HEAR YE!!! HEAR YE!!! Gather round my loyal followers!!! Today, we will discuss of one of the most fearsome monsters throughout human history: the Vampire. There have been many examples of those legendary creatures throughout history who stalk humans in the dead of night and drain the blood from their bodies. The modern-day version of the vampire came to life in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the 1897 novel, Bram describes Dracula as a pale ancient creature who skulks in the dark halls of his isolated castle, painting the picture of what we imagine today when we think of these monsters. Later writers began to weave symbolisms into the history of vampires. The lonely outsider who inspires much of Goth culture. The hopeless romantic unable to find love due to their immortality. For me, I prefer vampires as a metaphor for the upper class: the elites draining the lower class of all their wealth. The excess extravagances of the rich that seems almost alien to us. Their ability to prolong their own lives with arcane-like sorcery. If I were one of these said heartless ghouls, looking to siphon off money from the games industry, I would purchase some controlling stake in a company like Bethesda and have them create a drab, lifeless, uninspired looter shooter resembling all of the gaming today. That blight is known as Redfall.
For those who are blissfully unaware, Redfall is the recent release from Arkane Studio, previously of Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop fame. Redfall is their latest attempt to jump aboard the live-service looter shooter that can be played solo or co-op. Unfortunately for Arkane, the internet is slowly realizing this is a charade to swindle money from players with worthless microtransactions. Only destined to share a shallow grave with Marvel’s Avengers, Babylon’s Fall, and many failed live services. You could say I was skeptical of the product from the start, but with the title on Xbox Gamepass, I figured I had nothing to lose. If only I knew.
Now those of you familiar with me standing atop my soapbox and talking about games, probably notice I tend to begin with the game’s story to set the scene. Alas, my followers, there is little story within Redfall to tell. Evil people come to Redfall. They use science to become vampires, and they hold the town hostage. The four main protagonists were on a ferry heading out of Redfall when the vampires drain the water from the harbor and use that water to erect a mountainous wall to keep people trapped in the town. From there you are introduced to the citizens of Redfall, but they feel more like plastic mannequins than living characters. There are no animated cutscenes. Every story or side mission begins with still images of characters standing around and talking while our hero talks over them. There is even a mission to retrieve a film of one of the vampires and watch it in a movie theater. Surely, you would think the game would give us an actual film to watch, but it is still presented in the same slideshow fashion. This method of delivering the story in a PowerPoint presentation comes off as cheap and threadbare.
Even the main playable characters come off as flat. I chose the engineer character because I love playing the engineer thanks to the endless hours playing one in Team Fortress 2. I still remember the trailer that introduced him, sitting next to his turret strumming on his guitar while the turrets fired in all directions. Unfortunately, Redfall’s engineer doesn’t have a fraction of the charisma that our Southern charmer has. I can rattle off facts like she came from a big family, worked for the Coast Guard, and built her own robot, but I still don’t feel like I know her. I don’t know how she would handle failure or difficult situations she can’t shoot her way through. I can’t even recall her name.
One character development trick I heard from Double Fine’s Tim Schafer is to imagine what kind of music the character would listen to. We have seen the Team Fortress 2 Engineer playing Southern licks on his own guitar, so it is probably safe to assume he likes Johnny Cash, The Outlaws, Lynard Skynard, but more obscure Lynard Skynard songs. I can only guess that the Redfall engineer probably listens to really generic Hispanic pop. There is just honestly not enough to her to assume what she listens to. Redfall’s playable characters are just not compelling enough to care about them.
Friendly NPCs also seem stilted and plastic. I remember there was a set of quests from the doctor character. With no animated cutscene or solid writing, I struggle to even recall his name. All I remember is out of the blue he wanted to go visit his father’s grave so he left the safe house. When I finally caught up to him at his father’s grave, he had been unceremoniously killed off. I assume Redfall expected me to be heartbroken. Oh, what a great tragedy to have fallen upon me. Surely, I would be weeping in despair at such a loss. Nope, I sniped the vampire mindlessly standing over his body and moved on with my day. To imply the doctor was an actual character is to insult the legion of writers who have dedicated their lives to writing characters we have loved over the years.
It’s not just the main heroes and NPC who seem void of any personality. Our opposition is filled with generic one-note enemies. Most of the vampires are elongated humans in trench coats. You think they wear coats to hide from the daylight, but vampires can spawn in the daytime. It’s like Arkane took the imagery from titles like Blade without any understanding of why their vampires look the way they do.
The human occult members aren’t much better either. They are supposed to be humans who saw the power of the vampires and decided to dedicate their lives to serving them. You think they would try to dress in a way that vampires find appealing but they don’t. They sport fisherman jackets and ski masks like every other boring bad guy in the sea of shooters that aim to be realistic. Some will wear antlers or excess blood as if it was supposed to denote crips and blood gang symbols but it doesn’t help them look any less tiresome. Quite frankly this seems lock step in line with the common video game trend of dishing out humdrum human enemies in games that don’t need it. You have vampires, why am I fighting enemies copy-and-pasted from The Division? Redfall is not the only guilty party here. Both Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West also make you fight the same mundane human mobs when you could be fighting robot dinosaurs instead. This trend honestly needs to have a stake rammed through its heart.
