 In 2017 I found myself being one of the rare people defending a game that everyone else seemed to hate. I even recall making a Reddit post saying that if Mass Effective Andromeda had been called Space Explorer Infinity or something, it would be considered a perfectly decent game. Not great or anything mind you, and totally full of bugs, but a slightly above average game that was worth playing flaws and all. And the video I have with the most views is my review of Rage 2, another game that reviewed badly despite having excellent combat, and a game I was convinced would one day be the subject of YouTube videos with thumbnail saying, actually Rage 2 was pretty good. I do my best to avoid all reviews of a game I plan on making a video about until I've played it, but that was impossible here as Redfall's myriad bugs ended up being THE big news story last week. But I actually have a very high tolerance for bugs and performance issues, so I was still ready to give Redfall a fair shake. I also always try as hard as I can to not let my expectations impact what I think of a game, and usually I think I succeeded that. But with some developers it's sort of impossible for me to separate what I wanted from what I got. I was pretty seriously disappointed in WoW Long because the Neo games I just loved them so much, and my insane hype for Elden Ring ended up leaving me a little disappointed with that game. Still, both of those games were at least good enough, and close enough, to what I expected that I still had a great time. I just didn't have as great a time as I had been hoping. Arcane Studios is one of my very favorite developers, and their Austin studio developed what I consider to be two of the greatest games ever made in Prey and Moon Crash. So when Redfall was announced I remained optimistic despite being pretty disappointed that the game wasn't what I had wanted, and I tried to temper my unease with a game that looked as if it had nothing to do with previous Arcane titles. Sure, I thought, the game is co-op, and yeah it seems to have classes and like tiered loot for some reason, but surely Arcane Austin would infuse this tired genre with all the things that make an Arcane game great. Well, we got Redfall, and I can honestly say I have never been more disappointed in a game, and that is not hyperbole. I have seriously never once been more disappointed in a game. Now it's not all bad, and in many ways I think Redfall might even be reviewing worse than it actually is, because on one hand Redfall is a perfectly decent open world shooter with a bunch of interesting bits, but on the other hand this is a game made by the studio who made Prey. And when we take that into account, Redfall is catastrophically terrible. From its truly embarrassing technical state, which will eventually be fixed, but man it is just a mess, to its bland mission design and its inconsistent storytelling and its boring combat, Redfall is sometimes pretty good, but far more often it's just bad. The kind of terrible that ends up closing studios down, it's that bad. Today let's take a look at one of the most baffling and stupid titles of the last 20 years and at least try and figure out what the hell they were thinking after the logo. Yeah, it ain't far cry. We're gonna try to quickly go over the problems this game has before we wrap up and try to understand why Redfall is such a massive failure, and the place to start is with combat, because if you're gonna make a co-op shooter, you really need to make sure the combat is excellent. In the run-up to the game's release, we still had no real idea what the hell Redfall was, which is always a bad sign, and it was only in the last few months that Arcane Austin started saying that Redfall was their take on something like Far Cry. I think they were actually using that description as a way to somewhat manage expectations, but honestly, when I heard that I thought, okay, that's kinda interesting, I can see how an immersive sim studio could make a game that sort of resembles Far Cry and do it well. But the sad truth is, when it comes to the combat, the Far Cry comparison makes the game look even worse. The reason an Arcane Far Cry could actually work is that the immersive sim design ethos does, in fact, perfectly fit in the Far Cry sandbox. Far Cry's core design is all about freedom and combat, and for all the shit I've given Far Cry 5 and 6, the fact is they do still have that core design there. Most encounters are carefully built around the stealth approach, but there's also a huge variety of weapons, explosives, and vehicles so that the player has a pretty unique amount of agency to figure out combat problems. Every Far Cry combat encounter ends up playing out in unique ways, because the entire sandbox is carefully tuned for both stealth and mayhem. And importantly, Far Cry's difficulty, at least until 6, was tuned in a way to heavily incentivize stealth. Sadly, Redfall just utterly fails on all of these metrics. If stealth was gonna matter, players need a hell of a lot more options than a sniper rifle, one silent sniper rifle. As it stands in the game, you can just