Redfall review: vampire blaster is a bloody, baffling, but often beguiling mishmash (2024)

A couple of hours into Redfall, Arkane’s open-world vampire adventure, and honestly I’m baffled. In fact, I’m convinced I’m missing something. This is the new game from industry luminary Arkane, the studio of Dishonored and Prey, and I’m playing a serviceable but technically wonky Destiny-esque looter shooter. I go out on a mission, I shoot bad guys and blood suckers; occassionally better guns will fall out so I can shoot them more efficiently. It’s alright, but expectation can be a troublesome thing. I’m expecting Arkane’s brand of inventive ‘immersive sim’ and combat freedom, I’m expecting glorious world-building and level design.

Dig deeper and you will find this stuff. The Arkane magic is there, but it is pushed to the peripheries in favour of a structure of game that has been done to death over the last decade. And rarely done well. It’s an odd marriage, but you can perhaps understand the desire for one of the industry’s best developers to have a crack at it. Less understandable is how Redfall released in such a state that Xbox boss Phil Spencer issued an extraordinary mea culpa following a less than stellar reception.

Perhaps an apology is corporate overkill for a game that has no doubt been created with the best of intentions, but Redfall certainly has a litany of unignorable technical woes that suggest it needed longer in the oven. But there is also a fundamental mismatch in the recipe of the game that no extra time would have solved. It will probably be no surprise that, glitches aside, the looter shooter part of Redfall is where it falls flattest and the Arkane-specialty immersive sim and design is where it shows some spark.

Oh and how it shines when given the chance. Even the opening has a suggestion of something more. The titular Redfall is a small island town in Massachussets overrun by a multiplying cabal of long-limbed vampires, their brainwashed cultist followers and the gung-ho private military group sent in to contain the situation. The latter not doing such a good job given the vampire gang has managed to conquer the town and block out the sun.

You are one of four super-powered members of the local resistance –each with their own set of special skills– forced into fighting back after a failed escape attempt. The boat you were on is capsized by the vamps as they swept the water up into a magical, beguiling blockade. As you retreat back to shore, you see that Redfall itself is a spooky, but gorgeously constructed parody of the American dream; clapboard suburbs, neon-signed radio stations, a preserved 50s movie theatre, looming churches, dockyards and shrimp shacks. Your initial base of operations in the first of Red is a cavernous, fabulous fire station. Venture into any number of the buildings and they are equally as intricate and telling of a simple life before the vampire invasion, with smartly written notes giving you more context. Arkane have a unique way with colour, light and framing that both feeds you eye candy and guides you to where you need to be.

“Here we go,” you think. “This is the stuff.” And yet for all of its apparent meticulous construction, Redfall often feels broken and empty. The game runs at a now rather infamous 30FPS as opposed to the slicker 60FPS. I don't subscribe to the idea that this is automatically a bad thing, but Redfall often feels sluggish and constantly judders below that number anyway. Add in some grisly texture pop-in, frozen, non-reactive vampires that can be walked straight through and some odd sound glitches and you have a level of scrappiness that becomes impossible to ignore and extremely difficult to excuse.

Redfall becomes not so much an abandoned town as a creaky unused soundstage. As you collect your missions from the fire station and head out to your map marker, those streets feel more barren every time. There isn’t even that many folks to fire your gun at away from the mission markers, something that would be a mixed blessing anyway, given the action tends to only ever push at the boundaries of okay.

There’s a decent heft to the guns as you blast away with the usual array of assault rifles, pistols and shotguns. Plus the added vampire-bashing stake launchers and UV torches. Aiming is a little sluggish on the default setting, but the rattatat of gunfire has a certain satisfaction. Blasting your way through the (notably stupid) human enemies feels like passable busy work. They pointlessly fire shotguns at a distance, are bewilderingly slow to notice your approach and are happy to bundle together in a handy group so you can shoot a red barrel and get rid of them at a swat. Maybe the cultists' lemming approach makes sense, but I'm not sure what the military specialists' excuse is.

Redfall review: vampire blaster is a bloody, baffling, but often beguiling mishmash (2)

Vampire battles fare better. They’re creepy foes, if not as tough as they look, floating off the ground and rushing you at lightning speed. They need to be knocked down and then staked before they recover, disintegrating into a firey pile of ashes. They come in different flavours too, life-sucking siphers, shielded fiends and watchers perched above ground that clarion call everyone to you if you are spotted. That brings a modicum of tactical nous and crowd control to fights, but little of the broad improvisation that has come to define Arkane's combat.

What's odd is that the game proffers this as a possibility, a splash screen tutorial promising different routes and approaches. Even my character, stealth specialist Jacob Boyer, utters before entering one property that there will be several ways to approach it. But after some searching that seemed to be limited largely to what door you kick in. Those different classes can mix up the combat, Jacob can go invisible or briefly conjure a spectral sniper rifle, telekinetic Layla can summon ghostly lifts or summon her vampiric ex-boyfriend to help, Remi has a combat robot and can lob C4, Dev can teleport or use a blacklight that turn vampires to stone.

There is a familiar flair to the special skills and when playing co-op you can definitely see the potential in the systems created here. Layla taking Jacob up to an otherwise unreachable vantage point so he can play overwatch with his ghostly gun, for instance. But the simplicity of the small-scale combat and tendency to draw you indoors for the more prominent setpieces renders it all rather defunct.

Instead it relies on you chewing through bad guys, spending an inordinate amount of time vacuuming up dropped guns with higher stats and little character and scattered stuff –board games, discarded pop cans– to trade for more guns with higher stats and little character. And… why can I not just get back to the good bits, rather than playing post-apocalyptic clean-up?

Redfall review: vampire blaster is a bloody, baffling, but often beguiling mishmash (3)

And herein lies the rub. For all of the confounding identity crisis and objectively crummy technical issues… I find myself content to return to Redfall. I swing from dire frustration at the games’ foibles, to mild enjoyment at its combat, to genuine pleasure at some its more fleshed out set-pieces and action.

There are, for instance, sidequests to clear out vampire nests and these distractions hone in on some of Arkane’s strengths, at least in terms of creating tension at atmosphere. You pass through the nest door into a more twisted and linear portion of the town, roads cracked and buildings floating. Creeping through the interior of the battered cinema only to see the screen flickering until you jump through into vampire-lined streets. Once you have destroyed the pulsing heart of the nest, it begins to collapse, leading to a mad dash to collect as much gear as you can before escaping through the nearest portal. Some of the game’s main missions offer up some similarly inventive intoxication.

Perhaps it is the promise of these moments that have made wading through the game’s other problems more bearable, with there being enough there to keep you vaguely entertained before the next genuinely good bit. This all makes Redfall a difficult game to recommend but not necessarily difficult to like. The problem is that even in its best moments you feel like you are lurching at the shadow of something better.

There is a mission relatively early on in Redfall’s tale that draws you into the mansion of one of the town’s main antagonists. It is a creepy, looming pile creaking with atmosphere and, once inside, plays smartly with Arkane’s knack for twisted level design; shifting time and space and spinning a hair-raising tale through gameplay and artistic direction. It is brilliant and, for a moment, recalls some of Arkane’s best work. But then it’s gone, fading in the wind as you return to wrestle the so-so shooting, lacklustre looting and barrage of bugs.

Rather aptly, the mission is called The House of Echoes.

Developer Arkane Austin Publisher Bethesda Formats Xbox Series X/S (tested), PC Age rating PEGI 18 Released 2 May 2023 RRP £69.99 and available on Xbox Game Pass

Redfall review: vampire blaster is a bloody, baffling, but often beguiling mishmash (2024)
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