In June of last year, on the occasion of the traditional summer conference dedicated to the future of the Xbox division, Microsoft chose to take the stage of the event armed with a new promise, with the clear objective of reconciling with a community that had drastically left dry of exclusives for all of 2022, and still clinging to a series of announcements that have been swallowed up, one after another, in a black hole of silence and postponements. The company was evidently aware that it hadn't offered who knows what recognition to anyone who bought a next-gen Xbox, so Phil Spencer guaranteed on stage that everything that appeared that night would find its way into the hands of gamers within the next few years. next 12 days. months without the possibility of appeal.
Today we know that things did not go exactly as Microsoft had planned, but there is no doubt that the opinion that fans have of the Redmond house is now significantly more positive. Players have had the patience to greet the postponements of Starfield and Forza Motorsport with a cheerful "not bad", also because after years of inaction at least Xbox is now there, along with Sony and Nintendo, to occupy the release calendar with an important first. party production.
Of course, we could all somewhat predict that Redfall would have a difficult time competing against two giants of the caliber of Final Fantasy XVI and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, however, we could bet that almost no one would have reasonably imagined it. that Xbox, in this delicate context, would have presented itself in this decisive convergence of May and June with one of the most disappointing exclusives since Crackdown 3.
In the red drop review We will take stock of the few lights and the many shadows of the new effort arkane austin, trying to understand how it is possible that those who created Dunwall in Dishonored and Talos I Station in Prey end up offering a mediocre vampire shooter that has nothing to do with the standards to which the studio has accustomed us. Leave the stake at home, Arkane vampires don't bite.
An interesting concept, a disappointing development.
Looking at the previous works of Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, the idea of Arkane working on one open world shooter It was both exhilarating and quietly terrifying. The studio has earned its reputation by sculpting simply memorable settings, but the ability of these worlds to bend and contort to adapt to the player's every intuition is what has allowed them to become permanently etched into our consciences. Like an imitation, the map seemed to change to suit your imagination, making you find paths that you had drawn in your head just seconds before.
Applying this magic to an open world format would have required an incalculable amount of effort and resources and, although our hope was precisely to find a Dunwall without limits placed at the service of our curiosity, it is now easy to realize that the undertaking was nothing . more than structurally unviable. Well, the first thing we can say about Redfall is that the game has a completely similar dimension to that of the team's other works, only here its limits are forcibly stretched and stretched to adapt them to those typical of an open game world. The result? TO'very diluted experience and completely anachronistic, if we compare it with current standards of open world video games.
It's a real shame considering that, at least on paper, the narrative premises from which the study began were more than promising. Redfall takes place on the small American island of the same name in the state of Massachusetts, which if you've followed even a little of the promotional fanfare that preceded the game, you'll know is overrun by thirsty bloodsuckers. The interesting thing is that in Arkane's game, unlike what happens in the extensive literature on Stoker's clear origins, the origin of vampires is not some biblical plague, but something much more terrifying: capitalism.
In fact, the transformations have their origin in experiments that an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company, Aevum, carries out on the island in search of profits and power. It is precisely the corporate leaders who transform first, weaving what is a kind of hierarchy among the ranks of the vampires. We found this narrative framework quite original, but we were very disappointed to discover that progressively reconstructing what happened on the island and on Aevum is the only way Arkane has developed to hold together the fragments of a story. history inconsistent, generic and rushed, which will have considerable difficulty involving you in its plots.
The story immediately settles on absolutely linear tracks, content to take us by the hand in the progressive clearing of Redfall's two open world maps, without ever experiencing first-hand that hint of intensity or suspense that a plot tinged with horror should provide. . at least in some situations. Ironically, the game also lacks actual gameplay. movies narrative, since for some inexplicable reason the developers preferred to articulate the most salient points of the story through slides in which the characters remain motionless while being dubbed. We weren't expecting much from what is still a vampire-slaying game, but some stylistic choices and the overly schematic design of the main quests that are reiterated for each supreme vampire quickly bled away any form of participation, leaving us at the mercy of a gameplay with obvious imperfections, but also with some interesting ideas.
