Redfall – Review
Overview – While the core gameplay loop in Redfall’s open world is pretty conventional, the game’s unique touches and attention to detail help keep it feeling new and exciting.
Pros:
- Interesting setting and color pallette
- Unique abilities
- Great for solo and co-op play
- Minimal hand-holding
Cons:
- Story is not a focus
Score – 8/10
Within Redfall’s vampirically induced water-wall, you play as one of four customizable heroes trying to figure out what the hell is going on. You and a handful of other survivors will set up shop in a decommissioned fire station and use it as a home base as you take on major missions from the briefing table. You stock up on ammunition, peruse the skill tree for the flashy moves you want to learn, and venture out into a world that alternates between a gloomy ecliptic day and a pleasingly spooky night (really, no game captures the saturated, slightly campy feel of Halloween quite like Redfall).
The crux of Redfall is that a group of power-hungry people working under the guise of medicine and wellness tap into an inexplicable power that transforms them into super-vampires and most of the region into regular vampires; oh, and they eclipsed the sun and blocked everyone in the region using a water-wall, the mechanics of which I never quite understood. Despite the fact that you spend a lot of time with human people in the bases, Redfall’s story isn’t the focus here. The only characters with any significant growth are the villains, each of whom is maniacally devoted on a particular gimmick, and the playable heroes only get a few surface-level snatches of their own dialogue.
Arkane games have always been less about the main story and more about the unusual things you find through a combination of play and exploration in a strange and distinct gaming environment. Most importantly, you may still do it in Redfall, and you can find all sorts of strange things in the city’s fairgrounds and forests. The combination of the graphic style and the nearly neon-vibrant lighting throughout the environment makes it compelling even on a merely visual level; it really is a picture postcard of spookiness, and that can ramp up genuine fear in some of the vamp-infested mansions and otherworldly places.
The open world, which is Arkane’s first, is deep enough that you can just go in any direction and find something to do. When you venture inside a building, the game’s atmosphere shifts from open-world exploration to something more reminiscent of a Giallo horror film, complete with crows circling the building to warn you that the inhabitants are vampires.
The game’s emphasis on both outdoor and indoor environments, as well as the excellent level design of some of the buildings (with multiple entry points via skylights above, secret passages below, front, back, you name it), prevent it from feeling like a typical open-world game that prioritises outdoor locations.
Redfall features two open-world landscapes, each with its own set of neighbourhoods for you to explore. Each of these enclaves features a Safehouse, where you can take on optional objectives leading up to a showdown with the area’s underboss. True to form, Arkanese combat allows you to choose your own strategy, be it a full-on assault with Leila’s mental barrier, which explodes on adversaries upon discharge, or a stealthy manoeuvre using Justin’s invisibility cloak. In order to use Davinder’s translocator, which allows him to teleport to perchy locations up high, I played through the game as him, despite his irritatingly toffish and off-kilter British accent. There is no one best way to handle these situations; in the past I have avoided detection by teleporting to a nearby roof or throwing my translocator through a window to reach the underboss’s hiding place inside the building, where I would then coolly shoot them in the head with my devastating Stake Launcher before vanishing into the night.
In order to get access to the Big Bosses of the game’s two separate open-world maps, you must first beat a set number of these subbosses. Oh, and there’s also the strange alternative world where the vampires live and draw their power from; in addition to the elaborately constructed bases, mansions, and homesteads of the mortal realm, you’ll also be dipping into the vampires’ psychic reality on occasion.
Here, the game’s cooperative shooting instincts start to clash with the Arkane’s more freewheeling worldview. It is not uncommon for ‘Vampire Nests’ to appear on the map, marking the beginning of a circle that gradually becomes larger over time and bestows more strength onto all vampires within it. To eliminate these, you must first locate the portal to the psychic realm in these regions, and then run a linear, semi-randomized gauntlet to pulverise a huge heart and seal the nest. Sure, these zones look the part, but with their enemy modifiers and what seems to be a few different level elements randomly spliced together each time, it feels like a shallow attempt to pad out co-op play, and is somewhat superfluous when there is already perfectly compelling co-op stuff to do out in the overworld.
Similarly, the Big Bosses aren’t the immersive sim deliciousness of letting you defeat them anyway you please or through crazy roundabout tactics, but rather, they’re staged showdowns against enemies with limited movesets that are simply too easy to cheese and outwit.
