I have a love/hate relationship with Arkane, and Redfall seems to bring about a bit of both feelings.
Dishonored? Loved it.
Deathloop? Not my cup of tea.
Redfall? It’s.. Eh.
I’m not too far off from “real” reviewers in that I didn’t really get to experience the game as early as I’d like in order to put together a real review, although in my case it’s because Arkane isn’t going to give one iota about my opinion on their games until GGN gets much larger.
The problem here is Arkane wants to feel like an all-grown-up AAA studio and release buggy games like Bethesda, but they don’t have the chops and charm that Bethesda’s buggy releases can endear you to despite being a subsidiary of Zenimax.
Jank abounds in Redfall, and I’m not just talking about performance (although the DLSS implementation critical for giving me framerates that are mostly above 60FPS on high – with a lot of variability – is also quite janky).
The AI pathing? Atrocious.
Your OWN pathing? Just about as bad. One area where I was clearly taking an expected path had me stuck trying to find a way over something that was more like a place to stub your toe; we’re not talking chest high walls which you can mantle over, here, but literally I was being blocked by something not much larger than my big toe.
Arkane’s delivery of Redfall
The story delivery so far is fairly “meh”, as well. You can tell they are going for B-movie camp, but even the technical delivery is something more like what I would direct in a story as an extremely amateur video artist rather than something from a studio with the likes of Dishonored and Deathloop (Deathloop’s story wasn’t bad in my mind, I just hated the gameplay loop).
Overall, though, there are certain things where I feel like it might be worth playing after Arkane works out their shit.
Given the loot shooter and RPG mechanics I could see it even being something folks will want to play in New Game Plus (assuming they implement it), and the world itself is interesting overall, if a bit sparse.
I felt very little connection to the world or the folks in it; all I felt connected to here was making sure I explored all the nooks and crannies and took out every foe available to me.
The mechanics itself are simple and easy to understand, which is good, because I doubt I’d be willing to invest the time to learning everything if it wasn’t.
I’ll keep playing for a full review and cross my fingers that the game gets patched up. Thankfully, I’m playing on Games Pass, so I didn’t have to pay anything extra for it. If you’re curious and don’t want to wait for the full review, that’s my suggested route at this point.