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Arkane Austin and Bethesda released their open-world vampire slaying game Redfall today and it's not great. I'll say it. It's not great. Still, if you are interested in finding out for yourself if it's good or not, you can presently play Redfall on Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Game Pass.
In Redfall, you assume control over one of four vampire slayers as they try to rid the city of Redfall, Massachusetts from a bunch of evil vampires that are blotting out the sun. These players have special abilities, they've got a variety of weapons, and they even have various mechanical tools to help them on this adventure.
The game being released today is the end of the good news. The bad news is, sadly, everything else.
Redfall has released in a state that leaves a lot to be desired. Some of the game's issues do revolve around uninspired and baffling gameplay decisions, but also seems to include a heaping helping of performance issues as well. We already know that Redfall launched with only a 30FPS option on Xbox, but the PC release has experienced its fair share of technical shortcomings as well.
An earlier report also said that Redfall would require a persistent online connection, even in single player. This is indeed the case. In fact, even when playing solo, you are unable to pause the game. When accessing the menu, the game continues to run in the background.
Around a year back, we learned that only the host of a co-op gameplay session would make progress on missions. This is still true for the game's launch. While you can continue making character progress and earning gear that can be carried over between solo and co-op sessions, story progression is tied only to however far you made it as a host or in solo play.
Redfall released to a critical average of just 64% with less than a quarter of critics actually recommending the game. In a normal world, 64% would actually be rather decent, but when it comes to a score for a AAA game from an established developer and publisher? It may as well have scored 0's across the board.
For PC users, the technical issues may rival those found in Star Wars Jedi: Survival. On my system (Ryzen 9 5900X, GTX 1080 Ti, 32GB RAM), I could not figure out what was going on with the game's performance. When playing solo, I had "decent" framerates in areas but would often encounter traversal hitching or hitching when new shaders were loaded. Neither CPU nor GPU was ever maxed out but then again neither was my framerate. My framerate never even neared the 144Hz refresh rate of my monitor, ranging anywhere from 30FPS up to 110FPS depending on where I was, what was happening, and if the wind was coming out of the west. The fact that my CPU would top out at maybe 25% usage and my GPU topped out at maybe 90% tells me there's a bad CPU bottleneck and the game is not well optimized for multicore processors.
I freely admit that my GTX 1080 Ti isn't a stellar GPU these days, especially for running new releases at 1440p. However, other reviewers have been quick to point out the poor performance of the game. BabelTechReviews and their 7800X3D, RTX 4070 Ti, and 32GB of DDR5 6000MHz RAM encountered crashes along with the same stuttering, bugs, and framerates that often dipped "into the low teens." The user reviews for Redfall on Steam are full of people complaining about how poorly the game runs on their beefy systems.
Playing this game in co-op offers up its own bag of technical oddities. My framerate in co-op, using the same settings as in solo, were far, far worse. I encountered an area where, when looking up at a mostly empty sky, I was maxing out at 17FPS. The exact same location in solo saw me pulling over 100FPS. A co-op partner running an RTX 3080 complained of abysmal framerates inside a single-room sized safehouse while I had no such issues. They also complained from the start about unresponsive and laggy menu loading while I had no such issue. Conversely, there were other areas where they had a great framerate while my system struggled.
My co-op partners and I almost all encountered the same amount of traversal hitching at the same places at the same time. There was also an issue where all of us would randomly not be able to read the game's various lore notes. There was an issue where sometimes one of third-person models would clip into the ground and glitch up and down repeatedly while running around. I saw one of my co-op partners floating a couple of feet above the ground while running around at another point.
More generally, we all encountered different graphical hiccups such as z-fighting on walls, stretched textures or decals, poor shadow loading, floating rocks, holes in the world, and all of the aforementioned performance issues. Then there's the whole issue with the almost completely braindead enemy AI, which is its own can of worms.
Keep in mind that just like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall starts at $70 regardless of which platform you choose to play on. Those of you with Game Pass can play this one for far less. Even with Game Pass, Redfall is a difficult game to recommend in its present state. Like the case is with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, you may want to hold off on this one for several weeks, or even months, while Arkane works to iron out some of these major issues.
