One of the worst games I've launched this year. I've expected nothing and still disappointed. Empty open world, atrocious ai, which can not even aim at you fast enough. Unlikeable characters, mid soundtrack and visual style (although vampire nests are quite cool). I have not found any reasons to play it by stealth and using the abilities at all. And you heard a lot about poor optimization already.

To be honest, I don't see that it will be improved after qol and performance patches, this game should be reworked fundamentally. It's really sad to say, considering Arkane made some of my favorite games ever (I even enjoyed Deathloop despite its huge flaws).

You know I won't really go to in depth with this one since you have most likely already heard about this one.

Going in with low expectations I still somehow ended up being disappointed even further which I was not expecting. Buggy unoptimized PC port and I have a pretty good rig and still was dipping below 60 FPS A LOT in the open world. Horrendous mission design making for a boring gameplay loop that never once changes up its formula with its main and side missions. Laughable bosses that pose no challenge whatsoever making you wonder why this game even has bosses LOL.

Gameplay is unaspiring and insanely easy as you can mostly one tap human enemies and UV Ray mostly every type of vampire and just smack them once or shotgun them once when they get stoned. You really never have to think about anything during the game you just run and gun and I played solo and still had zero issues with any segment of the game on high difficulty. And the story was there but I did not care a single inch about the story. The game was also pretty short? I was doing every side quest I was coming across and I only clocked in at around 11ish hours by the end which surprised me idk if I was just missing stuff but I unlocked everything on both maps and was doing every side quest I was coming across.

Its just sad because I LOVE Arkane studio I ADORE Dishonored and prey a lot so a game like this coming from them is a punch in the gut.

Thank god it was on gamepass allowing me to questionably play through this atrocity hahaha.

Don't even give this game a try through gamepass lol.

RIP to anyone who bought this at full price.

De fato, inesquecível.

Não sei pq ele é tão criticado?? Ele é legal e funciona mto bem. Meu tempo com ele foi bastante proveitoso, 15h de pura diversão!

Quando o mundo inteiro te criticar, virar as costas pra você ou te discriminar, eu sempre irei te defender pq eu entendo suas falhas e as aceito, pois me diga, quem não erra? Já dizia a lenda Pitty "quem não tem teto de vidro que atire a primeira pedra."

Você não é perfeito, eu sei, mas isso não importa sabe pq?
Pq o verdadeiro Redfall, são os amigos que bugam dentro de paredes.

Por isso, ignore toda e qualquer blasfêmia direcionada a você e lembre-se dessas palavras, nada além de gratidão, @VitorConti ♥

There is no game out there I want a development postmortem on more than Redfall. Somehow, one of the most beloved studios in the modern era fumbled what should've been the easiest "paint by numbers" game design ideas out there: making yet another Far Cry/Borderlands clone. Ubisoft, themselves have seemingly had a hard time keeping the formula going, with increasingly derivative releases of all their major franchises, while many studios have followed in their wake to produce increasingly long, vapid "open-ended" experiences that go on longer than they have any right to; Arkane is the latest and most unfortunate victim of this, with what many are rightfully calling the worst example of this open-world/looter-shooter genre in action.

Far Cry clones have been beyond stale to me at this point. I have picked up and dropped plenty of open-world titles this console generation because the investment they ask of the player isn't anywhere near rewarding enough to stick through for 20+ hours. So, when a studio you used to have fondness for - but hasn't released a good game since 2017 - attempts this formula, there's skepticism going in at the very least. The initial trailers of this game looked terrible to begin with, and it only looked worse as more was being shown off leading up to release. The state Redfall landed in is not surprising in the slightest if you had a modicum of smelling pre-release marketing horseshit. With bland looking trailers, annoying sounding characters, sketchy console performance/PC hardware metrics, and scant but bland gameplay showcases releasing, you only have yourself to blame if you went into this thinking it would be good. That's without mentioning the massive talent exodous in Arkane after Prey released.

