Author: Darlinganddeath
Date: 05-10-2023
If you've been around our humble Pillow Fort for a while now you know that we don't truly believe in bad games and we choose to not score games based on the fact that game scores seem empty to us. How can you realistically score a game? You could give Stardew Valley a score of 10 and then Grand Theft Auto an 8 and then spend days arguing about why it's worse when in reality, you can't compare the games at all. Sure, you could give it a score in correlation to its genre, but we both know the variety of games in each genre makes even that unrealistic.
So... therefore... how are game scores fair at all? The answer is... they aren't. It's for this very reason that The Pillow Fort chooses to omit them from our reviews entirely and operate on a Recommended vs Not Recommended model. What did that little rant have to do with Redfall? Well... let's go back to the fact that we don't believe in bad games, and we still don't, however, it kills us to say that we do not recommend Redfall. At least... not for its $70 price tag. Redfall is a game that you need to get an Xbox Game Pass if you truly want to play it as in its current state it's nowhere near worth its hefty price tag. $70 is a Triple-A price tag and this is not a Triple-A game. It could be... but... it's not currently. Don't worry, we're going to get into the nitty-gritty and talk about exactly why we feel that way, so hold on tight, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
Game Description:
The town of Redfall is under siege by a legion of vampires who have cut the island off from the outside world. Trapped with a handful of survivors, slay alone or squad up in open-world FPS action.
The Good:
For the sake of padding all the bad we're going to talk about, let's start with the good. At Redfall's core, we honestly feel like it could be a good game, great even! Why? Well, let's break it down.
Story:
At the beginning of your experience with Redfall, you're greeted by a few cutscenes that set the basis of the story right from the start. We get a quick look at a big bad vampire that "mercifully" spares us in order to use us at a later time. It's clear there's some sort of rift between her and the other vampires so the game already sets some premise of there being a power struggle on the island that we're going to be in the middle of. After the cutscenes, you're spat out on a crashed boat surrounded by giant waves in a stasis state that reminds you of Moses parting the seas. We had a few good laughs about it and went on to force our way onto the island and set up shop in a little fire station.
I want to say that while the story was set at the beginning, and it's obvious that we're here to exterminate every vampire and their cultist follower friends off the island, it feels a little disjointed after the initial cutscenes. There's a lot of "how" lacking that doesn't get answered even within the first few hours of gameplay. It ends up feeling more like an MMO where you run around the world and complete quests along the way. Things such as, "Go exterminate this vampire den (we'll get to these in a bit)" or, "Go figure out why two of our helicopters got shot down and salvage the lost supplies". It almost feels like what Call of Duty would be if they implemented an open world Story Campaign where you can run to different locations in order to complete the quests.
I will say that at a fundamental level, this works. I'm an MMO player at heart and I'll happily go quest endlessly and ask questions later. At this point, my brain has learned to auto-path and tunnel through quests to get them over with and get to End Game in order to kill Illidan on my 4th alt... wait... wrong game.
Jokes aside, I truly feel like this is how the game is meant to function and that's completely fine. The idea behind Redfall is that we're here to cleanse the island and the only way we're going to do that is by running around, taking safehouses, killing vampires (and their followers), and moving on to the next zone to do it all over again. We do it in games like Destiny, World of Warcraft, FF Online, Elder Scrolls, Borderlands, etc. and we have no complaints, so to say that it's a problem in this title would be just downright unfair. The game does its best to get the story baked in from the start and stays consistent with it even a few hours into the game. There's obviously a lot more we haven't seen about the story either so I'd be curious to see how it evolves but unfortunately with the state of the game, we won't be experiencing it until a few things get fixed.
Combat:
This is going to be in both the good and bad section but as this is the good section, we'll talk about what is fun about the combat. I'll be the first to say that combat can be, and is, fun a lot of the time. The different characters have different combat specialties and abilities that they use to make things a bit more interesting. From little turrets that deal a bit of extra damage to metal spikes that spread lightning everywhere (and to everyone, you can kill your friends and I did many times so be aware that no friendlies are in the range of some of these abilities), Redfall does a decent job of offering at least a couple styles of combat that should cater to a few different play styles.
I do want to state that the combat to start was exceptionally easy. We were playing with 4 people and a lot of the time the enemies were dead prior to me even arriving on the scene. I can't say that I was "far behind" my teammates either because I wasn't, but if you weren't the first in the area it was unlikely you'd get any part in the action. This can be countered by simply turning up the difficulty and that's exactly what we did. It helped the combat feel a bit tougher and we didn't notice ourselves dying any more than we had prior to turning it up, so if you're like us and are upset that you're not getting any slice of the action, just turn up your difficulty and call it good.
