E3 2021 saw the announcement of Redfall, a new game from the Austin branch of Arkane Studios. The pure CG trailer provided some vibes about what the game was going to be like. It seemed to have that Left 4 Dead feel with its focus on four different characters, and it had vampires instead of zombies. It had a little bit of Overwatch in terms of characters wielding distinct powers. It also had a little Battlefield: Bad Company, as the characters often shared comedic banter among the action. It seemed interesting enough that there was some disappointment when the game was delayed and missed its proposed Summer 2022 release in favor of a Spring 2023 one. Now that the game is out, it is fascinating for a variety of reasons.

The story starts off with a woman narrating her arrival in Redfall, Massachusetts to attend a medical clinic. The promise is that the doctors and scientists would examine her blood, since it contains undisclosed special qualities. The truth is that they practically siphoned it all out and used it to create powerful vampires. In addition to the usual traits, like being able to teleport via mist and gaining slight levitation in their unending bloodlust, they also gained the power to block out the sun and suspend water into a giant wave wall that traps its inhabitants and blocks the outside world. As one of four survivors who somehow survived a crash from the last escaping boat, you take it upon yourself to try to quell — or stop — the vampire plague.

If you're the type of player who's big on story, then you'll find the one in Redfall to be unfocused, at least initially. The characters that you see when you wake up from the crash are promptly ignored, the narrator is only heard when you pick up special vials, and there's a focus on going after a cult leader known as The Hollow Man. Every important story beat focuses on this, and it isn't until you get closer to the fight with The Hollow Man that you realize there's plenty more to the story than what you're initially led to believe. This is a good point to get you to complete the game, but that isn't apparent until several hours into the experience, so it can be a turn-off for those who aren't into really slow burns with the narrative.

The cut scenes are almost all told via moving stills as opposed to full CG-rendered movies or ones done with the in-game engine. To be fair, the stills are done with your character's current configuration, so you'll see them in the outfit you've chosen instead of the default one. The stills convey what's going on, and they show off the art style, but it would've been nice to see the characters moving around. It also would've been nice if the lighting were brighter, as some of these scenes are too dark to see what's going on, especially with HDR turned on.

You start off by selecting a character, all of whom are practically the same except for their three special abilities. Jacob can summon a spiritual sniper rifle that can lock onto multiple enemies from afar. He has a raven that can mark enemies, and he also has a cloak to hide his presence until he attacks or touches an enemy. Devinder can throw a javelin to produce an electric field to stun enemies and a UV grenade to freeze vampires. He also has a translocator to warp from one area to wherever it's thrown. Layla's psychic abilities give her an elevator to provide an extra leap and an umbrella that acts as both a projectile shield and an energy burst when thrown. She can also summon her ex-boyfriend, who happens to be a friendly vampire that'll fight alongside her for a time. Finally, there's Remi, who has a robotic companion that can distract enemies. She can also place healing beacons and deploy C4 charges to clear out enemies and other explosive hazards.

Presented as a first-person shooter, the gameplay can be aptly described as a mash-up of the style of game that Arkane is known for, along with elements from other games within the genre and outside of it. The game sports two sizable open areas to explore, and the game does a good job of mixing vertical exploration and checking out interiors and exteriors without the need for loading screens. There are plenty of markers and safehouses for fast-travel and side-quests. The game doesn't feature a regenerative health system until you get close enough to death, so you will depend on health packs, but the game also adopts the philosophy of the company's previous games of letting you heal by eating food. You can generally pick up anything and everything that's not nailed down to get quick cash to buy med kits or tools.

The shooting aspect feels like a Tom Clancy game in that the regular humans can go down with a good headshot or two and aren't big bullet sponges. The vampires are tougher because they have much greater mobility. All attacks hurt for big damage, so players can still take advantage of the company's multipronged approach of choosing between stealth and full-on action, but don't expect to get in one-hit stealth kills. Redfall lets you carry a bunch of different guns at once, but you can only swap between three of the chosen guns before you need to go into a menu to select another one. With a Borderlands-style approach, all of your guns have different stats, and while there isn't much difference, you will spend time reading stats to see what needs saving and what needs salvaging for cash. Environments are also interactive, so you have plenty of objects to blow up and plenty of items that can be set ablaze. Lighting up stray pools of gas or igniting hay bales to burn enemies never gets old, and some of those dangers affect you, too.