I cannot think of a less appealing gaming experience than sprinting through a shallow open-world, picking up the same 5 guns but with slightly bigger numbers to make damage numbers slightly bigger, all while half of the enemies (who all look the same because there are maybe 7 unique enemy models in the entire game) will stare at you like a deer gazing at headlights and the other half will be clipping through the walls trying to run to you. This is all on top of terrible performance no matter the platform, and you're being spoon-fed a story that doesn't appear to be going anywhere with characters that throw around eye-rolling dialog. How is this appealing? How is one expected to suffer through the sheer boredom of shooting fish in a barrel for 20 hours to have a royalty-free trap beat (that will not age like milk in like 4 months) play to signal number get bigger? Is this fun to people? For the past 7 years it's seemed like it, but hopefully the massively negative response to this game can start sending a signal that these rinse-and-repeat open-world games are nothing than a minimum viable product. I wouldn't have a clue how I'd sleep knowing I released something this creatively bankrupt and fundamentally broken.

The game gets a whole single star because it technically boots up and "works."

Minha experiência com Redfall foi algo engraçado, joguei na companhia de amigo, o que tornou tudo melhor, mas é inegável, o jogo é deplorável, e digo isso com uma baita dor no peito, por que tinha tudo pra ser legal... Mas também vale mencionar seus pontos positivos (em minha opinião), a gunplay é muito gostosa e satisfatória, os personagens junto de suas habilidades são muito úteis e divertidos de se jogar, e a própria Redfall em si é um lugar muito maneiro e bonito. Creio que se o jogo não for ''largado'' e esquecido, ainda tem como voltar atrás e salvar, mas sendo bem sincero até no momento dessa análise, só jogue se for o que tiver, e claro, que como citei acima, uma boa companhia ajuda muito a ''tankar'' o jogo! Dentre os pontos negativos, estão: má otimização, IA completamente estúpida, mapa bugado, missões fracas e repetitivas, constantes bugs, etc. Recomendar este jogo é algo complicado, mas foi algo bom ter minha própria opinião sobre ele, mas lhe garanto que, mesmo tendo essa experiência, não foi algo tão diferente do que já havia lido e assistido em outras análises. =/

A very OK game, which is apparently the greatest sin for anything to ever commit. Where's the fire here? The gameplay and story are completely serviceable, even if they lack innovation and tend to feel a bit too familiar to other games, and is definitely fun to play and explore lore and combat scenarios with a friend. Sure, its got some performance issues or whatever, but at its core this game is completely fine. Fun can and will be had. Impossible for anything with a reference to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to be bad, few will understand this.

Redfall feels like the most progressive and considerate person you know making a holocaust joke, for not only is it horribly offensive, but also profoundly out of character. Arkane are one of the finest triple A studios in history putting out some of the best games that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, as you have heard by now this is not one of them. A comment made by one Yahtzee Croshaw comically speculated that Redfall was "an act of passive aggression" by Arkane to the publishers, holding a tendency of a "resentful spouse" towards them in response to the demand for something so cynical, what makes this so funny is that, as Schreier unveiled in his exposé, this was entirely true. Nobody wanted to make this game, a quality very apparent well before we were properly informed outside the experience, which is why I pity Redfall rather than be disgusted by it. Yet again, an oafish publisher gets a studio with the skill set to make single player projects and rips them to shreds in the name of making something with broader appeal and easily monetised multiplayer, yet again, another sickened example of what industrialisation does to art. A moderately interesting plot drowned out by repetitive missions and poor presentation, an utterly meaningless loot system which serves only to remind us that still nobody has grasped why Destiny ever worked, and an endless tyranny from technical problems. I can not in good conscience give this a positive score even if I had fun with it for most of the time I spent. You read that right, there is fun to be had here, the shooting does feel good even if the AI prevents the combat from engaging much beyond a surface level, but that is really all Redfall can offer. Shallow fun, so tragically shallow. The first hour will be the last you see of any elements of emergent gameplay, expect none of the immersive sim philosophy which has defined Arkane games for so long, in its place stands only a hollow co-op looter plagued by crashes. My friend and I tried so hard to meet this game half way, but in the end we were left exhausted before even getting to the end. I pity Arkane, and I want to waste no more time regurgitating everything other people have already said. If only Prey (2017) sold better we wouldn't be here, but unfortunately, gamers are mostly stupid creatures who don't engage with experiences like that, and so games of that sophistication will never emerge from the triple A sector again! The agony of Redfall is just eating what we ordered.