After turning up our difficulty it was actually quite fun when we did get to join in. With the enemies lasting longer, it allowed us to use some of our class abilities and really experience the differences in them. One of us was sniping from the backline and throwing out support shots, while others were throwing their faces into the vampires and driving stakes through their hearts. It felt like combat should feel in an FPS-style game and it definitely gave us those good Destiny or Borderlands vibes. It's for this reason that I truly want to say Redfall is a good game but ... we're getting to why we can't say that.
Loot & Guns:
I'm actually a huge fan of the loot and gun system. The loot is mostly separate from your friends so anytime an epic gun drops, you don't have to fight over it. It feels a lot like Borderlands in the sense that you're constantly finding a cooler, better gun to bring to the gun show and it makes you noticeably stronger against your foes.
Aside from the guns, you'll find useful items like lockpicks and rewiring kits (and health packs of course) that will get you into some extra loot caches such as trunks or locked-up garages. A word of caution though, when you break into a car you have a chance to set off the alarm and if you shoot the car to shut it up... well... it explodes and so does all of your loot... and sometimes you with it. Yes, be careful not to stand too close to a car that's become the victim of someone's gunfire as you'll become the victim of the explosion that soon follows.
Mini-Bosses & Full-Fledged Ones Too:
So, I'm sure if you've seen the trailer of Redfall then you'll have undoubtedly gotten a glimpse at one of the biggest foes in the game, which are the bosses. Now, our team only experienced a Mini-Boss as we didn't get far enough in to experience a full-fledged one, but what we did experience of the mini-boss, we loved. The combat felt similar to the bosses in Borderlands would and it was honestly just our favorite part of the game. We darted around dodging life-threatening blows and exchanging turns either tanking or gunning it down. This is where our class abilities and ultimates actually felt like they had some purpose. If Redfall was just killing mini-bosses over and over, it would probably be one of the highest-rated games on Steam because it truly felt fun. If they're able to fix the graphic issues we'll talk about later, and just throw in a bunch more of these guys around the map to fill it up, this would be an entirely different article... but alas... we're here.
We're desperately hoping that the second map you get to after the initial landing zone has more of these than the first map did as we got through nearly 2/3rds of the first zone and only came across 1 of these guys. It bummed us out as all of us in the group agreed that it was the type of combat we'd been dying to experience but it took us 2-3 hours of gameplay to get to that part and that's just unacceptable. If you don't get to the good parts before the Steam refund policy is in effect, you're just dooming your game.
Vampire Dens:
Unfortunately, this is going to be the last thing in our "good" section, and while we might rewrite the article in future patches of the game if things get addressed, for now, this will conclude "the good".
Vampire Dens are what we consider to be the second most enjoyable part of the game. Scattered across the map are Vampire Dens which are home to a considerable amount of the blood-sucking fiends and considering the Vampires are significantly stronger than their cultist counterparts, it makes for a fun experience. You run through these instanced zones and clear the den out, dodging toxic miasma and deadly fangs while throwing out a slew of bullets. Afterward, you get treated to some extra special loot including more powerful weapons and we all know how much we love bigger things to pew-pew with.
I do want to state that the timer at the end of a Den is your loot timer, not your "get out before the time runs out" timer. We mistakenly thought we had to run back to the entrance and were depressed to find out it just teleports you out at the end of the timer as we'd left some good loot behind. The idea of the timer is fine as there are multiple caches you can loot and you want to be quick about it, but maybe making that a bit more clear the first time you experience a den would be a good thing.
The Bad:
So, let's finally get into what's a bit rough about the game, but could be easily improved for a far better gaming experience. I apologize for the lack of screenshots or gifs in this section but as it's sort of hard to capture some of the bad in an image or 4 second gif, I'm going with what I've got.
The Ammo:
Okay, here's the big problem of the game. We could forgive some graphic issues, we can forgive some silly bugs that make great shorts, we can overlook the fact that it took 2-3 hours to experience a fun mini-boss... but we cannot overlook the fact that even if you're lucky enough to find enemies (more on this later), you'll have nothing to shoot them with. Now, the irony of this is that it feels as though there's plenty of ammo scattered about the world, especially at the end of vampire dens, and worse comes to absolute worst? You can buy refills back at base. So... what's the problem you ask? The problem lies in the fact that our entire squad bought ammo from base and it didn't register in our inventory. Or the countless times we found ammo and our ammo count refused to budge. Our ammo bags were like a mimic, laughing at us and spitting out any ammo we tried to snag.
