that things would crescendo as it approached its conclusion; that an imaginative finale might make jostling with all the jank worth a Game Pass glance for vampire junkies and co-op crews. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better. If anything, it gets worse – like the delayed reaction of a knock to the crotch.

Redfall is a distinct departure from the likes of Deathloop and Dishonored. Certainly some of that Arkane DNA has sidestepped its way into the finished product – chiefly in the magical abilities of the four available powered-up protagonists – but Redfall’s open-world approach to a modern-day Massachusetts is otherwise a little more mundane in comparison. Not only does the architecture seem a little flavourless compared to Deathloop’s funky retro-futurism and the Victorian backdrop of Dishonored, but also the whole thing is lacking in fidelity and detail. This is not a showcase of what the Xbox Series X is capable of.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Redfall’s angular and simple visual style – which is on-brand with Arkane’s typical approach and roughly akin to a bloody, gothic Fortnite – but all the charm of a stylised approach like this is lost with such murky textures, basic foliage, and mediocre lighting. It just doesn’t look like a brand-new 2023 Xbox game. As it stands, it regularly looks like something from the backwards-compatible catalogue – and not necessarily from the most recent generation.

Bloody Bore

Redfall is perhaps best described as Far Cry with a supernatural slant, and its premise is simple: take back the town from the slobbering vampires and their human flunkies that have occupied it. Unfortunately, doing so is remarkably boring.

Missions are extremely cyclical, and each is cut from a very limited assortment of templates and repeated ad nauseam. Most seem based around poking through various locations around town looking for random items and picking them up, putting them down, or turning them on or off. Occasionally, even this is mishandled: during one mission I needed to retrieve some spare candles from a shed on a farm and, after visiting several outbuildings on the property, I eventually stumbled onto some candles and rejoiced at yet another menial scavenger hunt completed. However, these weren’t the required candles; they were just set decoration. The required “candles” were actually a box with unseen candles in it, in a different shed. Nobody foresaw this confounding annoyance.

Sometimes you’ll encounter a locked door, or a piece of equipment needing a key. That key will be on a lanyard somewhere nearby, but you’ll only discover it by systematically hunting around and looking at dull props until you or one of your (up to three) co-op buddies accidentally highlights it. It’s just irritating busywork to pad out vanilla quests.

Frustratingly, the deeper I got into Redfall the more evident the rut became. For instance, access to attack each boss is gated in exactly the same way and requires the skulls of three underbosses – skulls that can only be gathered by doing side missions. But these side missions quickly repeat, too, and before you know it you’re stabbing the same haunted trees, blasting identical vampires to dust, and shooting the same gas bottles in the same giant piles of trash.

Even the kooky and otherworldly vampire nests, which essentially function as enemy camps you can assault for loot, are a letdown. These nightmarish nests, which remix parts of the overworld and warp and cram them into twisted tunnels descending to a huge and haunted heart that needs to be destroyed, quickly became chore-like once I began to notice the same segments being recycled and reused in subsequent nests.

It also ends with a whimper, with a boss fight against a huge, supernatural nasty that… essentially boils down to pressing X at three different points on the map. It’s like diet Doom Eternal.

Sucks to Be You

Plenty of games have gotten by with weak and repetitive quest design simply by having great moment-to-moment gameplay, but Redfall doesn’t have that going for it either. With four heroes to choose from, each with three special abilities – plus co-op support for up to four players – there are objectively many ways you and a team of friends can approach combat. The colour-coded gun and gadget loot system is a bit hard to parse, with ostensibly rare and elite golden weapons doled out early but rapidly eclipsed in potency by seemingly more “common” colours, but when it’s cooperating the combat is kinetic and bloody. The default aiming controls are far too sluggish, and it’s absurd the only way to change weapons is cycle through them in chronological order, but it can occasionally be satisfying to quickly take down a clump of enemies as a group. From time to time I got into a brief groove with my friends by petrifying vampires with UV light so that they could shatter them, allowing me to concentrate on the next as they bashed away.

