Redfall Review – A Life-Draining Trip To New England

The biggest disappointment I had in 2023 was Redfall. As a massive fan of developer Arkane Studios’ previous work, from Dishonored through Deathloop, my expectations were high for the company’s new release. This first-person vampire shooter has a lot of technical issues and design choices that are counterintuitive. The result is an often-bland experience, made frustrating by occasional glimpses of potential, and it’s sucked the life out of me. 

Redfall is a fictional Massachusetts harbor town that has been overrun by vampires. You are one of four characters who must restore the region’s former glory. Standing in your way are the Vampire Gods, a wealthy group of scientists-turned-monsters whose backstories never impacted me despite the campaign’s surface-level attempts. That’s about as much as the introduction gives you before throwing you into the action.

After completing Redfall’s introduction, you conduct story and side missions from a centralized base of operations. The first few hours of the narrative follow The Hollow Man, a mysterious entity proselytizing from the town’s radio signals. This mysterious entity seems to be everywhere and is very unnerving. This stretch features Redfall’s best missions and locations, which require you to explore a dilapidated mansion and its gruesome past, fight a powerful enemy at a cliffside lighthouse in a lightning storm, and rescue hostages from a boatyard that The Hollow Man’s followers control. Unfortunately, this game attempts to recreate its first hours in its entirety. Unintelligible story revelations and side activities are repeated, while a second less interesting map is also included. Lastly, Arkane presents the Vampire Gods’ storyline via flashbacks in which you stand in an abandoned space watching vaguely humanoid ghosts speak to each other. It’s a forgettable result. 

On a positive note, I like the four launch protagonists: Remi and her robotic companion Bribón; a teleporting cryptozoologist named Devinder; Jacob, who is a marksman with a psychic eye; and Layla, a biomedical engineer who inherited telekinetic powers after a medical trial gone wrong. Each character has unique skills you can upgrade via a straightforward-but-sufficient skill tree, but with only three total abilities per character, you won’t use them nearly as much as your firearms. The experience could’ve been more interesting if I could pick and choose from the game’s 12 abilities to carve my playstyle, but sadly you must select one character and their pre-determined skillset for the entire game. 

Redfall’s shooting mechanics and armory of weapons are serviceable, with the heavy-hitting stake launcher and ultra-violet raygun – which petrifies vampires – being the highlights. You’ll discover new weapons as you explore the world and complete missions, each slotting somewhere into the rudimentary tiered-loot system. Despite guns having randomized perks, like increased damage to petrified vampires, I didn’t pay much attention to them because the loot system recycles the same dozen or so weapons repeatedly, with slightly higher stats each time. The loot system does the exact same thing with vampire enemies. I’d often fight the same kind of vampire frequently, but my character would remark that it was a new vampire simply because it had a different name. 

Redfall’s wasted potential makes me sad. There are some forgettable locations for every good one. It’s a hollow game, full of puzzles. There are no stealth kills and a frustrating quest and waypoint system. You can also not pause the single player mode. The game is plagued by technical problems, such as frequent server crashes, bad inputs, animations broken, etc. This makes playing Redfall frustrating. Redfall, a game that is about fighting against the undead in the worst possible way, feels soulless.