vampirism gives you yaoi hands

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I wish I could just start and end with that joke, but unfortunately I feel compelled to say more. I truly do not think the hate this game is getting is merited. Redfall is not good, but it will not be the worst game you play this year. I think it is tempting to say that Arkane Austin was meddled with and their vision was compromised by corporate overlords, or that the release was too rushed, which I’m sure is all true to some degree, but I’m not convinced that these are the core issues with Redfall. I think the issue is that this game is just too many things. This game is trying to be at least three completely different games and is none of them well. The loot system is a cavalcade of junk, the co-op is hectic and empty, and the open world stuff, the only stuff that comes close to succeeding, is bogged down by those other two. The vampires aren’t enough of a threat to be exciting to fight by the late game, and some of your powers are sort of busted. The fact that co-op was marketed so hard on this is utterly baffling, because I truly think this game is only ever fun playing solo. Any of the friction that arises from playing carefully vanishes when you’re running around with three other players. You can’t read diaries or look at environmental storytelling when your friend is just bee-lining to the next waypoint. There are a few really cool moments in this game that would be utterly ruined in a four-stack. If they hadn’t been trying to make that work, maybe they could have devoted resources to making the weaker elements stronger. (Though I still think the game shouldn’t have done loot the way they did.) There are moments where I can see a version of this game that works, when I’m skulking through dilapidated mansions or scoping out a cultist camp. I also think there is a legitimate novelty for a vampire story to not have the vampires be sexy socialites and instead just be straight-up ghouls. The vampire gods in Redfall are capitalist Nosferatus who run a version Theranos that is even more evil somehow. Each of them is shitty in their own way and you do definitely want to see these fucks dead by the end. And I did play it to the end, because I have brain problems. Do I regret it? A bit. I think I would have gotten more out of another game, but I do not think Redfall is a horrible, unplayable game. I had some fun here and there. It’s just such a mess of competing design paradigms that it turns into a giant pile of oatmeal. And boy, am I stuffed!

Even with every immediate problem solved, it would still be just another game.
No innovations when it comes to gameplay;
A null story that no one will remember, not to say that no one will care while playing the game;
Influencers as characters (it's over bros);
Soulless;
The graphics and art style are nice (when you aren't having problems with textures, etc) and the gunplay is good enough.
Again, just another game. It is an objective waste of time playing alone, and if you got someone to play with and you have NOTHING ELSE to play, it might provide you some fun.
IMO it is not worth my time, I have better things to play, but I might open up just for fun with some homies.
I think that if you have XGP, you should at least give it a try, but don't expect much.
I'm marking it as "abandoned" because I think this is STRUCTUALLY bad, not something that can be fixed by patches, but who knows, right?

I loved Prey 2017 and had high hopes for Arkane Austin's next project. But I can't believe this was made by the same team. Redfall is so bad, like, questionably bad. What the hell happened??

I'm not even totally against Arkane making a looter shooter instead of an immersive sim, if at least the game was good. But here, it's a failure on all levels.
It's very repetitive, the guns feel so weak, finding loots is not satisfying at all. The open world is not interesting to explore because there is nothing really to do except shoot the same vampires and humans over and over again.
Speaking of the enemies, they are completely braindead. This is some of the worst AI I've seen in a AAA game in a long time. They can't even jump over a car or fence, or crawl under a low object. They will just stare at you because they don't know how to get to you.

Visually, this barely looks like a PS4 launch title, but it takes up 105GB for some reasons and runs like ass. I had constant texture streaming issues and everything looked blurry.
Also the art direction is very bland and lacks a distinct style. This is the most disappointing aspect as Arkane is known for creating games with strong artistic visions. Redfall looks like a bunch of Unreal Engine asset packs.
Even the music seemed out of place, and I had to mute it because it was destroying the mood.

This is definitely not worth 70$. It feels so barebone and cheap. They couldn't even afford cutscenes, so the story (which barely exists anyway) is told with a bunch of still images.
I'm really worried about the future of Arkane Austin, this is super disappointing.

It feels like there’s something in Redfall, but there isn’t. Every session gives a glimpse until you get a clear view of something and realise it’s bad. It is just an empty, repetitive and deeply uninteresting experience.

The repeatable content loops make it playable, but within this nothing really stands out. The designs of interiors are cool. Places evoke stories more interesting than anything in the game’s conventional arcs. The map is cool looking and I liked seeing new sights, it’s just that there’s nothing to do in any of them that legitimises them. No divergence or room for player expression.

