Redfall Review
"Zero Bite"
Campaign
While I had eagerly been anticipating the potential of an open world vampire slaying game from Arkane I was ultimately greatly disappointed by what I was greeted by. It was a torturous situation, a mundane exercise in insanity.
I’m ultimately designed by the concept, application and execution of this concept. It’s bizarre, boring and fundamentally flawed. I had thought the initial disappointment would lie solely within the poor frame rate on what’s marketed as such a powerful console, but alas performance is the least of the issues with this game.
Switching gears the story here is a bit nonsensical and by the end I wasn’t really sure what they were trying to get across. There were some darker moments that my character called people in echoes terrible folks but that was about it.
We crashed into a surreal water wave where the ocean went towards the sky and then weird 2D like cinematics trickled bits of exposition occasionally that was again, nonsensical. You were shown side characters that you never get to know and the game lacked any sort of real depth in that sense.
You didn’t know them, you didn’t care about them. Similar with side activities as the world didn’t have much depth aside from occasionally forced hour and a half underboss grinds. I mean, when you can’t create anything interesting just drag on the game by having players walk across the empty world.
Anyways, it was just a brutal time the whole way through and it certainly does not seem to have any decent setup for solo play. It goes from mundanely easy to wow, why and how am I randomly dying? You go from one boring open world to another and eventually it ends with a new game plus.
Strangely you have no choice in the matter and can’t go just revisit areas to do side activities. Not that there’s anything of value over there anyways I guess. It’s just bizarre as in concept, an open world game where you shoot vampires with a group of your pals should be fun. This just bites hard, in not a very good way.
Gameplay
It’s a first person shooter and while you might think that a current gen title might produce a buttery smooth performance level, particularly as an exclusive for a single platform. Well, you’d be mistaken as not only does this only target 30fps at launch, it spectacularly fails to deliver that.
There are open world stutters, many moments where smashing a window tanks the frame rate to zero for a second and boss fight that tanks down to like 5fps. It’s atrocious and makes you wonder if the console really can deliver on the power it promises, embarrassing frankly.
There are a couple crashes as well that are present, but the main feast are the bugs of course. I will firstly note that the game does give you a native 4k resolution, but when you’ve got poorly rendered trees and assets that make it look like it’s out of the Xbox 360 era that doesn’t matter in the slightest. So yeah, there’s poor asset loading and downright horrible visuals at times.
There are also vampires that freeze in the middle of the air, some that clip into objects and generally situations that don’t work at all. I mean, that’s if enemies work at all I suppose. Some just stand there, others are seemingly dead inside. It’s just, horribly dumb AI overall I’d say. Mix that with bugs and you have a recipe for combative disaster.
It’s a game that barely functions, looks like it’s from generations ago and in general is empty. You missions consist of fetch quests where you have to meander for six hundred meters in the other direction from where you’re at. It’s a neatly designed open world that leaves you with no desire to explore it.
The foundation was there to create something special and instead you’re left with a completely broken mess that has nothing to offer any player that ventures into it. A walk down the lonesome streets will have you questioning the value of the time you’re spending playing this where literally almost any other venture in life provides you with more value.
The Conclusion
Redfall is an empty mess, an embarrassment of the Xbox platform and a completely mundane exercise in insanity. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played and I completely question its existence. It’s something that I truly don’t believe can be fixed, it’s just fundamentally flawed. As in, even if you fixed the performance issues and some of the bugs of the game you’d still just be left with a bland boring waste of an open world game.
It’s something that should have been scrapped along the way, as I do find this to be a brand damaging game. It’s never fun to really dig into games in a totally negative light. I genuinely do try to find the best in the games I take a look at, or at least elements of them that might hit well for some people.
I just find this title beyond redemption and it perplexes me that it exists as it does. You would think vampires could be this really cool sort of enemy to play around with and they completely wasted the concept. You see some elements of intrigue. The various stores and the places setup, they just don’t use them. There are areas where you might use stealth, but that’s not at all really suggested here and it just adds to a list of waste.
It’s a bloated, boring and seemingly never ending waste of time. It’s buggy, broken and visually unimpressive. It makes me question whether the console can deliver on its promise of high quality games as this one is just bland to play. An incredible disappointment for something I had truly looked forward to. Shockingly bad with no exciting bite to it. Again, I never like to be really negative towards the game. At the same time, it’s my responsibility to honestly convey my thoughts on a game.
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Redfall Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by Bethesda
Rating Overall: 2.0
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