Redfall – Review In Progress

Redfall is now available for players worldwide, but unfortunately, I’ve only been playing for a few days and cannot provide a full review yet.

Writing this Redfall review-in-progress is painful because Arkane Studios is one of my favorite game developers, and its new game is largely disappointing. While the open world is beautifully sculpted with intriguing vistas, it’s weirdly empty, often implying that the harbor town’s vampire usurpers invaded during the offseason.

As a whole, Redfall’s gameplay is unbalanced. Several puzzling decisions, like a lack of stealth takedowns or the inability to pause the game in single-player mode, are far from what I’d expect from an Arkane game. Rampant technical issues hinder the brighter moments of the experience, including frequent server crashes, inputs failing to work, NPCs and enemies spawning duplicate versions of themselves, and one very frustrating bug which prevents me from closing the world map and main menu in cooperative play.

On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists, each with unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-effective skill tree. Also, a handful of weapons are neat, like the heavy-hitting stake launcher or ultra-violet raygun that turns vampires to stone. A few locations, like a deranged scientist’s mansion, a cliffside lighthouse, and a hangar repurposed as a prison quarter, provide enough challenge to incentivize intelligent pathfinding. Unfortunately, most locations and enemy placements feel haphazardly designed – certainly a byproduct of creating two open-world maps.

However, my evaluation may change in the coming days. I’ve completed roughly 50 percent of the game and its first story arc, but I’ve only played for a few days and have more content to see.