To an extent, certain systems have promise. Nothing compelling is built out of them or around them, though. Characters are limited, best described by others as a complete character split into four deficient options.

Can a broken game ever be good? Not in the technical way that a faultless piece of coding can be good. Not in the usual way where the mere function of running game is the lowest expectation.

What if you take a trusted studio like Arcane and have them make someone else’s game and it is broken beyond belief? That gets more interesting.

It begins to channel different things, looter shooters before their primary development and social hooks were added. Something like RAGE, from Bethesda’s own catalogue, a neat idea with advanced textures that does come together despite id coding to the metal (they are not alike in this last way). And most clearly, it’s like Duke Nukem Forever, this instantly outdated pastiche of ideas that used to work that is thankless of the teams who have worked on it and for the players who play it.

There’s the stuff that has gone right, evidence that more things can go right. There are slices of worldbuilding which suggest an environment and beautiful places, that if stacked together as levels, would have their maximum impact. Instead, they are connected in two open world between vast quantities of empty spaces.

All the technical errors you have heard about are true. Every time you’re having fun with Redfall, it crashes. There is some fun, because Arkane are / were a deeply talented team of programmers that have made some defining games where you can path through them how you want to. There is no point here: you can go in guns blazing or the stealthy way and the same things will happen. Just don’t think about anything.

Just don’t think about how good it could have been, when you trace the edge of the map and there’s this gorgeous mountain of water suspended high in the air, or when you find a really cool multiplex with a fun mission in it, or find some really crunchy horror-themed shotguns.

Don’t think about what it would be like to play the multiplayer. The single player can hardly bare the weight of the game’s performance. Whole sections are so badly optimized the game becomes a total slideshow. Don’t worry that they didn’t design whole swaths of the game that seem like they ought to be designed.

Don’t worry because you’re in good hands with Arkane who make good games you don’t have to worry about. I remember now, that first E3 with Dishonored and how bright and happy the team was then. I think of them when I play Redfall now and hope they are still bright and happy, somewhere.

Não dá galera. Eu tentei gostar, joguei depois das correções, sem nenhuma expectativa mas o jogo ainda parece inacabado, ele não funciona direito, e não estou falando de crashs, bugs, etc, estou falando do design em si. As missões são vazias, a história é vazia, a parte looter shooter é fraca, combate é ruim (e olha que é difícil fazer FPS ruim), a cidade não marca, esperava pelo menos algo da direção de arte, e nem isso eles entregaram. Queria mesmo entender o que aconteceu dentro da Arkane pra um projeto tão fraco como esse ser lançado.

Joguei sozinho, mas consigo visualizar que jogar em grupo melhoraria significativamente minha experiência.

The main thrust of this game is about learning how to deal with deep, alienating tragedy, reconnect with a sharply divided community, and understand the repressive structures that actually enable disasters instead of turning on the visible small fry. The notes are about this, the game’s loop is rebuilding a community and helping in ways big and small, and there’s a truly moving sermon you can find that lasers in on this. It’s telling a pulpy, X-Files-esque plot about barely-greeked versions of Theranos and CRISPR and Henrietta Lacks, and it’s genuinely committed to that vibe. The open world was designed with the intent of feeling like STALKER or Far Cry 2, but the co-op and loot mechanics make it easily recommendable, especially when it’s on Gamepass.

It’s an ace pitch, and it’s ultimately unworkable in the final execution. This is probably how 1313 would’ve turned out, or the original project Titan, and definitely how the original Duke Nukem Forever would’ve turned out. Games like Redfall are therefore unique in the ways that it shows what happens when those games make it to the finish line. It’s educational to witness, in its own way - the design and scope have so many disparate aims that feel in there out of obligation or as a way to paper over other underdeveloped parts. The stealth is undercooked, so instead there’s a focus on the shooting, but the shooting (while fun!) is undercut by the very simplistic AI, so instead there’s a focus on the open world, with lots of downtime where you’re reading notes and looking at graffiti and paying attention to the movements and sounds of this world, but there’s fucking co-op so you can’t soak that in without feeling like you’re being the weak link.