like hilariously pick off mook after mook as they wander stupidly in front of your reticle because the AI here is clearly broken, literally broken, where Far Cry gives you silenced pistols, silenced SMGs, throwing knives, bait, animal attacks, bows and arrows, silenced shotguns, and more. Redfall gives you one silent sniper, no throwables, and levels that are simply not designed with stealth in mind outside a very, very few proper arcane maps that are scattered across this game. But what's even worse is what happens once stealth breaks. Redfall has a pitiful roster of weapons for what is essentially a game entirely about shooting things. Two types of handguns, a few shotguns, two snipers, three assault rifles, and like every weapon feels basically the same because enemy AI is catastrophically terrible. Gunplay often feels fine, ish, and the game has its moments for sure, but it's never actually good because the player has zero defensive options. In a game that is all about combat, with enemies that charge directly at the player to melee them, it blows my mind that there's not a dodge mechanic here. How did this game get developed? And nobody along the way thought to include a dodge. Imagine the possibilities that open up if the player simply has a doom eternal style dodge. Instead what you have is standing still and headshotting humans and then like circle strafing vampires with pathetic enemy variety. Because that AI is seemingly broken, almost nothing actually works. Stealth is borked because enemies strangely vary between not noticing you at all to seriously spotting you from half a mile away. And with that inconsistency, it quickly becomes obvious that stealth simply isn't necessary and doesn't really work anyway. Then there's the disastrously poor visibility here. It is extremely common to have no idea where you're being shot from because enemies blend into the background which can be very annoying. And that kind of ties into the serious issue with how the difficulty works in Red Fall. The normal difficulty is so easy it's ridiculous and the hard difficulty is just a hassle. On hard, enemies have more health and do more damage but because the player has no actual way to avoid damage beyond slowly kiting mobs around, playing on hard only slows you down. Plus the online aspect of the game means that dying has no penalty, which means the combat encounters have no stakes, which means nothing matters. You'll die and respawn and when you get back all of the enemies you killed, stay dead. So every death is just you brute forcing the level. This game desperately needed death to matter. It needed the game to respawn all enemies when you die. Instead, death means nothing except a few wasted minutes running back. Why would I play on hard when there's no penalty for dying? If I'm playing on hard, I expect that I will need to play very well to complete the mission and if I play badly, I will have to repeat it until I get it correct. Instead, hard just means you spend time running back to your corpse. It just shows that there's like no idea on how to make an interesting shooter here. Imagine in Doom Eternal if every time you died, the enemies you killed stayed dead. It would be horrendous, terrible. That's the first of many ways this game's online co-op design just absolutely ruins the experience. In its current state, when it runs up against the catastrophic bugs and the downright embarrassing AI and the difficulty issues and the lack of consequences, those average FPS mechanics are dragged down until you're left with a downright bad combat system. Arcane Austin's last game, Prey, was one of the most carefully designed web of systems ever, and it made the game tremendously more than the sum of its parts. Redfall is less than a sum of its parts. It is just sad. Exploration is not the name of the game. Prey is one of the best designed game worlds in history and Moon Crash is even better. The station in Prey is complex and interesting. The game is full of alternate paths that tie directly into progression. There is hacking, the dart gun, strength for moving obstacles, you can level up your agility so you can jump to unseen paths. Attentiveness is rewarded by finding vents to wind your way through and the player actually feels like they're breaking the levels with the glue gun, or the ability to turn yourself into any tiny object in the game and roll under doors. The reason Prey is amazing, despite having only average shooting mechanics, is because the progression makes the late game feel like an entirely different game from how the first few hours play. That, plus the fact that the player is constantly solving problems just exploring the ship, means you're almost never just running back and forth across a map. Redfall has none of that. There are several really nicely designed locations in the game for sure, but they're so rare and the careful exploration just doesn't work in a suburban American setting. All the previous Arcane games are dense maps. The Space Station, all of Dishonored's levels, and especially the Moon in Moon Crash, are levels that stack on top of themselves