The delicate relationship between Arkane and the shooter genre
Let's start by addressing the thorniest question, that of Shooting. Anyone who knows Arkane's DNA will know well that it is not one of the studio's specialties and this is also seen in Redfall, which in turn is characterized by unsatisfactory and somewhat imprecise shooting. In reality, the beauty of a confrontation depends mainly on who is fighting, for several reasons: on the island we find many humans who have been enslaved by vampires and against them, for example, classic weapons are especially effective, such as pistols, rifles , shotguns and sniper rifles. Gunfights with humans are the least fun we found on Redfall Island, as not only the AI of these opponents is ridiculously backwards, but also because common weapons never manage to offer a proper feel during the action, also due to the standard settings. dead zone of the joysticks that make aiming very problematic in the most hectic situations.
Instead, deal with a creature of the night and throw the offensive potential of one of the three at it. weapons to kill vampires manages to provide excellent feedback, and the beautiful creature design created in the purest Arkane style plays a very important role in this. Vampires are by far the hardest thing to kill in Redfall, which is why we have a special set of tools designed specifically to turn anything with fangs longer than 2 centimeters into dust: the stake, UV rays, and blast guns. flares, too. In addition to making Buffy extremely proud of you, they will be able to give you a real chance of survival, even against very powerful vampires.
L'AI sucks blood is significantly better than that of human enemies, although in some situations it may happen that they also get caught in an obstacle during attacks. However, what makes them much more interesting as enemies is their variety, not very deep, but sufficiently heterogeneous. Each one will use different skills and attacks in combat and, even if you have already met them all halfway through the story, the good number of copies guarantees a fluid alternation of encounters with different rules.
Redfall is anything but a looter shooter, but equipment The ones scattered around the American city all have a reference color, which reflects the number of skills that are added to the weapon's statistics. We'll delve deeper into the topic shortly in the discussion on the topic of open world quality, but already at this stage we anticipate that the game lacks all those subsystems that usually clutter open world shooters: there is not even a shadow of Como crafting mechanism, weapons cannot be modified except aesthetically and there is no type of customization of equipment characteristics. The recipe modeled by Arkane is quite brief and the only thing capable of giving a hint of depth to the gameplay is the presence of the four characters in whose shoes we will visit Redfall, each equipped with a set of unique abilities that seem taken directly from the that were available to the protagonists of the studio's previous video games.
It's unclear why Arkane made such a radical decision, but if you look closely at Arkane's capabilities, Jacob, Layla, Dev e Remi, it seems that the studio has fragmented the abilities that appeared in its previous works to distribute them to the new characters, however forgetting to give the player the possibility to change their choice on the fly. At the start of the game you choose one of the protagonists but have no way of testing the abilities of the others in the same save, with the result that in Redfall the player has far fewer opportunities to express their creativity through the game. compared to what happened in Dishonored.
However, we must admit that the presence of capacity manages to make Redfall's gameplay much fresher, even if there are fewer of them than we would have liked. Curiously, after having tried them all, the four survivors offer opposite game models, which in some way fuels replayability: Jacob, our first character, accompanied us throughout the story with his raven, turning invisible and hitting enemies at distance with his ghost rifle, but instead we often lamented the fact that he could scale buildings quickly, which Layla and Dev do very well. Remi, on the other hand, is aligned with a more secondary role, also having skills dedicated directly to cooperative multiplayer. Each power can then be upgraded and customized in a skill tree that's not very deep, but absolutely functional for a game of Redfall's ambitions.
A rapidly bleeding open world
As we said at the beginning, it almost seems that Arkane in packaging Redfall has taken advantage of its typical open map adventure in what is for all intents and purposes a open world naked and devoid of activity, unable to offer real incentives to exploration. The story unfolds through two dozen main missions designed to offer that multiplicity of approaches that characterizes the studio, but beyond these and a handful of secondary ones with a very simple design, the island offers very few other pastimes for lovers. . of walks in the moonlight.
