Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot is a novel about vampires who settle into a small, New England town, where they set up shop and turn the tide. In a lot of ways, Arkane’s Redfall — a newly released Xbox console exclusive — is very similar to King’s classic and beloved story, although it’s unfortunately not as good. One is a must read literary effort, whereas the other is a mediocre-at-best video game that we had hoped would be better. It’s too bad, because Microsoft was due for a win in the exclusives department.
Set in the fictional town of the same name, Redfall looks and feels like Salem’s Lot come to digital life, but there’s simply not enough to it to make it fun or memorable. It feels like an unfinished game; released too early to appease those holding the purse strings.
The game begins after you choose from one of four different heroes, each with his or her own special abilities and inferred classes. I had a hard time picking between these folks, because it wasn’t obvious which one was best for my play style. Then, I ended up picking a character I would normally avoid — he of the enemy spotting raven, ability to go invincible and a special power that brings up a damaging sniper rifle. When I realized what I’d done, I considered starting anew but never did. I just — admittedly — haven’t used his abilities much.
Then again, that’s more of a problem with the game than with myself. The player should feel the need to use special abilities as much as possible, but there are so few enemies in Redfall that the bird feels almost unnecessary. Yes, you read that right: there’s a distinct lack of enemies in what is a co-op focused shooter. That’s not something we saw coming.
Simply put, the town of Redfall feels ghostly. You can walk and walk without running into enemies, or perhaps just coming upon a few in the street at most. They’re quite easy to avoid, so the raven doesn’t feel important. It’s an oddly desolate game world, and it keeps the experience from being fun. Granted, the amount of damage enemies can do, coupled with the limited (five) health packs you can carry, and their inability to fully heal you, makes for a game that would be frustrating if it had a lot more foes.
The bad guys are not limited to vampires, you see. The majority of the enemies you’ll come across will be humans who worship different vampire gods and walk the streets with guns in support of them. Regular vampires will be found nearby, or even by their lonesome, and will chase after you. Your goal is to pump them full of lead or EV light, deplete their health bar and then stake them (with one that’s attached to your gun.) These will be your most common combat experiences, although you’ll occasionally come across shielded vampires, creatures that blow up when shot, turret vampires, ones that steal your life force and one or two other special varieties. They’re just limited, annoying and best left alone if possible.
Being that this is a loot shooter, like Borderlands (mostly in name only), there are lots of things to pick up throughout this troubled town. This includes random items, which are turned into money that can be spent on med kits, lockpicks, rewire kits and ammunition, and dropped or discovered weapons. There are a lot of pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles, shotguns, stake guns, UV guns and flare guns to pick up and choose from. They’re assigned different rarities, but you’ll often end up with duplicates.
Each player can equip three different guns at one time, but their inventory can hold something like forty of the colour coded things. I mostly stuck with a pistol, a shotgun and an assault rifle, but used the latter two most. After all, it wasn’t hard to one shot cultists, and those two did the best damage against vampires, at least in my opinion. The gunplay is quite basic and dated, though, like a lot of the core gameplay found herein. Nothing about it stands out, and it just is what it is.
There is basic melee combat, but it’s next to useless.
That’s the thing about this game: it’s really devoid of personality, engagement and fun. If there was more to the core gameplay loop then it would be easier to recommend, but it feels so empty most of the time.
After you clear a firehouse out of bloodsuckers, the local survivors community takes up refuge within it. This becomes your home base, where main quests can be found at a table and white board combo upstairs. There are around ten of them, and some hardly feel like story quests at all, including one line of missions involving placing a watch on a grave, then opening a car trunk to get a reward. There are side quests, though, despite them being few and far between. Sometimes they’re a bit better, and an example of one would be having to go to the movie theatre to get a kit to fix the popcorn machine at the firehouse.
Since I couldn’t see the achievement list, I thought that these missions were all there’d be. Furthermore, I thought that the challenging and annoying boss I fought after completing them was the final baddie. That wasn’t the case, though, because my character had to travel to another, separate part of town afterwards. There, I discovered a second map, complete with its own firehouse approximation, missions and NPCs.
Truth be told, I’d kind of been hoping I was finished, and found myself disappointed by this even if it made sense.
Before we move on, it’s important to stop and talk about the maps themselves. These separate parts of Redfall each have their own quests, survivors, etc. but they offer more than that. Although the game world does feel empty and generally barren, there are safe houses to unlock (by providing them with power), vampire nests to destroy, and things like that. Not much in comparison to other open world games, but some added stuff.
It’s possible to skip some of this, but unlocking safe houses is obviously a helpful thing to do, because you can fast travel to them and save a lot of running. Plus, each safe house is considered to be in a different neighbourhood, and they all offer a couple of neighbourhood quests, involving defeating special enemies, completing a miscellaneous objective or something of that ilk, and then defeating the vampire boss of that area to gain its skull. The skull is then used — in combination with others — to unlock boss battle(s).
Of course, Redfall is a co-op focused game that I played mostly solo. When I invited a friend in, she told me that her movements felt laggy, but I’m not sure if that was due to the game or my hosting. You see, I’ve had internet problems for the last year and, as I wait for fiber to be installed I’m dealing with random outages. Since this is an always online game, it means I’ve been kicked while playing. After that happened, I decided to hotspot to my phone and played that way, even when my friend joined.
I originally felt like this was my problem and not the game’s, but you should be able to play single player without internet. Why does it always need to be online? Thankfully, the devs are said to be working on this.
Apart from all of the above, the only other thing you need to know about Redfall — in terms of gameplay — is that it features skill trees that are different for each character. Because I didn’t find my character’s special powers to be that useful, I didn’t get a lot out of his, apart from some additional ammo stores and improved health. Looking after one’s health is important, but dying only makes you lose some money. Thankfully medkits aren’t rare, and blood vials can be equipped in order to upgrade one’s max health.
Redfall just doesn’t have enough to it. It’s supposed to be a co-op game, but there’s little to really do or shoot, even in single player. Plus, you have to launch a separate, public game, in order to add friends. You can’t just do it through your single player game, though your progress and character level will both carry forward. Be warned, though: Only the host gets progression in co-op, and there is no matchmaking.
You’ve likely heard that this game doesn’t have a 60 frames-per-second mode yet, and that’s true. It only features a 30FPS mode, but it often drops below that. There are definite hitches, even after the day one patch, including times where it can become a slideshow. I also had two crashes to deal with, as well as a bug that prevented me from being able to heal until I quit out and started my save up again.
There also seemed to be no difference between dusk and daylight, the medium and easy difficulties. At least switching didn’t seem to change much, especially when it came to damage done by enemies. The last, or second last boss — a female vampire god — was quite cheap and difficult regardless.
Alas, it’s not like Redfall is a real looker. It’s not. Everything about it feels dated, and the same extends to the visuals, which can occasionally look nice but generally look mediocre at best. It’s all very past-gen, really. It doesn’t even feature real cutscenes, and just uses slightly animated ‘motion comics’ instead.
The sound is a bit better, and there’s serviceable voice acting. The writing isn’t that great, though, nor is the story which feels more like a reason to kill vampires than a real focus. It lacks a lot of depth, isn’t told well and is quite forgettable.
I wanted to love Redfall, and hoped it would end up being a sleeper hit. However, this isn’t the Far Cry inspired, open world game that I was promised by press releases and trailers. What’s here, as the final product, is an underwhelming, barren, tedious and unfortunately forgettable game that is more dated than modern. I wish I could say differently, but most won’t find much to like, let alone, love here. It’s too bad, because Arkane tended to be automatic, in terms of quality.
This review is based on a copy of the game we were provided with. We played it on a Series X.