I always joke to pad the bad, but this was just downright bad. At one point, nobody in the group had ammo left and we were in the middle of a vampire den. We were lucky enough to find some towards the end of it, but you can imagine how we felt attempting to fist-fight a horde of vampires. It was pretty horrible and, while of course a bit humorous, we pretty much called it after that. It's hard to enjoy a game you can't play due to a bug so critical you end up unable to partake in combat. No words are needed to explain why no ammo in a First-Person Shooter game is a huge problem. I want to defend and say we aren't the spray-and-pray type either. Both Joey and Ducky are huge FPS fans and have played everything from Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Valorant, to even more indie titles. It would be one thing if it was just Haley and I with empty ammo pockets, but that wasn't the case.
It's truly a shame as this could be entirely omitted by just fixing the ammo bug.
The Map Size:
Before we get to how empty the map feels, let's first talk about Redfall's map size. Now, we got through about 2/3rds of the first map in just 2-3 hours of gameplay. Mind you, that's gameplay that was riddled with pauses to adjust our graphic settings, restarting the lobby entirely due to sync issues, and fist-fighting foes because we had no ammo. If the experience had gone smoothly, it could easily be done in half the time. This was a massive problem for us because there's nothing worse than paying $70 for a game that has a huge lack of content. I will say that we took to Google and realized that there is a second zone and it's a bit over twice the size of the first one. That's good... but when you say things like "open-world" in your game trailer, you put yourself in a bracket of games that Redfall doesn't deserve to be in. Yes, it's an open world, but it's more like an instanced open world rather than a true open world.
One thing we also need to take into consideration is that Redfall is at a $70 price point which means you're competing with titles like Assassins Creed, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Red Dead Redemption. This is honestly what we feel doomed Redfall. If it was at a more reasonable price and had not oversold the game in its trailers with what people have now said to be a complete misrepresentation of the game, it could've succeeded. But... it wanted to play with the big boys and it fell so far short it hurts my soul. Rockstar is looking down shaking its head and Nintendo is straight up laughing. Both have created games that are physically smaller in file size (Redfall is 116GBs), better in about 40-50 ways, and yet, at the same price point... so... we don't know why Arkane did this to themselves but it hurts.
The only thing I will say about the Map Size is that they can easily add more maps in future patches, but that begs the question... does Redfall island ever get cleansed? How does Redfall's story end that it would allow future content to make sense? Could you imagine going back to your captain and being like "We scoured every inch of that island and it's cleansed. Top, bottom, caves, creepy tunnels we shouldn't have crawled into but did for the fancy guns. All of them are empty sir!" and him responding with a, "Good, good, now let's go home," only to find out a few months later it magically got overrun again? I'm sure you could have it make sense; maybe some egg buried deep in the earth that we missed... you know... that ark? That's all fine of course, I'm just purely curious how they're going to add on to it in the future because they'll need to.
The Empty World:
The size of the world could be forgiven if it was jam-packed with non-stop action. Let's think about Destiny and Borderlands for a moment. When you run around the world you constantly have enemies coming after you. Even if these are just tiny bugs crawling out of rocks and are more of a nuisance than anything, they exist and they give the world a sense of reality because real worlds are rarely desolate. I'm going to defend Redfall on one instance and it's that this is supposedly an island where most of the people have died and it's overrun by vampires and cultists, so some desolation is fine... however (you knew it was coming), someone needs to explain to me why loot respawns in certain locations and not the NPC enemies. Yep. I can go loot the same toolbox I looted on my other two runs through a location, yet somehow there are no people there. Not sure what little ant returned our lockpick ... but thanks!
Again, it's a critical problem that could be fixed by throwing in some respawn-able NPCs. I do and don't care that this might not fit the theme of the story. If they felt like it didn't, then you need to at least make sure that through our first run-through of the areas, they're so condensed with foes that you start to appreciate going back through areas that aren't. Of course, fix the ammo bug first, but when you couple the fact that the world feels like a walking simulator most times, with how small the overall map is? Well... it honestly just saddens me. Note from Ducky: One idea we had to give more life to the game could be to add in random enemy ambushes. They could have little spawnable areas that when you enter them, it triggers the spawn point and generates a random amount of enemies at varying difficulty. For example, spawn 5 cultists and 2 vampires, or heck, set more difficult ones that reward some fat money or a juicy weapon in exchange for battling it out with a mini-boss. Set these areas on an invisible timer (or visible, think about how Final Fantasy online has their duty spawns) and have them randomized as to where they spawn. This would give you the idea of an actual threat on the island rather than playing a walking simulator until you got lucky enough to come across Cosplay Night at the Vampire convention downtown.