and connect in surprising ways. They have a similar level design to Dark Souls, and it's just a joy to explore them. But Redfall feels like any other open-world game. Now, I've seen a bunch of people saying that the game is ugly, but I have much lower standards for graphics than most I guess because in my opinion Redfall, when it's actually working, actually has a very pretty map with fantastic art design and a ton of really interesting locations. It's got a ton of detail and love in its art direction, and it has a bunch of places that make you stop and admire the view. But, you know, like, so what? You spend a bunch of time just running from one waypoint to another. There's no gameplay involved at all. I actually finally finished Breath of the Wild to get ready for the sequel, and while I maintain that that game is annoying as fuck half the time, there's no denying that it uses its open world in a cool way, almost like an immersive Sim way. You spend a ton of time just trying to figure out how to get where you're going. The world is one big puzzle. That is how to use an open world in an interesting way. Again, Breath of the Wild's open world map feels a lot like a big ass immersive Sim map. Exploration is an actual mechanic. You would think that Arkane, the kings of current immersive Sims, would have brought that ethos to their open world, but no. Redfall's open world is a chore, a literal chore. It's just a bunch of time wasted in between the actual game, which isn't that good to begin with. Then there's the progression and looting. Prey has one of the best loot and progression systems ever designed. Nearly every single object in the world can be broken down into resources, and those resources used to craft every single object in the game, from ammo to weapons to even crafting skill points. This was the core thing driving exploration. There was a reason you tried to get into every single door and open every single safe, because that exploration was the only way to progress and every single banana peel you found actually had value. Redfall does let you grab a bunch of loot, but it is useless. Amazingly useless. You are basically looting weapons, med kits, ammo and money. But the money is pointless. You can buy guns, but why? Guns drop all the time and upgrades come extremely fast for some reason. You mostly end up using money to buy lockpicks and rewire tools. But you'll quickly realize that you are literally using lockpicks to get the money to buy more lockpicks. The game makes you buy health kits, but imagine this. If the game just refilled your healing items for free when you died or traveled to a safe house, would you need money at all in this game? The answer is no, which means that it's just a time sink. You will never find skill points. Why? You'll never find XP. Why? The very best weapons basically only drop from bosses and vampire nests. Why? And you level up by doing quests and killing things. So there is quite literally no reason to even bother exploring the map. There is no reward, barely any story, and map exploration has almost zero effect on progression, which means exploring the map is pointless. In an arcane game, this is a developer whose entire catalog is basically all about slowly exploring a map. This is why the basic idea behind Redfall could have been great. An open world immersive sim shooter with arcane's attention to detail and systems heavy design sounds awesome. It's just that the execution is terrible. As to the skill trees, they could not possibly be more bland. It would be impossible to design a more bland skill tree than this. I often forgot to spend skill points and when I finally open the menu I'd look at the tree and think how meaningless all the nodes were. Praise skills fundamentally change the game. So much so that a different playthrough can play radically differently. Meanwhile, Redfall skills are so bland I didn't bother to use them. Every so often, maybe like once every few hours, I'd almost die to another poorly designed encounter and remember to use my superpower, but the rest of the time it's so useless it kind of amazes me. In fact, pretty early on the game realizes it cannot challenge you at all without kind of cheating. You'll kill these watcher things with a silent sniper rifle and it will still bring nine vampires directly to your location, which is the only time you actually need the skills and superpower. I don't understand why the skills are so vanilla and uninteresting. Why are the guns so bland? This was obviously once a live service game so why are the gun perks so boring? Why aren't there special guns that chain lightning? Why no guns that blast fire or blood? Why no guns that cause explosions on headshots? How is the game so insanely safe and boring? There is no progression that matters. An exploration is pointless, which means combat was everything in Redfall. Everything. How did they think that this game, which has so much less going on than Prey, should have combat that is so much more bland? If ever a game needed insane Borderlands style weapons, it was this. Instead of having a rifle that causes blood