We take a long look whilst playing Arkane’s vampire themed first person shooter Redfall and determine why the game was so poorly received. We also provide some ideas which we think would have made the game so much better within the vampire theme. Watch the video, or check the key points listed.
Some key points for those who do not want to view the entire video:
- Soulless world
- Poor enemy AI
- Lackluster objectives
- Repetitive gameplay
- Uninteresting story
- Woke NPCs
- Dull combat
- No sense of fear (considering the vampiric theme)
Some Ideas to improve the game:
Populate the empty world with plentiful NPCs who can either be friendly, faction based or a vampire. However, the vampires are not easily spotted and can hide amongst the human looking NPCs. Vamps won’t attack the player on sight but blend-in making it difficult to hunt them down. At a stretch, given how Arkane handled enemies in Prey, they could have used a similar mechanic in this game. The player has to determine which NPCs/graves/coffins etc are vampires or house a vampire by discovering clues of their whereabouts. Perhaps a household in the neighbourhood has weird goings-on. Or people have gone missing in a specific area. Are their visual clues to follow. Once the vampire has been ousted and killed, the player gains knowledge of the leader vampire for that area. Once enough lesser vamps have been killed, enough info is gathered to hunt the leader vampire for that area.
In our view, as it stands Redfall boils down to a simple looter shooter with dull vampire enemies and even worse human enemies. The world could have been filled with regular folks (and light-immune vamps) during the day and factions / vamps at night. So much could have been done with the theme, but Redfall just doesn’t hit the mark in any meaningful way. This is such a shame and wasted opportunity given how good Dishonored , Prey and to a lesser extent Deathloop was. As for the co-op element, there are several games out there which have the theme of players working together with one of the players being the antagonist/impostor. This would have worked pretty well in Redfall.
At this stage, we think the Redfall name is tarnished, even if Microsoft pumped a lot more resources into fixing the game, we don’t believe gamers will take the bait this time no matter how much it improves. So what of Redfall 2 then? Well, that’s a possibility but we honestly don’t see that happening any time soon. We think Microsoft will count their losses on this new IP. A shame.
