Redfall Reviews
Arkane's vampire thriller is muddled and deeply compromised, but has moments of real charm.
Redfall's empty open world, flimsy shooting, and siloed systems make for a flat, dull experience.
Redfall is ultimately a fun experience thanks to the world, the enemies, and the gunplay itself, but as a whole, it's an incredibly shallow one too. Because of this, some may question whether it's worth the price tag, but it's noteworthy that Redfall is launching on Xbox Game Pass. It feels like the game is designed for the service, with an experience that is easily digestible, is full of simple mindless fun, and is easy to move on from.
Redfall is a bafflingly bad time across the board. Plagued with bland missions, boneheaded enemies, and repeated technical problems, Redfall simply wasn’t ready for daylight in this state.
Redfall isn’t a total disaster, and there’s fun to be had in slaying vampires, especially with a couple of friends. But to call Redfall a shallow experience would be an understatement. I’m happy to loot and shoot and make my own fun, but there still needs to be something there to pull me through it. Nothing in Redfall, from the loot to the characters to the exploration to the power climb, ever made me want to keep playing, or feel like there was something more to achieve. No amount of bug fixes or updates will be able to improve Redfall’s fundamental gameplay flaws. It’s not just rough around the edges, it’s rutted all the way through.
Redfall is ultimately not up to Arkane's usual standards. It feels rushed, unfinished, and unsatisfying to play.
Looking at the world of Redfall, I become sad by its wasted potential. For every great location, there are a handful of forgettable ones. The result is an empty-feeling game with several puzzling problems, like a lack of proper stealth takedowns, a tedious quest and waypoint system, and the inability to pause gameplay in single-player mode. Rampant technical issues hinder brighter moments, including frequent server crashes during multiplayer, inputs failing to work, broken animations, and numerous other bugs that make playing Redfall a frustrating experience. For a game about fighting the undead, Redfall feels soulless in all the wrong ways.
If this tone takes center stage in the back half of the story, combined with plot developments that add some momentum to the proceedings, it may be easier to overlook the game’s weaker aspects and appreciate it as a compelling narrative work. At this point, though, the town of Redfall is sucked too dry of liveliness for players to be invested in whether its vampires triumph or not.
Arkane takes a stab at infusing the genre du jour with its signature style, but the end results are a bloody mess.
An echo of Arkane’s past glories - one in which the studio’s unique voice can still be heard, but more faintly than we’ve come to expect.
From a studio having delivered far better and should in all likelihood have done so once more, Redfall is an uncharacteristically poor and cobbled-together brand of tedium.
A hollow open world FPS which feels more like you're playing through an already abandoned live service, as opposed to a fully supported one.
Redfall is hampered by issues like poor AI, texture pop-ins, and bland missions, meaning its stronger moments are overshadowed.
Frankly, it’s a relief to see real neck-biters treated with the proper pulp care. Arkane Austin gets right to it: teeth, claws, and clear agendas.
Redfall is an open-world shooter where you can creep through a spooky mansion alone at night, then link up with some friends to take on a giga-vampire in another dimension. It's weird, and it's the right kind of weird.
Redfall becomes Arkane's most fun game: no moral dilemmas, no existential doubts and totally enjoyable both with friends and alone.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
I wanted desperately to find a good game underneath all the bugs in Redfall, and every now and then a tiny ray of light would shine through and give me hope. I took my time to give it a fair opportunity where others wrote it off only a few hours in. Unfortunately, they were right, and this will go down as one of the more disappointing games that I’ve played in recent years. All we can hope for now is that Redfall’s disastrous journey serves as a warning to Microsoft and its stable of development studios. Not because the world’s second-largest company can’t take the hits, but because players deserve better.
I really spent most of my time playing Redfall thinking about what else Redfall could have been. I like that Arkane tried something new, and I’m bummed it came out like this. It’s a really unique premise and concept in its first bite, but its fangs don’t leave a lasting mark.
In Redfall, Arkane's trademark can only be seen in places, and the end result, while not entirely awful, falls far short of what we expected from the return to the scenes of Prey's creators.
Review in Italian | Read full review