Since we need to fight repetitive humans, we have to fight them with the dullest set of guns I have ever seen. Guns, so plain, that my mind wanders to more interesting topics when I think of the pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles in this game. You also have some skills based on the hero you picked but they are hardly worth mentioning either. Yes, there are weapons specifically used to fight the vampires like stake guns and UV light guns, but Redfall never leans into these more interesting weapons. Of course, these guns come in the tiresome color coating system to denote rarity in the hope you will chase guns that are labeled orange instead of green. I had a slight hope that legendary weapons would add interesting gameplay perks, but that was too much of an ask for Redfall. My four legendary weapons simply do more damage. For a studio that gave us interesting abilities in the Dishonored series, this is a complete step backwards.
Unfortunately, the vampires are not as challenging as they appear. They merely bum-rush you and swipe at you with a melee strike that’s easy to sidestep. Combat, between both cult members and vampires, is woefully wearisome. Partly due to the design of combat but mostly due to the AI being so dumb it could make a tech CEO backtrack his plans on making AI the future. I lost count of the number of times I walked up to an enemy before they realized I was there. In all honesty, the combat in Redfall is so tedious and tiresome, that I am falling asleep on my soapbox as I recount my experience with it.
Naturally, it would only make sense that this mindnumbing combat be used to justify all the content being spread across a map in the typical open-world fashion. Frankly, Redfall resembles trying to spread the last bit of peanut butter across bread when the jar has been empty for weeks. Surely players would love spending minutes walking from one lifeless firefight to another to clear out nests and unlock safe houses. Only for those safe houses to have side quests you can do, but all consist of going to a place and either shooting someone or getting an artifact. Do enough of these activities and you can spawn The Rook, a hulking vampire who dies in three hits from a solid stake launcher. It makes a town being invaded by vampires sound so routine and stale.
Now, I know I am one of the harshest critics when it comes to open-world games. I have torn games like Horizon Zero Dawn for copy-paste open-world design. I certainly understand the appeal of having a checklist of tasks you complete in one of these games, but I can’t just have a list. I need a fun exciting way to get around the map along with really solid gameplay loops to justify that list. Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ghost of Tshumia are my prime example of this. Now, I recognize a lot of people don’t share the same opinion and just want a checklist. To those people, I still don’t recommend Redfall. You will not get the same enjoyment from Redfall you get from a Borderlands or Far Cry game. The cathartic release is not there because everything is mind-numbingly generic.
I am honestly not even mad at the game itself; that would imply I had an emotional investment in such a vapid product. Honestly, I am more mad that Bethesda thought it would be a good idea to market Redfall with a cover of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. A song about the tragic loss of Kurt Cobain; how Chris Cornell was so stricken with grief that he simply wanted the world to be washed away. Sure, Bethesda, used that song in your trailers because there is a solar eclipse in your dishonest video aiming to sell another live service that is both cold and dead. Tasteless is still too kind of a word to use here.
Some might be asking, Doomsayer, why would you even bother with Redfall? Surely, you heard the game was getting panned by both critics and audiences alike. Honestly, my loyal followers, both my friend and myself have a guilty pleasure: we love playing bad co-op games to laugh at them. A cruel jester to the artist who did their best on the product, but to deny the satisfaction at laughing at higher-ups who make such blunders like thinking Dead Space 3 should be co-op is a pleasure we both can’t resist. Naturally, when we caught wind of Redfall being on Gamepass for free and being a complete and utter disaster, we both looked at each other with the most diabolical grins. Little did I know it would be Redfall that would have the last laugh.
I tried to install the game on both of my existing hard drives and got the same error saying Redfall failed to install on both of them. I ordered a new one and was successful in installing the game. Unfortunately, my technical troubles were far from over. Redfall frequently would crash on me mid-game; I found myself only being able to play fifteen, twenty, or half an hour sessions, before being booted back to the Xbox app. I spent hours opening and closing my computer testing cables and various hard drives. My current playthrough of Redfall says I have played for 20 hours, but for me, it feels like an eternity. Sometimes I close my eyes and I see that opening main scene displaying the titular town of Redfall. Not only is the game utterly absent of character, challenge, or cathartic release, but is also completely cursed on a technical level. Even if you have Gamepass, this title is not even worth the space on your hard drives. You may laugh at me as a crazed man shouting atop his soapbox, but I am completely serious when I say stay away from Redfall.
All I have left to say is to ask the game industry how many other single-player studios are you going to destroy in the pursuit of live service gold; more like fool’s gold though. The reporting has finally come out that Bethesda wanted Redfall to be another microtransaction cash grab and frankly, I would not be shocked if Bethesda tries to add them back in. Seventy percent of Arkane Studio has left because they did not want to make this game despite management claiming time and time again that no, seriously we want to make live service slop. This live service craze has killed studios like Bioware, Arkane and will probably kill Rocksteady with the release of Suicide Squad. All of this needs to stop. We need to learn from the success of Hi-Fi Rush; simply make games and release them when they are finished. Stop with the chase of live services. Stop announcing games before they are ready. Stop with the bloated marketing budget. It is over. We, the audience, need to greet any and all live services with pitchforks and torches. Only a bloody stake through the gaming industry’s vile heart with save our beloved hobby.
