Arkane Austin’s Prey released to the world in 2017 on previous-generation consoles and PC. Initially the game’s critical reception was held back due to the myriad of performance bugs that hampered the experience — sitting at around an average metascore of 82 to this day. Over time and with multiple fixes and expansions to the game, Arkane’s ‘not really a spiritual successor or reboot to anything in particular’ is often praised by critics and fans of immersive sim experiences as one of the best titles that the genre has to offer. Hell, I’m one of those fans that’ll chime the same way about Prey. From its captivating level design and intriguing narrative, or right down to the surface level where everything in the game’s player space can be manipulated to solve a problem, the first-person space-shocked masterpiece stands above it’s peers in ways that haven’t been competed against.
So when Arkane Austin announce Redfall, the first-person open world shooter, in 2020, to say that I wasn’t excited about what this team was going to do with the game is an understatement for sure. Deathloop from Arkane Austin’s sister studio, Arkane Lyon, was well on the horizon (and I for one thought that game was extremely good by the way!) to meet the same level of praise and uphold the same design standards that the rest of Arkane’s titles did. So I didn’t have any initial concerns about Redfall continuing the same trend back when it was announced. An open-world shooter with co-op that features heavy on the immersive sim elements that these teams have mastered? I’m all in at this point and there’s no further reason to convince me otherwise.
Fast forward all the way to May 2023, with the game released on Xbox platforms and PC: massive performance hitches that makes Prey’s errors look trivial in comparison. A compendium of hilarious, frustrating, and even player-supportive bugs that occur inexplicably through your playthrough. A game being unoptimized is par for the course for a lot of releases this year, and this is another game from my favorite developer at the moment so stomaching the pain to experience what the team’s done with Redfall was something that I was going to do regardless. The issue here is that even if this game released in a pitch perfect, fully playable and bug-minimal status…there just isn’t much at all left on the surface to even warrant the experience of this game.
This is what bugs me the most about Redfall, a game that simply doesn’t live up to the standard that Arkane’s several other titles have upheld and a game that doesn’t do much of anything to challenge open world game design.
THE PLAYER, THE WORLD, AND YOU.
Redfall takes place in the fictional town of Redfall, Mass., where the player awakens to being smack dab in the middle of a vampire revolution. Vampires have blocked out the sun and whoever’s human are either saving themselves of joining with the Vampires and their many cults that are littered in the open world space. You choose between one of four characters, each with their own unique skillsets and character progression to fight back against multitude of vampire and cult gangs to save this town and figure out what was the cause of all of this. Immediately when the game opens you get to see the effects of the vampires taking over; they’ve drained the rivers and lakes and waterfalls, using the water to cast a magic barrier that isolated the town from the outside world. You’re forced to navigate the drained remains of a riverbed, no weapon to defend yourself, until you try to meet back at fire station with the rest of the human survivors. It’s a classic redintion of the many ways Arkane opens their games, allowing the player to soak in the sudden destruction of the world’s status quo while trying to lick your wounds.
Once your first objective is finished, the first region in the game is open to the player to explore at their leisure; liberating safehouses, marking points of interest or navigating through the campaign structure. It’s from here when the player starts to see that…it’s essentially the gist of what the game offers. Now with an open-ended game like Redfall, it allows you to explore multiple abandoned and cult-or-vampire ruined buildings, soaking the storytelling beats through the environment design as every other Arkane title does. This wouldn’t be an issue if there wasn’t a sense of samey-ness when it came to the interiors of the world. Sometimes the blood stained halls of the suburban one-story or brownstone that you peek your head into has some rare weapon, or it’s a nest of sleeping vampires, or you just get some notes about the town was like before the neck-suckers came in and mucked up the place. That element of the game is there but it, and a lot of other elements, are just half-baked and undercooked. The initial region that you explore in the game are undercooked — or rather the performance is being a direct hindrance of giving the player a chance to explore the initial region. You get so lost between the mundane commons area that doing things like the ‘vampire nests,’ or psychic spaces are a massive breath of fresh air for the player. That is until you realize that those vampire nests scattered around the world are ultimately just as drab and uncreative as the rest of the game’s world design. Don’t get me wrong; whenever Redfall knocks it out the park with some visual element or a part of the world, it absolutely shines as it should. You see more of the highs in the game’s environment space once you reach the second region and do more of the psychic spaces that are exclusive to the many bosses and underbosses that you come into encounters with. But those great blips of content are stretched out by the long, endless walking through parks and town landmarks — fighting through the same, half-unintelligent enemy groups and kind of just going through the same mission structures. Redfall, for an open world game, is an extremely repetitive experience and what’s left just is not worth that repetition.
COMBAT
A common complaint that Arkane Lyon’s Deathloop had was that the shooting and gunplay elements were not a strong suit at all. For immersive sims, having poor gunplay or combat is just something that Arkane’s titles sort of get through the door as a playable sort of thing if you just want to slice and shoot at dudes for a few hours. It works, but is it ideal? Probably not. Yet combat up until Deathloop was never the central focus of gameplay because the developer provided a myriad of options to actively avoid shooting anyone. Whether it be shooting a sleep dart or causing some grand scheme to concuss an entire room of people in a non-violent fashion, or being an extremely annoying jackass with a nerf crossbow and some clever bottle chucking you could actively play through both Dishonored and Prey without needing to kill a single soul. Deathloop is a bit stricter on the kill rule as you have to kill the visionaries to progress through the game, so Lyon double downed on their gameplay to the best of their abilities whilst still offering multiple options to actively avoid fights until it was extremely necessary. So I guess I could see the critique about Deathloop’s gunplay just not being up to snuff.
