This doesn\u2019t leave much room for them to distinguish themselves, and while your abilities do become more potent as you pump in skill points, gameplay doesn\u2019t change that much. That\u2019s especially true as enemies scale with your level. Compared to Dying Light, the sense of progression just isn\u2019t all the way there. This leaves it to the shooting to pick up the slack, which it mostly accomplishes; Redfall is a solid first-person shooter and the weapons are decently varied, punchy, and impactful.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve got various versions of the usual suspects such as pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and sniper rifles, but there are also more specialised weapons, including a stake launcher, UV light gun, and flare gun. These anti-vampire innovations lend your arsenal some personality, but some of them just aren\u2019t that useful. In terms of damage, the stake launcher wildly outclasses the UV and flare gun, which are more situational but also <\/i>feel underpowered. For instance, the UV light gun is a theoretically useful crowd control tool that stuns vampires, but its effects are far too brief to be useful in practice.<\/p>\n

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Human enemies will go down without much hassle. Vampires, on the other hand, enter a weakened state when their health bottoms out, requiring you to stake them to actually finish them off. When you do, you\u2019re treated to a fantastic visual effect of their bodies burning up as their flesh turns to ash, putting me in mind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Blade. It\u2019s very satisfying to unload shotgun rounds into a vampire before impaling them.<\/p>\n

Strangely, you can\u2019t just carry stakes around. Shotguns and assault rifles have stakes mounted on them, but you\u2019ll need to switch to them to deliver the coup de gr\u00e2ce<\/em>. The stake gun will also do the trick, as will fire and electricity, but it\u2019s odd that your character \u2013 a vampire hunter \u2013 can\u2019t just hold a stake. This is more limiting than it might otherwise be as you can only equip three weapons at once and, as Redfall is always online, you can\u2019t pause while you switch between them. You have a melee attack, but it feels like you\u2019re not even hitting anything when using it, nor are there any cool takedown animations for one-shot stealth kills on human enemies,\u00a0unlike Arkane\u2019s previous work.<\/p>\n

If that seems a trivial complaint, the enemy AI is a bigger issue. It\u2019s laughably bad. Humans will often barely react to your presence at first; you can just run up to them and hit them with a point-blank shotgun blast and not be in any danger of getting shot yourself. The game\u2019s rudimentary stealth system is so effective that you can be crouched in an enemy\u2019s peripheral vision and they won\u2019t see you. You can even shoot one of their buddies in the head and they might not even react. But the funniest thing is that vampires will just run up to you if you\u2019re standing in a UV light and get petrified. The enemies are simply braindead.<\/p>\n

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You\u2019ll constantly be drowned in loot while playing Redfall, which combines with a commodious inventory to require many lengthy cleanout periods for you to salvage all your now-useless low-leveled crap. You get scrap for this that you can use to buy things, but there\u2019s not much reason to do so, as you\u2019ll frequently find what you need by exploring. You lose 10% of your scrap upon death too, which means you might end up losing a ton if you\u2019re playing solo.<\/p>\n

On that note, the world in Redfall feels at odds with its always-online, co-op friendly billing. You\u2019ll find books and documents to read all over the place, but since you can\u2019t pause the game while solo and no one in a co-op game session has ever been happy to wait for someone else to read things, I\u2019m not sure when you\u2019d be meant to do this. It\u2019s like Arkane wanted to flex its immersive sim chops in world design, but the combat is clearly built around co-op, especially when it comes to a boss fight. Characters can\u2019t take much punishment, suggesting a co-op-oriented need to revive your teammates, so solo players won\u2019t be experiencing the game as it should be played. But the missions themselves often require players to scour environments for key items, which doesn\u2019t gel all that well with the action, especially when you\u2019re meant to stand around and listen to glorified audio files.<\/p>\n

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I feel like Redfall would have been much better if it didn\u2019t try to focus on co-op in the manner it did. Dying Light did an excellent job of offering a single-player campaign that worked fantastically with co-op. If this were an immersive sim with more depth and less of a focus on numbers, I really think it could have been something special. I still enjoy the game, but it doesn\u2019t compare to Arkane\u2019s other, more focussed work.<\/p>\n

I got hit by several serious bugs during my time with the game. Sometimes I couldn\u2019t interact with key items, which required me to restart missions. On multiple occasions I\u2019d get stuck in geometry too. For a lot of the game, a sidequest marker hovered over the head of an NPC whose lone sidequest had already been completed. And even if you\u2019re playing solo, any disconnection from the internet will kick you to the menu and make you repeat mission progress. Since a player has to host, and you can seemingly only play with friends and not randos, this is yet another strange choice. I also experienced some choppy performance, with the fps dipping rather low, especially in the first map.<\/p>\n

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It took me about 15 hours to complete Redfall\u2019s main story and most of the major sidequests. I skipped the unnecessary copy-pasted safehouse missions and some of the repetitive vampire nests. Once you beat the final boss \u2013 a little underwhelming, as you don\u2019t even directly fight them \u2013 your character automatically moves to a new game plus, so there\u2019s no endgame and you can\u2019t just explore to your heart\u2019s content. You also have to start a whole new game to switch characters.<\/p>\n

It has many small frustrations like these, but I still like Redfall. It does the core stuff well enough to be worth a look if you want to stake vampires with friends. But it won\u2019t replace Dying Light or Borderlands in your rotation, and it\u2019s left me wondering, in a disconsolate way, about the immersive sim\u00a0vampire game Arkane could\u2019ve given us without these\u00a0strange, discordant steps into the multiplayer action genre.<\/p>\n

The Redfall release date is later today, and it\u2019ll be coming to Game Pass. <\/p>\n