Any given individual part being half-baked would be something I could overlook if there was an overarching vision that guided it, or a single mechanic that was successful, or the narrative felt focused, but it’s just... not. The world itself is really well-considered and there’s great intentions in a lot of this, but the final product has nothing be truly standout without immense caveats. A series of ponderous Sunday School lesions that discussed with children how the Bible can be used to find peace in the game’s events are underneath a wall texture that takes thirty seconds to pop in. A moving sermon is protected by a vampire who pathed into the couch, stopped moving entirely, and docilely let me kill them unimpeded. Quests can be genuinely cute in their intentions - offering somebody whiskey and cigars one of their closest friends attempted to gift them before their untimely death - but there’s no reactions to them, and all you get is a cold stare and a bark you’ve already heard.

A lot of big canceled game stories are told in ways that focus on the pitch, and don’t discuss the realities of game development, which is about using state-of-the-art technology, legions of artists, musicians, and writers, and designing rules and systems in ways that tangibly cohere. Sometimes it just doesn’t come together, and most of the time it gets rebooted, massively reworked, or just canceled. Playing this game is a reminder of the infinite difficulties that underpin every game that ever releases. Even the most slapdash studio releases require sincere intentionality in itsdesign and direction. We all know who made this - it’s Arkhane, for crying out loud. More than any possible gamer out there currently despairing... you can bet money that everybody in the Austin department didn’t want the game to be like this even more.




Addendum - a rundown of the issues I ran across while playing: The game’s issues are there from the first seconds of playing. Multiplayer sessions do not save progress for anybody but the host, so you’re either forced to play in lockstep with them or spend however many hours grinding out the missions you just did, and there’s no matchmaking so if you want the full experience you need a four-stack. This makes the act of picking the damn game up and hitting “play” an unexpectedly intense investment. Neither singleplayer or multiplayer feel fully coherent to the design and gameplay loop, too. Singleplayer is always-online, with no pause button, with constant little interruptions that beg for other players to be there. Dying sends you back to the last fast travel point, which is always minutes away. Enemies are drastically undertuned - if you use the loot you’re showered with, you can one to three-tap vampires well past its opening hours even on Midnight, the hardest initially-unlocked ability.

Multiplayer is overtuned, by comparison. The same difficulty in a four-stack suddenly has HP and damage seemingly quadruple, which makes it difficult in ways that aren’t very engaging, either. As mentioned prior, the game’s pace and worldbuilding are drastically less effective in co-op, and the mission structure and progression feel more fitting for drop-in drop-out, if not for the fact that co-op is not drop-in. Every time you wanna invite somebody, you have to quit to the main menu and make a new session, which causes you to lose progress and spawn back at the most recent fast travel-point.

Lighting is half-baked and the lack of proper indirect lighting makes NPCs look flat and environments feel artificial, texture pop-in feels like it’s from a late-era Unreal 3 game, and the star of the show is the AI, which fundamentally does not function. Enemies are universally defeated by moving tangent to them in a straight line, and they stand around for five seconds before attacking and wait just as long between each attack. It's artificial and completely unengaging to fight. Enemy designs are uninspired and the possibly interesting ones don't show up very often, and encounters never take advantage of them due to the open world conceit destroying most level and encounter design.

The world design is fun to traverse but massively underpopulated with meaningful enemy compositions, and there's no point to stealth because everybody is stupid and inconsistent and there's no point to gunfights because you don't get a ton of exp from enemies and the only real rewards are weapons that perform identically to what you have and the ammunition you spent on fighting them. Despite its compressed scale most houses and buildings are still closed-off and serve as little more than time-wasting set dressing, which grows worse when death resets you to the nearest fast travel point and you have 30-60 seconds of just holding sprint.

Movement is barebones and standard for a 2023 FPS and the world design rewards paying attention and being creative about as much as your exploring leads to empty rooms whose objects have broken collision. Notes can be amazingly written or completely perfunctory, another sacrifice to scale and scope. Character writing for people you actually talk to is nonexistent and completely unreactive in ways that harm immersion AND what possible enjoyment of the narrative you can have.

Performance is terrible for the game's graphical quality, and Arkhane's usually-sharp art direction is let down by unmotivated lighting and difficulty in merging their heightened art style with realistic modernity. It's occasionally really good, the opening does it fantastically, but most of the time you're looking at photorealistic cars and using chunky versions of realistic guns and then enemies look much more painterly.

It's just... not a good game on any level and it pains me that there's not something I can really single out as unambiguously good. Arkhane really, really struck out here.