Redfall, sadly, does not provide the means of doing anything else but to shoot and kill. You jump, sprint, slide, explode, bang-bang, stab and kill ad-nauseum for most of the experience and while it helps that the gunplay is, believe it or not, the best that Arkane has to offer (like it’s really good!), it means that practically everything else about an immersive sim experience is reduced significantly or outright gone. Your only real tool is your gun and whatever skill that’s attached to your character. Yet the game still EXPECTS you to choose a non-violent or stealth approach to some of this combat encounters — even going as far as to include those elements in OPTIONAL campaign routes that is outright difficult or pointless to do because the game communicates so poorly on your levels of visibility. So throughout my sixteen hour gaming experience of hoping that the game’s performance doesn’t slap a fat one on me, I made the most of how good actual combat felt and wove my way through extremely dumb enemy mobs and AI. You kill them, sometimes they have great loot like an electric pistol or — hold your breath here — a pistol that will dust vampires without needing to stake them. Even the loot-based variety is yet another game of gear swapping, number crunching bullshit that I do not buy Arkane games for! It’s frustrating! Some of the weapons are outright meaningless like a burst assault rifle that fires as if you must crank it like a fucking engine, or a double-barreled… flare…gun? That barely provides the same level of impact as just, shooting a lantern on the ground and making enemies catch fire. You get legendary gear early on but there’s no way to stick to what you have and improve it by salvaging old weapons — they’re hard-locked to the level you pick it up at!!!! So even while the combat may be really entertaining, it’s yet another half-baked and undercooked piece of Redfall’s extremely convoluted and depressingly mediocre puzzle.
This stinks!
NARRATIVE
The narrative and storytelling in the game works and works well. I am one of the fans of Arkane joints where I soak in every little detail of the world, and I’m pleased to say that I was thoroughly satisfied with the storytelling. The game immediately struck to get me into the comically silly vampire lords that try to intimidate you, or the very endearing but small cast of support characters you encounter along the way. From a hard-nosed reverend and no-nonsense mother with a baby on the way, to a squirrel-collecting aunt with an extremely loud Bostonian accent. The cast is great, just very underutilized. As a solo player I’m left with interacting with this small cast in hopes of learning more about the town and silently hoping for more.
Narratively the game shines with its myriad of extremely goofy villains. The vampire lords are comically evil, often berating the player through multiple television monitors or just shit talking to you through a thick bed of fog, Silent Hill style. I felt that the second region allowed these antagonists to really shine as, unlike the Hollow Man character in the first region, these characters were given an opportunity to have the environment speak for their character development. You’re entering their world, their respective biomes that you have to traverse to — and the results are genuinely something that can only be done in a game made by its team. It’s the storytelling that keeps me trudging through the myriad of issues and design questions that I have. But, like a lot of Redfall it isn’t enough to say that the experience is worth playing through a character or two.
WHAT’S LEFT FOR ME?
I don’t have any grievances about playing poor titles at all — I can forward you to my Kane & Lynch 2 write-ups and speak truths to that statement. Sometimes a project does not come together in a way that satisfies both the developers and the audience, and that’s sort of how the game goes. I’m not frustrated that the game is bad but the product that’s left behind for me is something that isn’t particularly catered for me. The fears and annoyances that I have with standard, open-world game design prances through the game’s poorly performing vistas without so much as a care in the world and I’m left kind of distraught that this is the route that was taken.
It’s unfair to put the blame on anyone that caused Redfall to go into the direction that it chose to went, because I’ll be the first to say that my experiences with game development are minimal at best. As a fan, playing through this game is the first time that I’ve felt a genuine sense of disappointment. Something that I was earnestly looking forward to trying didn’t hit it out of the park for me. I’ve laughed at hiccups that come to my eye, but this is one of the few moments where I was playing a game and ultimately wanted to be done with it altogether.
The existence of Redfall paints a really worrying picture for the future of immersive sims for me, that one of the best in the business chose this experience as the direction that they wanted to go into. It’s perfectly fair that there’s a broader audience that devs and publishers want to seek and I have no issues with it beyond the fact that it’s just another product that isn’t really catered to my niche. It’s frustrating to try and explain it in a way that doesn’t make me come off as entitled because at the end of the day; it’s a poor game, and any assumptions about the future are simply that. Assumptions.
But what’s really left for me? After the performance patches come and go and the game is in a much more stable place, am I still going to have the same experience that Redfall gave to me in it’s rocky launch? With the same bone-brained AI, lacking level design and player input that only really asks of me to shoot blindly? I have no doubts that with the right amount of updates that Redfall can become a much better product for people to give the game a fair shake — it’s even got post launch DLC slated for it, so who knows what Arkane Austin can do to make the experience that much better, or even geared towards ImSim fans like me. As it stands right now, unfortunately, my time in Redfall is getting cut short after my sixteen hour playthrough. It’s not a great product in my eyes, and it’s not something that I really yearn to play more of. It’s a massive drag.