Of course, we make these comments and maybe they exist in Zone 2 (to our knowledge they don't) but how is anyone going to know when most people refunded the game before making it to the fire station?
It's Too Easy (Combat):
Okay, now, I'm that person that hates turning up the difficulty. Yes, I'm that filthy casual who leaves it on normal so I can experience and enjoy the game, rather than play gray screen simulator 20x in 5 minutes. So... the fact that I'm writing this section seems like downright hypocrisy. That being said... If I'm the one sitting there saying, "Can we turn up the difficulty? The enemies we do encounter die in one shot and I want to at least experience the combat", your game has a severe balancing issue. This could actually be immediately fixed with a better scaling system. What do I mean? Some (maybe most) will know what a scaling system is but for those that don't, let me explain. A scaling system is a system put in place for in-game content that might feel challenging for small groups but is exceptionally easy for larger ones. You see this in games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Destiny, Borderlands, etc. The more people in your group, the more enemies spawn and the harder they are to defeat. These systems are usually fantastic at balancing a game so that solo players and or small groups can take on content while not punishing your larger groups by making the content too easy. Of course, they can always have flaws, but for the most part, they're a smart choice. The shocking thing is that Redfall has a scaling system, but it needs to be fixed... immediately. We had 4 players in our group and some locations would have 5-6 enemies that died in one decent hit. Even when manually turning up our game difficulty, this only made it so that they lasted 2 shots, rather than 1. I shouldn't be having to turn up the game difficulty to enjoy my experience. I don't want to play on hard mode, I just want to play the game on not easy mode. So, basically, improving their scaling system would help groups feel more engaged and entertained by the content, rather than 1-2 people playing walking/loot simulator and constantly bummed they weren't the first to the scene.
The Ugly
Alright, this is the part I don't really want to write, but it has to be done. I can not blatantly ignore the fact that this game has some extreme graphic and animation issues, so much so that they made Joey (one of our Friends of the Fort who joined us for this game experience) sick, and we haven't played since.
Graphics:
Now, it's highly likely that Deke and I will go through by ourselves for the sake of getting a bit deeper into the game to experience the second zone, but if after just 3-4 hours of playing a game, our friend tells us he's going to be sick and he can't stand to play anymore, we take it pretty heavily. Let's also add that he's not running on some 2001 Dell Laptop that's still rocking Windows 98, he's equipped with a 3070 and a Ryzen 7 5800X, a rig that should realistically run most new games on medium at the very least. Some of you are going to say something silly like "Well it's a beefy game, you need a beefy computer". Sure, let's explore that thought for a moment. The same computer that can run Hogwarts Legacy on High to Ultra and have a near-buttery smooth experience while casting Revelio for the hundredth time on their broomstick, can't run a game with graphics that are drastically worse on a far smaller map with much less to actually render. It's just not acceptable. If your game isn't optimized for a decently up-to-date rig, you have bigger problems on your hands.
We're not talking about small graphic blips either, we're talking about full frame drops so bad that you get motion sick. My own personal computer was fine 90% of the time (aside from all the bugs that I experienced) but once every 1-3 minutes, my entire game would freeze frame and stay that way for a few seconds. Afterward, it would let me resume business as usual at its buttery smooth rates, but... sometimes I'd be dead on the ground due to taking attacks to the face and being completely unable to react.
This isn't me trying to brag, but I have an I9-12900H and a 3080 with a top-of-the-line 1TB SSD and 64 GB of Ram. If any computer shouldn't be struggling, it's mine. No, we aren't rich by any stretch, but I'm an animation student at the LA Film School and this computer was included in the tuition. I do my best not to sound like a brat when I say "the game has no excuse not to run perfectly on this PC" but it literally has no excuse. I also want to state that despite the fact that I've played through Assasins Creed, Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, Borderlands, and far more on this PC on Ultra graphics, I refused to put Redfall above medium because of how bad it was.