explosions or a shotgun that heals you from multi kills, you find guns that do 50% more head damage or have 20% increased reload speed. And worst of all, the gun stats are not randomized. Every level 13 sniper does the exact same damage. Every shotgun of the same archetype has the same reload speed. The only thing affected by the tier, you know, green, blue, purple, the only thing that affects is how many perks the gun has. But the perks are like don't even matter, man. The lack of creativity on offer here is stunning, seriously stunning. We can imagine a version of this game that has a bunch of Destiny style exotic weapons and Borderlands style random roles. Who cares if the balance would have been all over the place. It's always worse to be boring than unbalanced story. I won't spend much time in this because I generally don't give a shit about stories in games. Story in games is like dessert. It's nice to have if it's good, but it's not necessary outside of narrative focused games. World building is usually more important than story. That's why I will take the non-story of Dark Souls 3 and feel much more immersed than when I'm playing AC Valhalla with its 55 hours of cutscenes. And Arcane is actually one of the best devs at this very thing. That having just enough story and world to keep you interested while still being mostly a systems and mechanics driven game. The Dishonored games have wonderful worlds with good story. Austin's last game, Prey, has an excellent story, and Mooncrashes was really good too. Redfall's story would have been pretty good for a live service game, but as a single player game it is not even average. There's a bunch of characters who do not matter and don't feel like real people. The game's tone whiplashes all over the place. It's seemingly supposed to be a dark serious horror vibe, but the player character is always making jokes. Why? Why are there any fucking jokes here? Every so often this game will put you in a place where you get serious horror vibes. When you're following a trail of blood with creepy sound design and the lights go out, it makes me so sad for what this game could have been. As to the main story itself, it's like it's just not even there. It's barely there at all. The quote unquote cutscenes are static images with a voiceover. Sometimes they're static images with no voiceover, but I think that was probably a bug. Actually, I don't really know. Then the best story in the game are told through these wireframe video log things. Is it too much to expect that these things actually move? The Dead Space remake just showed how much story you can deliver through this very method. Redfall has an interesting story here, but it's hardly using the visual and interactive medium of games to have me stand and still looking at static wireframe models while dialogue track plays. Just amazing, this was considered acceptable. And again, from Arcane Austin, just amazing. Imagine if these were actually cutscenes. There are some legitimately powerful and interesting stories here, but they're just ruined by this presentation. Man, the story of the first big boss is interesting, but it's told so fast. Why isn't every single mission and side mission about putting together the mystery? Instead, you get three missions about this very interesting character and six missions of fucking chaff about finding whiskey and cigars or finding some NPC's dead brother that I don't give a shit about or any number of utterly forgettable filler. Praise, audio and text logs are some of the best in gaming. Redfall has a shitload of text logs, but you can't pause the game to read them because of the stupid online shit. So it has the same problem as Fallout 76 where I have to hear the game audio in the back while I'm trying to read and I can end up being attacked. I can't really concentrate and read if I hear the game's audio. What a mess. And unlike Fallout 76, which still had many excellent stories in the logs, Redfall has barely any at all. Of the few great little stories, they're simply not fleshed out enough. A perfect example is this boat here. There's a story here about how the crew ended up trapped and slowly started turning on each other before the captain sold them out and became a vampire herself. You end up fighting that captain too. So this is really setting up what should be a great moment. This is a really cool story that should have been slowly told in seven or eight or nine audio and text logs over 40 minutes. Instead, the game is so intent on rushing you through every level that you never spend more than 10 minutes doing any one thing. And as a result, this really cool story is told in two text logs that are in the exact same spot. Another example of the co-op online design just ruining this game. If you're going to have online play, then no mission can be more than 15 minutes. And nobody wants to wait for you to read a bunch of text logs before triggering the boss so we can't have any area actually tell an interesting story. Instead, all the worldbuilding and all the storytelling needs to be done in four minutes or less. And so you're left with a