Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

Redfall (Series X) - Impressions

I just finished Redfall after roughly 18 hours of playtime. It was overall a fairly enjoyable experience, but there definitely were aspects that brought down the experience by a lot. The reviews have mostly focused on the technical issues the game had at launch. But if you play the game today, you won't notice many issues like that. During my entire playthrough, I had some consistent issues like not being able to set a waypoint by clicking once but instead twice, the amount of ammo shown was constantly off and frames would drop whenever I'd kill a special type of enemy to just name a few. I also had a few crashes. But throughout the 18 hours I played, I didn't encounter any major technical issues. In fact, that aspect isn't even the primary issue with the game. There are more major flaws with the game, which are:

• The gameplay loop is repetitive and limited
• The progression system is poor and unrewarding
• The game is relentless in terms of difficulty with no noticeable changes if you lower it

So I'd like to go through these three points one by one. For starters, the gameplay loop is really repetitive. Granted, they do a good job of introducing a lot of new stuff in the beginning. You start off with your standard handgun, then find your typical weapons like assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and even flare guns. Then the game introduces two unique weapon types, which are stake guns and UV beams. The former is effective against the vampires in the game, while the latter is mostly used for killing the stationary enemies that spew a red poison mist across certain areas. The problem is that these weapons are introduced immediately and you don't unlock any new weapons for the remainder of your playthrough.

Moreover, you can only hold and switch between three weapons at once. I mostly used a shotgun, assault rifle and sniper rifle throughout the game. But I wanted to use the stake guns and UV beams fairly often as well. So I had to constantly go into the menu and switch out my loadout, which was such a pain. Considering the developer wanted to copy Far Cry, they completely omitted the series' weapon wheel.

It's the same issue with the enemy variety: the majority of the enemy types are introduced way too soon. They should've spread them out a bit more throughout the playthrough to make things more interesting. But yes, there are plenty of different enemies. They just become uninteresting to face off against during the second half of the game.

Moving on to the progression system, it's absolutely the worst I've seen in a game in a long time. There is a skill tree but you can't even collect enough skill points to unlock most of the stuff by playing through the game naturally. Furthermore, the stuff you do unlock don't even feel that rewarding. It doesn't feel like my character has been improved at all whenever I unlock something new.

Consequently, the abilities themselves are so unsatisfying to use. You have four characters with different skills and mine has an umbrella that acts like a shield that then explodes when it disappears, a "psychic lift" that propels you upwards and her special ability lets her call her ex-boyfriend to come in and do some damage. The umbrella is fine, but the other two feel so useless and unsatisfying. I mean, I want my abilities to pack a punch. But in my case two of my three abilities aren't even (direct) attacks and the third feels very weak to use.

This brings me to my last point, which is the difficulty level. I started on Normal and it felt pretty good at first but then I started dying over and over again. So I lowered the difficulty to Easy and there weren't any noticeable changes at all. The enemies were just as relentless as before. I probably died 40-50 times during my 18 hour playthrough. I died more in this game than I did in Returnal, which is known to be a difficult game!

So what's the issue with the difficulty? Well, the enemies deal way too much damage. On top of this, you can easily find yourself surrounded by enemies that will absolutely wreck you. Even if you upgrade your health, you can easily die in just a couple of seconds if you're unlucky. The difficulty level is just very unbalanced and for a game like this that's supposed to be fun and a good time, it completely ruins the experience.

There are so many other issues with the game, such as a bad checkpoint system and a bad waypoint system to name some more.

There are some good aspects of this game obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered playing it to the end. Even if the gameplay loop is repetitive, it's still a relatively fun looter shooter and unique gameplay mechanics like needing to use a stake in order to finish off a vampire (which is the only way to kill them) makes the gameplay more varied. The story is pretty good as well. Even if the game doesn't have cutscenes where characters move, the narrative is rather captivating and there's a lot of backstory to the characters. Not to mention that there's plenty of lore to read, in a typical Arkane fashion.

So to summarise, the technical issues that Redfall is infamous for is the furthest from its problems. Repetitive gameplay loop, unrewarding progression system and relentless difficulty level brings down the experience a lot. There's still some fun to be had here, but if you're looking for an open world shooter, you'd do better with many other titles, including Far Cry. If I had to give the game a score, which I rarely do but in this case I want to just so that I can convert my thoughts into a numeric value, I'd give it a 5/10.

@LtSarge Absolutely solid write up friend, you have articulated my thoughts about the game exactly. Like you, I found the game itself to be the problem other than the much talked about technical issues. Frame rate issues and texture loading were probably the most egregious examples from a technical standpoint I encountered. The game rather ironically just feels a bit lifeless, and yes the difficulty combined with the checkpoints is hard to stomach for long periods. I’m yet to finish the storyline but I’m in no rush, I’m a tad demoralised after the one two punch of this and Halo CE.

@AgentCooper Thanks mate! I think you can tell that Arkane bit off a bit more than they could chew. They clearly don't have much experience with these kinds of games, which led to Redfall ending up being a complete dud. You can definitely feel the production value, but the game itself is just not good.

Yeah, I feel you man. Redfall and Halo CE aren't exactly the best shooters and playing them one after the other does not make for a good time. Hopefully you'll get through them both in the end!

@RR529 Really enjoyed reading your Jedi: Survivor review back there. I agree with most of your points, if not all of them; you seem to have had a better time with the overall story but, as much as I could've done without Skoova Stev, that fourth-quarter catalyst is undeniably one of the best, most electrifying half-hours of any Star Wars in recent memory (interactive or otherwise).

Sorry to hear that you suffered so many technical issues, though. Your crashes and glitches sound a lot worse than anything I encountered, to the point where I'm starting to suspect that the PS5 is the most inconsistent hardware ever put to market, because this is the third or fourth major release from the past couple years where one person's perfectly stable experience is another person's unplayable nightmare. Well, they've promised more patches, even if they haven't been forthcoming for a while now. Fingers crossed, because I'd quite like to attempt a NG+ playthrough at some point.

***

@LtSarge Whenever one of these giant controversies rolls around, it's always useful to get a fair assessment from a regular gamer, so I'm real grateful for your insights on Redfall. It sounds like, beyond the temporary and fixable issues which made for such easy clickbait, there's a permanent and unfixable mediocrity which is far more deserving of scorn. Which is a shame, as I always love a good redemption story, and have plenty of games in my collection where, with a little patience for a few surface-level faults, the good stuff can shine through. Thanks for taking the hit and sharing your findings!

@LtSarge It sounds like you gave Redfall the space to make a fair impression on you, which I appreciate in a review/impressions piece, considering it's one of those games that got torn to shreds by the online gaming community even prior to release. It might have still disappointing overall, but it's good to know there are some redeeming aspects to it. But yeah, the gameplay in a shooter not being very good is going to be a kiss of death for most of us.

Based on what I've read, it seems like this was a game that Arkane's upper management wanted to make, but it ended up driving off a lot of the talent that was responsible for the studio's more highly regarded earlier games.

I'm always doing this. One of the secret benefits of having an ex-boyfriend <3