In fact, there are basically only two other things to do in the open world built by the Texan studio and they end up being mandatory tasks throughout the story. The first is the methodical and systematic disinfestation of Redfall neighborhoods, an activity that occurs according to a well-established script. As you explore you may find shelters, places to replenish medical kits and ammunition between gunfights. Here you receive a couple of missions, aimed precisely at freeing the entire neighborhood from vampire influence, and after completing them you receive the skull of a vampire general, a necessary object to later unlock the hiding places of the bosses in the Redfall story.
The other, however, is embodied by vampire nests, an activity that gives the impression of having been designed for cooperative play, but that can be carried out with complete autonomy even alone. Lairs are small, simple dungeons that appear on the map in random positions, and have a radius of influence that progressively expands, strengthening the enemies found inside. If you want to avoid tackling these areas, it goes without saying that it will always be necessary at some point to clear the map of hideouts, with the incentive that once completed they reward the player with a good amount of equipment and resources. The ending has a particular mechanic, which made us think of the cooperative: when you destroy the heart of the nest you only have one minute to collect all the rewards scattered in the final chamber, a practically impossible task alone, but which instead allows the group Collect all the loot before time runs out.
These activities are naturally not enough to justify the existence of an open world, and even the aforementioned one does not fail to do so. a cooperative, since you can never really sense what game mode the developers were thinking about when they laid the foundation for Redfall. At times, the Arkane title seems to have been designed to be consumed in company, since for example it is impossible to pause the game even when you are alone, as we discovered to our cost during the fight against a supreme vampire. On the contrary, the fact that story progress is only maintained by the host of a game, and that any form of balance at the level of the participating players is completely absent, implies that Arkane did not care much about developing systems capable of facilitate and make the cooperative accessible. At this point, to know, we will necessarily have to ask Smith and Bare what the studio's plans were in this regard.
What do we confuse 30 FPS with?
Il technical sector There has already been a lot of talk about Redfall, due to the frame rate on consoles locked at 30 FPS. We wish we could tell you that sacrifice was necessary to bring Xbox Series S | an open world with an extraordinary visual impact | from all points of view, from the effects to the quality of the three-dimensional models, from the animations to the lighting. Furthermore, 30 FPS on consoles is not solid in all situations, and from time to time we see some sporadic drops, although they are not particularly serious.
The most striking thing is the appearance of the game world, far from the immersive masterpiece that was Prey's Talos I station. Six years after the events of Morgan Yu, the main city of Redfall is a mass of buildings with very little personality, characterized by the constant recycling of assets and very little attention to detail. We had very high expectations in this regard also because we are talking about Arkane's specialty, but this time the studio offers us a cold and impersonal world, which almost never rewards the players' desire to explore.
Conclusions
Tested version Xbox Series X digital delivery Steam, Xbox Store, Windows Store Price 79,99 € Holygamerz.com 6.0 Readers (86) 6.5 your voteSomething must have gone hopelessly wrong in the development of Redfall. Arkane Austin's new shooter is an inexplicable exercise in carelessness and creative superficiality, something light years away from anything the studio behind Dishonored and Prey has shown it can achieve in the past. With imprecise gunplay, a bare open world, and a forgettable story, the Texan studio's open-world shooter manages barely enough thanks to some accurate intuition, but represents a major defeat for anyone hoping to finally have a good reason to Turn on your Xbox, after a 2022 without exclusives. Arkane vampires don't bite, those who bought a Series X|S might start doing so soon.
PRO
- The narrative concept is original.
- Effective variety of approach in carrying out missions.
AGAINST
- The shooting is light years from being noticeable
- The story will struggle to appeal to even the most enthusiastic vampire enthusiast.
- The open world is bare and uninviting.
- Technical sector that leaves much to be desired.