On paper, this sounds like a good enough foundation for a shooter. However, the first half of the game is too easy. Unless you bump up the difficulty level, it isn't tough to get the drop on enemies and dispose of them before anyone can alert others. Watchers are special vampires that can kill with death rays from their eyes, but they're so few and far between that it's easy to forget they exist. Named vampires are like regular ones but with a longer life bar. The red mists that cover areas with poison are mere annoyances without a UV gun because players need to take the long way around or run through a little damage, but there's nothing that hasn't been seen before.

The game is engaging enough but isn't anything special until the first big boss encounter, when the Arkane Studios weirdness finally shines through. Explore echoes of past memories to see how fiendish the big vampires can be. Twisted levels can be confusing but are easily traversable. Boss fights pose a good challenge. Reach the second map, and everything starts to flow together, after special forces have invaded and human cultists are fighting each other. Those same PMCs fight the vampires, giving you a chance to sneak away without getting harmed. Players can fight a stronger vampire for bonus loot. The game gets much more challenging, and the move to a small town with lots of wooded areas and mountainsides adds some charm. The title is kind enough to keep enemy damage intact when you die and staring from a respawn point to continue the fight.

The solo gameplay experience is done well but has its faults. Even though offline play is being looked at for the future, an online connection is required if you want to play solo. Aesthetically, despite there being an eternal eclipse, daytime sections are just as bright as they would be in a normal game. There's no red tint or dulled colors to let you know something is wrong, and the only real indication is seeing the large ocean wall with dead fish littering the seabed. Enemy AI is much better from the second map onward, but that means seeing situations where enemies don't react quickly enough or wait for you to strike first. The inability to travel between both major maps of Redfall makes sense from a storyline perspective, but it means that you'd better be thorough on the first map since you can't clean up later. Placing a marker on the map is inaccurate, since it always places it above your intended spot, forcing you to redo it until it's right. Powers work well, but you often forget about them since your instinct is to use guns and melee attacks. Powers aren't game-changers, and you'll often find ways to do the same thing without a special ability, even though your only penalty is a cooldown.

All of the marketing for Redfall has emphasized multiplayer play, and that's where players run into issues. If you're planning to play cross-play, prepare to create and use a Bethesda account. The actual gameplay when it comes to latency is fine, but it isn't stable enough to hold a connection long enough before a desync happens and everyone gets booted to the main menu. If you're playing the game off an HDD, prepare to desync faster, as the game takes ages to load, to the point where some elements aren't interactive until you wait long enough for them to appear. The game's constant chatter also works against it, as there's rarely a moment when you can communicate with others and not have it be covered up by other noise or someone speaking.

If you get lucky with a stable connection and everyone is on decent hardware, you'll find a few good things about online play. For starters, everyone keeps their progress while playing, and you won't suddenly get stuff that you can't use if you're playing with someone who has progressed further than you. The host determines the campaign level, but guests come away with any artifacts, levels and weapons that they find in that session. There's no chance of loot getting swiped from other players, since everyone's loot pool is personal. Despite the disconnects, the game saves often enough that there are no setbacks to campaign progress or individual leveling and loot. There's promise here, and hopefully a few patches will gets this to a point where online play is encouraged.

The audio is a bit all over the place. The main complaint is the music, which is quite good and has an adventurous, horror-tinged vibe. What makes this feel odd is that some of the music selections don't fit the situation. For example, you could have a heartfelt mission where you're asked to go to a personal place for one of the survivors, but the music is upbeat, causing an unintended shift of tone that mars the intended effect. Elsewhere, the voice work serves as a highlight; all of the performances are solid, but the use of the voices feels special. Nearby human enemies chatter away, and the proliferation of radios and loudspeakers and TVs ensures that you'll hear some kind of broadcast trying to provide hints or tempt you to surrender. Speaking vampires are the real draw. You'll hear them from further away than the humans, and you'll have to take into account elevation when trying to locate them among the shadows. It keeps you constantly aware and alert.