bland, stupid, storyless game with missions that can only take 10 minutes and levels that are too simple to get lost in. What a disaster. An immersive FPS. Alright, let's wrap this up because it is really depressing. I haven't finished this game yet. And I don't think I will, frankly. I almost always try to finish a game and if I'm going to review it, but I am positive I have now seen all this game has to offer. The game follows a formula three times. You do a chain of story missions, and then you are allowed to fight a boss. But this is a shitty open world game, so in order to actually fight that boss after you complete the five main missions, you also need to do six repeating open world side missions. I finished the first two main bosses and was doing the stupid open world shit for the last one. You need to get three vampire mini boss skulls to prove to the game that you deserve to play the next mission. Well, I was finishing up the second skull and killed the boss when its skull dropped through the floor and could not be grabbed. I fast traveled, still stuck in the floor. I quit to the menu, came back in and discovered that I would have to run across the map and kill the boss again. And you know what? That's the end of my time with Redfall. The game does not deserve to be finished. The sad thing is each of those three quest chains did have a few great moments. When the game remembers that it is a horror game about an entire town getting murdered, it starts to shine. And the handful of times Arcane remembers why people love their games, you can see the outlines of a great version of Redfall. Every so often, you can very clearly see what Arcane Austin envisioned when this game was first conceptualized. I can see an amazing open world horror immersive sim here. The looting even has a bunch of stuff like you would have looted in Prey, which is why I have an extremely strong suspicion that this game was initially envisioned as an ambitious horror version of Prey. I haven't seen anyone talk about this specifically, but it seems quite obvious. Let me convince you the two cores of Prey were the looting stuff to craft and the progression that includes alien abilities. Now let's look at the stuff you loot in Redfall. You loot fabric, like towels, toilet paper, clothes, that kind of stuff. You loot metal items, all sorts of metal items, and you loot chemicals, bleach, motor oil, etc. All sorts of stuff. Why does this game only have you looting this stuff? In the current game, the lower reason is that you're looting this stuff to help out survivors. Okay, but why would fucking survivors need watches and jeweled eggs and gold frames and stuff? Why would they need vampire juice? In the current version of Redfall, these things instantly turn into money when you pick them up. They are instantly converted to cash, but there's another version of this game where all that stuff ties into a crafting system. When you can craft ammo in most games, what do you use? Linen, chemicals, metal. The loot here sure sounds like what you'd use to make explosives and ammo in an immersive sim. Then let's think about the enemies. In Prey, all of the enemies you fight use abilities that you end up getting yourself. You kind of pollute yourself with alien bio matter in order to take their abilities. Hmm, what does that sound like? Maybe you would pollute yourself a little bit with vampire blood, which you can find in the game to get vampire abilities? In Prey, you unlock the ability to mine control by scanning and fighting enemies who mine control, saying with the fire, the psychic and the shock abilities. In Redfall, all of the different vampires have abilities that you yourself could use in a better game. Several vampires have fucking blink for Christ's sake. There's a siphon ability, there's a teleport, there's a ranged magic attack, there's a shield ability, and the enemies have a mind control ability. Sure sounds like the abilities the player was originally supposed to acquire over the course of an immersive sim. This game was conceptualized directly after Prey Mooncrash wrapped up. Is it so hard to believe that right after Prey, they imagined a very similar game but instead of aliens, vampires, and instead of sci-fi crafting, some kind of regular crafting system. Again, instead of taking the typhon material and turning yourself into an alien, taking little bits of vampire blood to just kind of slightly become a vampire to get their abilities. Anyway, after this game was conceptualized, they went to Zenimax and pitched it, and at that point in time, Zenimax was full on in their we must have live service games phase. They pushed one of Bethesda's satellite studios to make a fallout MMO after their multiplayer shooter failed. They pushed Arcane Leon to add multiplayer to all games, and so we got Deathloop with a core multiplayer mode. And they said, sure, Austin, you can make your vampire immersive sim, but it has to be an always online co-op game with cosmetic items and microtransactions. And that's what Arcane Austin did. They took their insanely ambitious open world horror immersive sim and made