Yeah now I’ve played a bit I would say that a 6/10 average seems fair. Some people will really dig this game and it will be an 8/10 for the coop stuff especially. And the atmosphere. Others who want something more like a far cry style looter shooter will instantly give this a 4 as in terms of polish and fun gameplay loops it’s so short of those sorts of games it’s not funny. Same for those who like the immersive sim games.
My overriding impression is that this is just too big a project for the team. Open world just seems flawed. It’s almost like they didn’t really know how to create the ambition and it feels like many things including the art style, graphics and gameplay all really work better in a wide linear type game than a massive open world.
You look at halo infinite and whilst that had criticisms, they took the amazing halo gameplay put it into a semi open world and added all the usual halo emergent combat and dialled it up to 10, that game genuinely showed what taking a previously linear or wide linear game and opening it up can do for the experience.
This feels the opposite. It feels like none of the systems really suit the freedoms given to the player and in fact often work against it. You can even talk the visuals and say that sometimes they are really good and create that atmosphere other times the art style is at odds with the open world and leaves the visuals honestly looking really very dated. Would that happen if this game was not open world? I suspect not I suspect they could have curated a much tighter look and experience for the player without needing to maybe build as many assets or re-use assets to make parts of the open world a bit uglier than others.
It really does too big of a project and I agree, they are best suited at those Prey and Dishonored game worlds. The strength of those games were how detailed these locations were, never once did I thought during Prey and Dishonored “damn, this is just too empty and boring.” the more linear game world design of those games is exactly what I love so much.
I remember when Arkane proudly said how big the map was and I immediately didn’t see that as a good thing perse. Bigger isn’t always better, absolutely not. Give me those more narrow, closed off locations of Prey and Dishonored any day. They don’t get old.
PlayStation has its duds as well, aka duds which do get called out by most players (even when the diehard PS fanboys are ultra defensive).
I mean I was there when Gran Turismo 5 was launched way back on the PS3 & the reception was… bad (especially when people found many of the cars were reused assets from the ps2 games. That was fun). Driveclub was eviscerated. The Order 1886 was hated. And most recently Forspoken was demolished.
Does Xbox get a disproportionate amount of hate? Yep, absolutely. It’s ludicrous. But Redfall… I mean if last week was a total sh*tshow due to the CMA’s decision (something outside of MS’s control), Redfall is entirely self-inflicted.
The first big first party game after a barren 2022 cannot be released like this without somebody high up realizing sh*t might hit the fan.
Played it for 2 hs yesterday. Games is alright, feels unpolished in some things tho, still fun to play. My main issue is the brain dead AI, I mean most of them seems not to react to you until you do something. Several times I was face to face with AI and they still missed shots on me. Will try to get all achievements due to odd numbers. They cleared had a vision on this game, that for some reason they couldnt get it on point. Still fun game to play, enjoyed my time on it.
There is no “shit hitting the fan” the game didn’t do well, you learn from it and then move on to the next project. Don’t you guys get tired of overreacting?
The AI is inconsistent actually, it seems. Sometimes they notice me in the dark (I do love how proper dark the nighttime is in this game, can’t say that about every game, certainly not with HDR on) and start shooting, other times you can indeed almost walk up to them and they don’t hear it. Oh man if this had the AI of Halo games, damn!!!
I do really, really love the HDR here though. The specular highlights really stand out.
No, but I do get tired of people pretending posts like mine are an “overreaction”, i.e. just to deflect points they don’t like. I’m not overreacting. I’m not dooming. I’m not being negative. I’m not doing anything irrational.
I’m just looking at a first party Xbox game sitting at 64 on metacritic & thinking about the implications.
This is a market. There’s choice. People can choose where they spend their money (& where they don’t). Redfall isn’t free. If it’s purchased, it’s 80 euros here. If it’s played via GP, it’s game time which could be used on another game on the subscription service.
What can I say? It’s a disappointing game. I tried it & yeah I can see why it’s not being received well right now.
Iv only put a very short amount of time in and just killed the first vampire so I can’t really judge it properly yet based on that obviously but i’ll be honest, there just feels like there’s something completely off with it
It’s hard being compared to Prey as it has one of the most memorable intro’s in any game but the difference between it and this is stark to say the least
Hate to break it to you buddy this won’t be the last “bad” game from MS or any of the other platform holders. Sometimes you miss, it’s only an issue when it becomes a trend which isn’t the case for Xbox. Sorry, not everyone feels like the Xbox brand is on the line because “core” gamers are going crazy on Twitter.
