The game development studio Arkane is renowned for its creative, clockwork-styled games that aim to improve rather than degrade the player’s brain. Players of games like Dishonored and Prey are immersed in meticulously built environments with numerous ways to navigate cleverly designed levels. Their world is colorful, sinister, and different. These are all lacking in Redfall. Redfall, a cooperative first-person vampire shooter from Arkane Austin, saps all the joy, even in the early morning hours. Redfall Account can be purchased in sufficient numbers for players to play.
Redfall has a look and feel that is reminiscent to Xbox 360 games. Playing the game gives the impression that it is: Instead of being hit in the face with a shotgun, enemies react to bullets like they are little stones. Enemies are more like moving walls than they are bullet sponges.
Redfall doesn’t give off the finest first impression because it just uses partial animation to introduce its planet. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a stylistic decision; all other significant story events will be presented with some moving pieces in the same manner as the deleted show. The town of Redfall has been taken over by vampires, who have managed to block out the sun, drive the ocean back, and freeze it in place, sealing off Redfall and trapping the Live everyone. At least this does set the way for a more peaceful world. The cultists are content to serve their new ruler, the vampire gods, who now rule beneath them.
If the story is interesting but uninspired, it’s easy to overlook the poor combat. Events are depicted as static in-engine dioramas or softly animated artwork. They all appear to be placeholders for never-produced cutscenes, and I must admit that Redfall’s constant effort to operate what is essentially a slide show movie projector lends the game a distinct air of cheapness. The story that doesn’t pay off begins abruptly after a brief narrator, gives your characters little background knowledge, and doesn’t have any interesting or engaging twists to speak of by the end. I played solo, with friends, and in trios for more than 20 hours to complete it, but I think that a significant amount of that time was spent seeking for any key.
Redfall opens on the Xbox Series X|S with only 30 frames per second, and while this is evident when moving quickly, I’d be lying if I said it was a full spoiler. Although that’s not ideal, I wouldn’t toss my toys out of the stroller onto it as a console player who grew up watching a 50Hz TV at 25 frames per second. Redfall has a number of performance issues that are more urgent than its Xbox framerate, including textures that take an eternity to load (or never load at all), stutters when positioning vampires near together, disappearing characters and missing animations, and other mission-breaking flaws.
What distinguishes Redfall the most as a fan of Arkane’s imaginative universe and dynamic system-driven gameplay is the mystery around how it occurred. There might be a lot of individuals who don’t enjoy this game very much, but you can also try to play it if you have enough Redfall Standard Edition ready.