A company such as Arkane, especially published by Bethesda, should have the money for proper Q&A testers and for Pete's sake, do an open beta period where you let the public play through the first few quests and take feedback on the issues they experienced and fix them... prior to releasing your game. Even Blizzard put Diablo 4 up for Open Beta so what are you going to say about it?
Alphas and betas are the biggest way you're going to know how your game runs on any and every type of rig and sure, you can argue that there was a closed beta that you could sign up for, but that's just game suicide. Seriously... developers you have no excuse. Throw a small portion of your game up to be butchered by the public prior to release. At least if you do this you can boast about everything you fixed and people will get the sense that you at least care about the overall end product you're putting out. It's also how you save yourself the expense of winding up as one of Steam's worse-rated games within 2 weeks of release.
Honestly? I put out an 8-minute review video of Everdream Valley's demo (that was available to everyone) and the devs fixed 99% of the issues I experienced (which were mostly small bugs) in the game. They even updated their camera movements for noticeably better movement fluidity. They're developed by a far smaller company that cares a whole lot more about their game, costs a whole lot less, and has arguably the same amount of playtime (if not more due to being a farming sim) available in it. Sure, it's an entirely different genre, but you get the point.
We're well aware that large companies have deadlines to meet and every deadline that gets pushed back, costs money, but... having your game come out completely in the red with no hope of flatlining anytime soon? That's a far worse fate than an extra 4 weeks in development. The thing about most of these graphic issues is that they can be fixed, so we write this all with a grain of salt, but it's going to take them a while to regain any amount of trust from their fans about their ability to release a good game.
Bugs & Poor Animation:
This is the last thing we're going to touch on in this article and we'll keep it brief since we already went decently into the graphics bit... but!
The amount of bugs in this game is ridiculous. From our teenage selves glitching into the floor in a permanent crouch position, to us loading into the firehouse and all having a completely black screen and being unable to even return to the menu (we had to hit Alt F4), to animations that literally skipped frames entirely, it was horrible. Funny. But horrible. I don't even want to talk about the fact that for the first hour of the game, I had no sounds except dialogue. I don't ever want to experience an FPS with no sound... ever again. The pure disconnect between firing your weapon and not hearing it, or you know... the ability to hear your enemies firing back, made it impossible to navigate through combat at all. It wasn't until
While we were lucky enough to be playing with friends, and that drastically padded our frustration, what is a solo player supposed to do aside from getting extremely upset and hitting refund on a game that they've had to close out of twice due to black or frozen screens, such horrible motion lag that it makes them sick and combat that feels easy and empty. It's honestly not a shock to us that it has the reviews that it has.
Conclusion:
Well... we finally did it. It hurt us to write but we did it.
I need to say that I want to love Redfall so badly. I want to write a positive review so much that it's depressing me. I think at its core and what Redfall could be is an awesome, Vampire Killing adventure, similar to Borderlands and Destiny, and a compliment to the genre. For some reason though, it feels like a horribly rushed side project that needed 2-3 more months of testing and de-bugging with some slight visual improvements. It sucks, it really does. People paid $70 for an unfinished product and from a small indie company it's sometimes acceptable, but from this one, it's not. We all tease Bethesda about Fallout 76 but it's a big problem that has us deeply worried for Starfield. We were lucky enough to have Xbox Game Pass, and if you do too, I highly recommend you give Redfall a try to experience it at least once or twice, but if we had paid $70 we would be just downright furious. We're the type to only spend that kind of money for a game 1-2 times a year, so we pick our Triple-A titles with care. I don't care what you want to say about inflation, $70 is a huge amount of money for a "video game" and if you're going to put yourself in that bracket, you have to deliver, and this one didn't. So, if you've been asking yourself why the reviews are so bad, it's my hope that this article helped clarify it for you. I want to put the disclaimer out there that there's more content we haven't experienced yet and while I usually wouldn't feel confident enough to write a more negative-toned article about a game like this until 8-10 hours in, this one needed to be written. If we're at the point where we can't even continue the game to get to 8 hours in... well... we've said enough about it at this point that I'm sure you understand why it's a title that's on the back-burner for now.
If and when future updates happen, we'll give Redfall another shot and keep you updated on any improvements, but for now, we've put Redfall into our "only open in an emergency" box.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that we did not receive this product for free, have not been paid or promoted for this review, and are not affiliated with Redfall or its developers officially in any way. All thoughts are based on our own genuine experience of the game. All footage is based on the Game in its current state as of 05/10/2023 and is subject to change or be completely omitted in future patches at the developer's discretion.
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