The key word here is quickly, though. That is, you have to kill them before the AI gets the opportunity to embarrass itself. The longer combat drags on, the more evident it is that Redfall’s enemies completely lack the wits to put up a stimulating fight.

Human enemies seem largely disinterested with taking effective cover in a shootout. This is particularly evident if you ever sit back and watch the various factions battle one another; opposing soldiers love squatting in front of objects to give their assailants the best chance to kill them. I’ve had snipers rushing at me like an eight-year-old on their first visit to laser tag, and others who’ve found themselves irrevocably trapped inside parts of the environment.

The vampires, however, are easily the worst offenders, from the low-level ones that charge and slash at us like mindless animals to the more powerful ones who’ll politely absorb sniper rounds to the face from afar (possibly because they’re confused by small spaces). Overall, vampires just seem woefully underused as scary threats. A lot of the time they float around in the open – apparently sleeping peacefully. They just hover, waiting for us to walk directly up to them and attack them – sometimes blissfully unaware you’ve just turned the vampire that was beside them to dust. It’s just not fun to fight enemies who are so dumb they can’t even defend themselves.

It’d be easier to look past the plain combat if the story was compelling, but it too has little bite. Events unfold in lightly animated paintings or static, in-engine dioramas. They all look like placeholders for cutscenes that were never made, and I have to say fighting my way to a film projector to run what’s essentially a slideshow certainly gives Redfall a cheapness that’s hard to shake. The unrewarding story starts suddenly after a short narration, provides little context for who your characters are, and ultimately goes nowhere interesting, with no engaging twists or turns to speak of. It took me 20-odd hours to finish, playing a mix of solo, co-op with a friend, and also in a group of three, but I’d estimate a decent portion of that time was eaten up hunting for arbitrary keys, or standing still watching statues of ghostly central nervous systems having tedious and stilted conversations.

Also, be warned that progression doesn’t save for any player but the host in co-op games, which seems fair enough if you and your mates don’t have the same missions unlocked but makes a lot less sense if all players are at identical points in the campaign. I began from scratch with two friends, all three of us fresh from the first mission, but while they kept their gear and XP they’ll now need to play those missions again – and considering that it wasn’t much fun to do the first time I don’t envy anyone who has to go through it twice.

A lot has been made of Redfall only running at 30fps at launch on Xbox Series X|S but, while it’s certainly noticeable when moving rapidly, it’d be disingenuous of me to pretend it’s a total dealbreaker. It’s not ideal, certainly, but as a console gamer who grew up playing on 50Hz TVs at 25fps, I’m not going to throw my toys out of the pram over it. What’s far, far more pressing an issue than Redfall’s Xbox frame rate is its raft of other performance problems, from textures that take an absolute age to pop in (or don’t load at all), stuttering when staking vampires at close quarters, disappearing characters and missing animations, and other mission-breaking bugs.

Sometimes my friends appeared stationary, sliding around the map like chess pieces, and sometimes they weren’t there at all – they were just a floating gun. On the other hand, sometimes a character will appear but their gun will not – making them look like they’re playing air guitar. During the climax of an early boss fight my character completely vanished from my friend’s screen, turning what could have been a satisfying team victory into a moment of bemused laughter.

During one side mission I died trying to kill a vampire, but when I came back to finish the job he was just a non-interactive blue ghost, rotating to face me but otherwise rooted in place. When I came back again his energy shield was there, but the vampire… wasn’t in it. During a co-op session I found myself (more than once) fruitlessly attacking an enemy who was standing right in front of me but my friends saw as a dead body. On more than one occasion, in both maps, my crouch and start buttons totally ceased functioning. They just made clunking sounds.

The start button doesn’t pause, by the way. It’s obviously understandable when playing online co-op, but completely baffling and inconvenient when playing solo. Dying while in a menu in single-player is absolutely ridiculous. There are even errors in the menu screens, but I guess that’s because vampires don’t use autocorrect. They love Type Os.