I found that I enjoyed Redfall the most when I just wandered around its spooky stylized world and let myself stumble upon things, such as a cult effigy being burned in the woods or a mysteriously lit house whose inhabitants had an unholy pact with a local vampire. I’ve also seen my fair share of gunfights between the various AI groups; once, a group of mercenaries came dangerously close to wiping out a group of Hollow Man cultists before being wiped out themselves by a pair of vampires. After doing quite a bit of damage to the vamps, I went in and staked the two of them to the ground, then helped myself to their loot.
In Redfall, you can find numerous vamp species. Your typical one is quick, strafes left and right, and can teleport around you (they may also be the first FPS adversary you’ll face that truly ducks and weaves beneath your shots, which adds a wonderful element of trickery to the fight). There are the exploding soft Bloodbags, the Syphon, which drains your life force, and the Shroud, which obscures your view and fires at you from a safe distance.
When you’ve really pissed off the Vampire Gods by generally kicking too much ass in the world, the Rook will show up, and he’ll be the most fashionable vampire you’ve ever seen. The sky turns red and lightning strikes more frequently as the rage bar fills up; eventually, one of these strikes will summon the Rook. It’s a fantastic idea, but on the Dusk and Midnight difficulties, these tense confrontations are far too simple and end far too quickly to do justice to the effort put into creating them. The same holds true for all aspects of vampirism, from routine fights in the environment to monsters; once you get into a rhythm with your powers, you become kind of unbeatable, and in co-op that is only likely to be worsened, regardless of the scaling Arkane adopts. It makes me miss Dishonoured 2’s wide variety of difficulty settings.
Compared to Arkane’s earlier works, the combat abilities of the four protagonists place less emphasis on stealth. While you can one-shot knock unwary adversaries on the back of the head with your gun, there are no opportunities for dazzling stealth takedowns, the setting of deliciously cunning traps, or hacking opposing turrets to fight for you. There is an opponent awareness mechanism, but the AI doesn’t seem to mind if you teleport around them with the translocator; in fact, they frequently turn to face you even if you’ve beamed yourself to a far different position. There’s still some room for stealth and covert mission completion (heck, I dodged every single vampire on one of those Vampire Nest runs), but less room for dirty techniques and system manipulation.
Arkane’s signature superpower-shooting stuff, where you could truly toy with your opponents like in Dishonoured, and a more straightforward looter shooter in the vein of Borderlands create a little of tension here. I didn’t care for the treasure system, where you constantly find yourself upgrading weaponry based on progressively increasing levels and numbers, or the floating numbers that come off of enemies (which you can and should turn off). The firearms include the usual handguns, assault rifles, and shotguns, as well as certain specialised weapons, such as the Stake Launcher, which is especially effective against vampires, and a UV beam that turns vampires to stone so that they may be easily shattered afterwards.
Aside from one character who acquires a C4 talent, the game conspicuously lacks explosive weaponry. The fact that the air around gunfights you get into often crackles with fire and electricity suggests that this design choice worked out for Arkane; I suspect that this is to encourage you to tactically blast the various vehicles, oil slicks, and electric generators conveniently dotted around many of the areas.
I agree that the skill tree isn’t as deep as Arkane fans are used to seeing in a single-player game, but I think it really shines in co-op. For example, the translocator isn’t just for one-time usage; it basically establishes a portal between where you tossed it and where it landed, so your teammates can use it as long as it’s there. Meanwhile, Dev’s electric pulse spear, which zaps enemies in a radial pattern surrounding it, can also function as a healing beacon if its user has the appropriate skills. I think there will be some really cool Redfall co-op gameplay videos popping up as players start figuring out how to work together to make the most of the game’s unique tactical collaboration potential.
It’s undeniable that Redfall watered down Arkane’s past games’ immersive sim purity to cater to the more commercial notion of hunting down vampires with a gang of friends. Redfall is the studio’s most overtly shooter effort to yet, but it succeeds in retaining auteurial touches like mechanical fun, innovative worldbuilding, and the thrill of discovering a fresh and incredibly stylish world. I hate to resort to a cliche, but goddamn Redfall might be a game with ergh a little something for everyone (assuming ‘everyone’ is made up of fans of Arkane/immersive sims, Far Cry, and Borderlands).
You can play Redfall solo, exploring a haunted New England manor in the dark and relying on notes and careful observation to piece together the horror that struck there, or you can team up with two superpowered friends and attack a group of cultists worshipping a tree vampire or take on a giant giga-vampire from another dimension. Its success lies in the fact that it provides a wide variety of experiences, from the engaging to the competent to the “OK, but awesome with friends.”
