‘Redfall’ Is Fine, But Not What I Expected From The Makers Of ‘Dishonored’

Arkane Studios is one of those game developers that I have a lot of respect for, mainly because they’ve made a few games that I really love. Dishonored remains one of my favorite games of the last decade or so, and their most recent before Redfall—the roguelike shooter, Deathloop—was super creative and a lot of fun.

Redfall is an open-world, always-online co-op vampire-hunting loot-shooter. It’s basically the last thing I would ever want from this particular developer. It would be like Dark Souls studio FromSoftware making a live-service battle royale game with loot boxes. No thank you.

I haven’t played a ton of the game yet, but here are some initial impressions.

What Works

We’ll start off with what I’m enjoying so far:

• Arkane brings some stylish artwork and animation to its bloodsuckers and to the woodsy town of Redfall. It’s not as immersive or unique as Dishonored, but it’s still pretty cool and with graphics turned all the way up, running my RTX 3080 GPU with DLSS on quality and ray-tracing enabled, the game looks great and runs just fine (for the most part). It’s nothing mind-blowing in the graphics department, but it’s pretty enough.
• I’ll emphasize that the vampires themselves (not the cultist bad guys) have a really cool aesthetic.
• I can see how this would be a fun game to play with friends, though so far I’ve only been able to play solo. Hoping to test out co-op later and report back. The story is a little threadbare but that’s okay for a co-op shooter.
• I like the superpowers you get. Each of the four characters has a handful of special powers (varying from special weapons to healing powers to invisibility and so on and so forth) with descriptions that actually remind me a little bit of Valorant’s hero powers. You can level these up as you go.

What Doesn’t Work

• It’s always-online for one thing. In my first fight in the open-world section of the game with a couple of nasty bloodsuckers, I was disconnected and had to go back to the fire station (home base). I was playing solo. There was no reason whatsoever for me to be connected to the internet to play. I wasn’t hosting a game. I had no intention of playing with other players. But I was disconnected.
• The gunplay is clunky. It’s not bad necessarily, but it sure isn’t good. It just feels slow and unwieldy, and I’ve done what I can to speed things up, including maxing out my FOV slider. The guns seem fine, but the actual shooting is not. I’m a big first-person shooter player and I have yet to enjoy a single encounter in Redfall.
• There are some weird bugs and performance issues. I’m less concerned by this, simply because of course these will be patched and ironed out but, as with any new game, buyer beware.

The big thing, though, as I said above, is that this just feels like a massive step backward for Arkane. I loved Dishonored and while other titles like Prey were not as good, they were still games that fit the studio’s DNA. A loot-shooter just feels wrong. Maybe that’s personal bias—I’m not a big loot-shooter guy—but Arkane’s talents feel wasted here.

You know what would have been much better? A single-player vampire game that dispensed with all the loot and just gave us cool powers to play with and a deep fascinating world to explore. Give us a cool story, all four skill-trees to unlock, and a campaign to play through and leave this live-service crap to other developers. I don’t need fifty different handguns and shotguns in my inventory. One of each will do just fine.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s necessarily as bad as people are making it out to be either. I think it just depends on what you’re looking for in a lot of ways. So far, I think it’s fine. Nothing great. Not something I’m excited to play or really my cup of tea. Unless something really hooks me in the next couple hours, I’ll stick with my Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and all the other games I have going right now, at least for the time-being.

I can’t say whether this will be a big miss for Microsoft and Bethesda or not, however. It’s a Game Pass title, which means a bunch of Xbox players now have free access to this to play with their friends. It might be something that grows into a big hit on the platform, kind of like how Sea Of Thieves started off on rough waters but sailed into something of a modern classic. I didn’t much care for that one, either, but I know many people love it. Time will tell!

Have you played Redfall yet? What do you think of the game? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.