it into a much less ambitious open world live service game. The bones of the original are still there, but the vampires at Zenimax have drained it of blood. They probably spent two years figuring out how to even make the online work as nobody in the studio has extensive multiplayer game experience. Then the company was bought by Microsoft Mid Development and they must have looked at this thing and realized it was a total disaster and told Austin to take an extra 18 months, rip out all of the microtransactions, and try to make Red Fall as much of an Arcane Austin game as possible. But it was too late. The game was doomed from the start. None of this excuses the horrendous technical state of the game, by the way. Microsoft should have been fucking embarrassed at releasing this. They charged 70 bucks on Steam for this objectively broken game. It doesn't matter how behind schedule this thing was. It's clearly not done and charging 70 bucks is outrageous. Still, I can see a badass version of Red Fall. It is kind of there. And that's the saddest thing. There's a bunch of good stuff here. The atmosphere can be amazing. The map is, you know, pretty cool for an open world game. But it is just buried under a rotten core and a mountain of horrendous bugs. And we didn't even really talk about the bugs. Keybinds break. A mountain of visual bugs. The interact key consistently fucking breaks and makes you restart the damn game. None of the ladders in this game work, dude. The central mechanic of staking vampires doesn't work half the time and you'll just punch the downed enemy in the chest. The AI is usually somewhat weak in Arcane games, but it's downright bugs and broken here. I'm always saying that studios should do what they do best, but that doesn't mean that there's no room for variety. I may not like Elden Ring as much as I like Dark Souls, but the idea of an open world souls game was a good one. As long as the core from design is still in there, which it is. There's been some hand-ringing over the idea that the new drain age is going to have an action combat system, but that's a good thing in my opinion, man. As long as the narrative elements are still classic Bioware, the problem with Anthem isn't that it has action combat. The problem is it has no Bioware systems at all. So even though I was nervous about Redfall, I was still pretty sure we were going to get a game that heavily featured Arcane's unique blend of narrative choice, deep stealth, and immersive sim gameplay. And again, a co-op immersive sim shooter sounds like something I might really really like. But sadly, Redfall has no immersive sim elements. And here's why I'm positive this game began as an open world prey. At the start of Redfall, the very first building you come up to throws up a tutorial about play your way. It says you can choose stealth or loud, just like all the other games, and it points out the huge building in front of you has a ton of entrances. This was likely built as the tutorial building for an open world immersive sim. But in a game like this, there's no point to use stealth because loud always works. And after this tutorial building, there's maybe like two other places that actually have a bunch of entrances and stealth paths. After playing the game, it is beyond obvious that Redfall is another example that shows why Zenimax needed to sell the company. Redfall is Bethesda's Gotham Knights, a game that was designed before the live service apocalypse and frantically tried to salvage something from the ashes, anything. The problem is that there was no way to turn this mess back into an arcane game. Redfall is the kind of mess that puts studios out of business. I think it will behoove Microsoft to have the people at arcane leak what actually happened here to Jason Shryer. I don't care if it throws people who still work at Zenimax under the bus. Those people need a bloody and embarrassing bussing. They were bad and they should feel bad and fuck those people because they just charged $70 for a piece of shit like this. And I sincerely hope that Microsoft pretends this shit never happened and gets Arcane Austin started on Prey 2 like tomorrow. At least Redfall will probably be the last time this ever happens. Actually I guess Suicide Squad will probably be the last time this happens but man, hopefully we can put this whole fucking terrible period of gaming behind us and get back to letting studios make the games they're good at making. Nobody is going to be the destiny 2 killer except destiny 3. Nobody is going to be the next big live service game just like nobody ends up being the WoW killer. The ship has sailed and the live service genre is saturated. No more making your flagship studios cram live service elements into their games please. Alright, thanks for coming. I will see you next time. Probably Jedi Survivor which is pretty good aside from the disastrous PC state or maybe how I think we really need destiny 3. Some kind of sick of destiny 2. Or there's a few other games. I've been playing a lot of games actually but I'll see you soon. Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye.