Shane
Welcome to Redfall.
An idyllic small American township where you can live the quiet life and slay a few Vampires.
Redfall, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda is a first person open world single or multiplayer game where a dark evil has befallen the otherwise quiet town.
To start off you select your vamp slayer from the four available; Jacob Boyer, Davinder ‘Dev’ Crousley, Remi De La Rosa and Layla Ellison.
Each of the heroes of course sits within their own unique characters classes and have their own skills and abilities, which you can upgrade via earned skill points.
There are two game options from the start; Single player or Host a game.
Going in to the narrative gameplay, (single player) you’ll start out having just escaped death.
The ocean has been pushed back, the sun blacked out and there are death zones littered throughout the town with pockets of half undead vampire minions to be taken down.
More of the story is revealed through the notes and diaries that you’ll find throughout the township of Redfall.
Exploration is a must. There is a lot of loot, meaty weapons and supplies to be found throughout Redfall, and luckily your inventory can store a fair bit.
Weapons can be customised and upgraded as well.
You’ll be tasked with missions which you’ll need to complete to get yourself through and it doesn’t take too long in to the game until you get some fierce firepower by way of automatic shotguns, fitted with stakes and more.
There is of course Vampires. And different classes of vampires.
Vampire Gods are in-game boss fights that separate out each chapter. You’ll also encounter Anglers and watchers. As you can imagine, each of these have their own vampire powers and difficulty levels.
Vampires can be found in random spots, in buildings, in back yards, parks and any dark corner. Generally easy to locate, you’ll know when you’re near one as they like to chat to themselves.
If you get yourself the ‘Bite Back’ edition, you can experience the game as a Vampire.
A grunty pistol or shotgun will take them down, but not out, so you’ll need to equip a weapon with a stake mount to turn them to dust.
And staking a vampire is a very satisfying experience.
The skill tree and weapons inventory is simple to use and get a hang of and there’s a lot of environmental hazards to make use of if you encounter vampire minions – or anyone else that is partial to death via electrocution, fire or U.V lighting.
You can equip up to three weapons from your inventory to a hotkey on the controller.
Multiplayer is hosting a game, which is exactly what it sounds like, but bear in mind that there is no drop-in. If you commit to hosting or joining a hosted game, you’re in there til the bitter end.
If you’re in single player and finding it tough and think, ‘hey this would be easier if I get a friend to help out’, you’re on your own and will need to quit the single play and go to the main screen for co-op multi.
Redfall does have cross-play, so if you’re gaming on a Xbox Series X|S you’re vampire killing friends on PC can join you.
But Redfall is not without issues… and some dodgy looking character animations.
Several times on Xbox the game crashed completely or had occurrences where an enemy could not be killed or even interacted with.
I would come across floating vampires that essentially had no idea you were there, and you couldn’t kill them.
Then there was ‘ghost’ vampires, one’s that I had killed, but nope there they would reappear after dying and float about like nothing happened, and again, you couldn’t interact with them. I guess they are the undead…
Asides from these weirdly amusing glitches the even more frustrating problems were random game freezing (both single and co-op), character motion locking (on occasion my character was pinned to a spot or their movement became slow and jittery) through to the game simply exiting itself to the Xbox Home screen.
These were frequent and game breaking, but should also be fixable with a patch.
Redfall has promise and the potentiality to grow and evolve.
If you can get a decent playthrough before the game glitches out there is some blood sucking goodness to be had in there.
If you’ve already taken up residency in Redfall, hang in there, it can only get better. If you’ve not started out your vampiric slaughtering missions yet, sit tight and wait for a patch or two to be released.
Released: May 2023
Rating: M15+
Platforms reviewed: Xbox Series X
Genre: FPS
Developer: Arkane Studios
Publisher: Bethesda