Excellent review from Jesse, and I enjoyed your post a lot as well. I’m interested in trying out this game when my slate clears a bit and can’t help but wonder how much of the negative reaction is due to the circular firing squad that’s been noted in here. I also wonder if the fact that Hi-Fi Rush was such a massive surprise and critical success has any bearing here.
To put it plainly, it’s very clear that a loud cohort exists that takes extreme pleasure in whatever negativity is generated around Xbox. I suspect that a complete surprise and success like HFR was destabilizing for them and they snapped back that much harder. I haven’t been paying attention to the newest Minecraft game, so I can’t say if there was a similar energy there, but it’s undeniable that Redfall had a concerted negativity around it for a while. I can think of a few places that were pretty naked in their anticipatory schadenfreude.
I want to be extra clear that I haven’t played Redfall yet. My perspective is certainly affected by the fact that I got a bunch of cheap Game Pass saved up so the asking price here is minuscule to me. I’ll get to it when I get to it, and I won’t be approaching with anything in my head like “this cost me $XX” or “I saw a video that says this could be running at XX frames per second” or “what does the reception of this game signify for Xbox as a whole”. I hope that I enjoy it but if I don’t, it likely won’t stick in my mind.
Edit: I also want to say that valid criticisms surely exist here, and that I’m not discounting them or dismissing them. I’ll decide for myself if these are deal breakers are not, but I don’t doubt the legitimacy of genuine issues people have. It’s just hard to filter out the noise and get to those.
Can we not do the usual “Xbox doomed” nonsense because a game from first-party is a mid-60s on Metacritic (which I’d argue is still fine as some of my favorite games - Sea of Thieves, for example - received similar scores at launch)? I mean, if we’re going to start pretending as if that means Xbox is doomed, then what does a similar spatter of scores mean for other platform-holders? See example A:
Some of you need to detach from these online narratives that mean absolutely nothing and have little-to-no real-world implications. Just as TLOU or the bevy of 60-rated Sony titles (yes, they very much exist despite what those same narratives imply otherwise) didn’t mean the death knell for Sony, these won’t for Xbox either… it’s frankly mind-boggling to come to make that kind of logical leap IMO.
2022 was light, but 2021 was filled with great releases. So much so that they won Metacritic “Publisher of the year”. MS also has 20+ studios currently making games that should start enabling regular releases that should hopefully help turn around some of these annoying narratives.
This year alone we’ve already seen Hi-Fi Rush, Minecraft Legends and now Redfall. Soon we’ll have Starfield, Forza Motorsport and potentially others. This type of release schedule would have been incomprehensible just 5 years ago.
Not every game is going to be a “winner”, nor do they need to be, but I also don’t believe that we need to take every negative thing and project it onto the entire gaming division and perpetuate narratives that don’t match up with reality.
If Starfield and Forza end up being bad games or garner mid-60 MC scores, or if 2024 ends up being devoid of 1st party releases, then maybe we can start to worry.
Reviews I have read are totally subjective. Like, I get their point, but also it doesn’t matter to me.
I don’t care about the AI. Graphics are fine to me. The loot is kind of okay/cool. Gameplay is fun. I don’t want this to be a 100 hours looter/shooter. It’s not a story heavy game, but there’s still some cool story bits in there.
I had no expectations about the game whatsoever. I just wanted the gunplay to be good, have some fun with it and I got that. I don’t know what people expected really.
Graphics could be better though and 60 FPS. That’s my only complaints.
I’m really enjoying my time so far with Redfall, but it truly is Arkane’s worst game. I was expecting some of the life sim aspects of their games in here but found very little of it.
Iv put a little more time into it and I don’t it’s anywhere near as bad as some reviews claim
Like 4/10 is just insane, 7’s I can totally understand and that’s probably where im hovering right now
It’s funny that people are talking about the improved gunplay though, for whatever reason I’m finding the aiming awful, like to the point where it’s almost impossible to hit anything unless I aim down sight so it auto locks on to something but maybe I’m just bad, Prey felt better than this for me
It definitely doesn’t feel like an Arkane game so far either
