Redfall is the first AAA game from acclaimed developer Arkane to release for PC and console exclusively on Xbox, and the critical consensus is not good.
The game was initially revealed at E3 2021, with a planned release in 2022. As is customary with Xbox exclusives, the launch date was delayed. Sadly this wasn’t enough to save the game from buggy mediocrity.
It had originally been slated to also release on PlayStation 5 before Microsoft acquired Bethesda, but given how crap the end result is I’m sure Sony is very happy to have missed out.
Redfall lacks the level of polish we’ve come to expect from Arkane, whose other big titles include Prey and the more recent Deathloop – both GOTY winners.
Right now, Redfall sits at a 63 rating on Metacritic. For context, Deathloop has an 89 rating. Conceptually, it’s a stylised open-world first-person loot-shooter with a heavy emphasis on co-op play and character comedy. In reality? It’s a compromised, unfinished mess that lacks good world design with piss-poor AI intelligence and a half-baked loot system, according to the critics.
In his review, Mark Delaney of Gamespot remarked: “Ultimately, Redfall is a game that should not have been released yet. Its litany of bugs hampers the gameplay loop of exploring its world with friends…I can’t pretend to know whether Arkane chose to make a loot-shooter or was assigned to make a loot-shooter, but I can tell you what it feels like: one of the best game studios in the world suddenly made toothless.”
It’s fair to say that most gamers will probably blame Microsoft for the problems here, given Arkane’s good track record and the nagging perception that Microsoft continues to mismanage their games studios.
Enough bugs to sink your teeth into
As is customary with virtually any big game these days, Redfall launched with a vast array of fucking annoying and comical bugs.
IGN reviewer Luke Reilly reported: “During one side mission I died trying to kill a vampire, but when I came back to finish the job he was just a non-interactive blue ghost, rotating to face me but otherwise rooted in place. When I came back again his energy shield was there, but the vampire… wasn’t in it. During a co-op session I found myself (more than once) fruitlessly attacking an enemy who was standing right in front of me but my friends saw as a dead body.”
Whether it’s the ambition and scale of the game or just the timescale it had to be put together in, it’s fair to say Redfall was not ready for release in terms of polish and overall concept.
Perhaps Arkane was not the right studio to tackle this style of gameplay. Was this game the studio’s idea or Microsoft’s? The jury is out on that at the moment.
What isn’t out is the judgment from gamers that Xbox as a platform is getting more untrustworthy with every delayed and mediocre game that limps full of bugs onto the platform. Patience is wearing thin, and Microsoft desperately needs some big AAA hits soon to compete with Sony and Nintendo in this console generation.
There couldn’t be more pressure on Starfield right now, which is currently slated for a September 2023 release. Is another delay coming? I wouldn’t bet against it…