When it comes to PC performance, Redfall is in a better position than most of the big releases from the past few months in that it isn't a stuttering mess. There are still moments where the frame rate drops while transitioning into a different section of the world, but it lasts for a second, and the game performs normally afterward. There are places in the world where the frame rate drops and the game slows down, such as during neighborhood transitions or looking into a large expanse but not to the point where it's unplayable. Texture pop-in isn't that evident, but the level of detail pop-in sure is when looking at trees or car tires; they change in density or shape when players approach them at any speed. Shadows can often shimmer for no discernable reason, so you can't tell if you're looking at a bug or an accelerated passage of time. Particle effects are abundant when dealing with vampires, as they leave behind whisps when darting around and explode into loads of dust. Despite some of those negatives, the overall game still looks nice, but fixing some of these issues would elevate the quality even more.

If you're planning to use some form of upscaling technology to offset the frame rate drops, know that it can only do so much. There are going to be moments where it'll still dip below the 60fps that people are expecting nowadays, even when armed with a high-end GPU like the RTX 4090. As a baseline, the system with the aforementioned graphics card has a Ryzen 7 5800X and 32GB of RAM. Since the game has no pre-built benchmark, we took a walk from the firehouse to the sporting goods store near the theater to get a performance example. Due to the randomization when it comes to enemy placement and time of day, there's enough variation to make these findings different from what others may see.

As a baseline, running the game at native 4K with Epic settings and no upscaling activated, players get an average of 64fps with the game sometimes dipping to the high 40s. If you use DLSS3 with frame generation, that average jumps to 123fps, but you'll still get some dips into the 50s. Turn off frame generation to get something akin to DLSS2, and your average hits 73fps with occasional drops to the 50s. The same result occurs if you're using Intel's XeSS technology, but the real anomaly comes with those using AMD's FSR 2.1, which produced an average of 61fps. Again, it's an odd reading but not necessarily something that proves FSR to be inferior to the other methods. No matter which version you use, only a few of the finer elements get crushed by it, such as some of the neon signs that look more blob-like until you get closer.

Steam Deck users will find that Redfall runs decently on the system. The settings aren't sporting cloud saves, so while your progress does carry over between systems, you can tweak settings specific to your system without fearing that it of carries over to a different device. Upon boot, the game sets every option to Medium but turns off anti-aliasing. It also automatically activates AMD's FSR 2.1 technology with it set to Quality mode. Using the same run from the upscaling tests, the game hits a little over 30fps most of the time, with the peak reaching 40 and the floor being in the low 20s. It's not bad, but the Medium settings mean that the textures for a number of elements can be too blurry. By comparison, we ran the game on a system that was below the minimum specifications, with the CPU being an Intel core i5-7600k versus the listed i5-8400 that the game wants. That system also sported a Radeon RX 580 8GB edition and 16GB of RAM. At 1440p, the game averaged 40fps with a medium preset, but the textures were much cleaner, so there's a bit of work to be done on the game to make it look better on the Deck. For those wondering about battery life, you're getting about 100 minutes of time here which actually puts it on par with some of the other big budget titles that have been released in 2023 so far.

It's a bit difficult to parse out the overall quality of Redfall. If you're talking about it from a technical perspective, it's scattershot but comes out better than some games that look and sound pretty but have terrible performance. If you're looking at it from a story perspective, it's a slow burn that cranks up things once you get close to beating the first major vampire, and the same can be said for the gameplay. Solo play is also better than co-op, based solely on the issues we ran into with connectivity, but mileage can vary. Overall, Redfall asks quite a bit of time from players before getting really good, which makes it perfect for Game Pass but tougher for those who don't have the patience to spend the time to wade through the jank to reach that point.

Score: 7.0/10