Redfall

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Critics Recommend

Average Score

Total Reviews: 54

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Redfall has a lot of charm, but rampant technical issues, uninspired combat, and dreadful AI make the game a huge disappointment and marked departure from Arkane’s usual standards.

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Critics Recommend

Critic Reviews: 54

Critics Consensus

# Reviews: 54

Redfall has a lot of charm, but rampant technical issues, uninspired combat, and dreadful AI make the game a huge disappointment and marked departure from Arkane's usual standards.

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Critic Reviews for Redfall

Critic Reviews

Distribution

54

Reviews

High Score - 90/100

90%

Average Score - 65/100

65%

Low Score - 40/100

40%

Not Recommended

Luke Reilly (IGN)

Right now Redfall is not the game I’d expected, certainly not following the excellent Deathloop, but you can check back with us later this week for our final assessment.

May 1, 2023 |

Full Review

Immersive sim meets four-player co-op in this vampire themed first person shooter that features competent gunplay but a lack of ingenuity in its challenges.

May 2, 2023 |

Full Review

6/10

Nick Gillett (Metro GameCentral)

Not Recommended

Reid McCarter (Polygon)

If this tone takes center stage in the back half of the story, combined with plot developments that add some momentum to the proceedings, it may be easier to overlook the game’s weaker aspects and appreciate it as a compelling narrative work. At this point, though, the town of Redfall is sucked too dry of liveliness for players to be invested in whether its vampires triumph or not.

May 1, 2023 |

Full Review

Luke Reilly (IGN)

Not Recommended - (Read Review)

Right now Redfall is not the game I’d expected, certainly not following the excellent Deathloop, but you can check back with us later this week for our final assessment.

Nick Gillett (Metro GameCentral)

6/10 - (Read Review)

Immersive sim meets four-player co-op in this vampire themed first person shooter that features competent gunplay but a lack of ingenuity in its challenges.

Reid McCarter (Polygon)

Not Recommended - (Read Review)

**Read all 54 critic reviews on the desktop version of VSG.

Read the Reviews (54 total)

Outlet	Author	Score	Date	Quote	Read
33bits	Juanma F. Padilla	75 / 100	05-02-2023	Redfall will surely not go down in the annals of Arkane Studios great works, nor will it become a console seller. It seems, in fact, a video game typical of more modest companies with errors and lack of optimization more typical of small independent companies. Beyond this, Redfall can give us hours of fun. The setting is attractive and the game can shine at times, even if it doesn't stand out in any particular way.	Read review
ACG	Jeremy Penter	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	"Redfall is uninspired, unpolished, and mostly unfun. A game that doesn't merge two ideas but instead separates them so much they still feel like 2 different games"	Read review
Areajugones	Ramón Baylos	7.4 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is an open-world game that retains some of the greatest virtues of Arkane's design, but is weighed down by certain issues related to the genre to which it belongs. Possibly it will be a game that becomes something much bigger in the future, but finishing it has left me with mixed feelings. Right now I feel that, despite its successes, what shines most about Redfall is the promise of what it could become... And I don't know if this ends up speaking well or badly of the game.	Read review
Attack of the Fanboy	Christian Bognar	3.5 / 5 stars	05-02-2023	In no way is Redfall groundbreaking	Read review
AusGamers	Kosta Andreadis	5 / 10	05-02-2023	And so this once sleepy locale has been turned into a gothic hellscape, where citizens are hiding, and cultists are working with their vampire overlords to appease the more powerful vampire gods.	Read review
Cerealkillerz	Steve Brieller	7.8 / 10	05-02-2023	Storywise Arkane Austin nails their presentation about the vampire infested small village Redfall. Graphic and audio design are very fitting with B-Movie flair. Sadly the game doesn't deliver that many highlights besides very basic open-world co-op shooter gameplay. Even though, four different classes, a small skilltree and several weaponoptions are provided the gameplay loop doesn't get much more than shooting at everything that moves. Using gamepass or waiting for a sale is recommended.	Read review
Checkpoint Gaming	Elliot Attard	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	Redfall is an interesting concept with some valid ideas, some cool lore, and some great moments driven by solid visual design and a knack for leaning into the supernatural. But with a vapid and dull open world, excruciating mission design, constant backtracking, and a plethora of performance issues—this release ends up sucking the life out of you one dumb glitch at a time.	Read review
COGconnected	Mark Steighner	78 / 100	05-01-2023	I had fun playing Redfall, both solo and with friends. There’s a definite Salem’s Lot vibe to a New England town oppressed by a vampire apocalypse. All the characters are interesting to play and the monsters are varied. Still, Redfall does not revolutionize the open-world shooter, or even really evolve Arkane Austin’s by-now familiar formula. Redfall feels like the product of a reliable game plan that’s due for an update.	Read review
Destructoid	Eric Van Allen	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	More often, though, Redfall has been technical hitches, repetition, and scattershot story. I enjoy the kind of world, narrative, and experience it wants to be, but I just don’t think it gets there. We’ve only had a few days with it, but we’ll have more on Redfall once we’ve rolled credits later this week.	Read review
DualShockers	Robert Zak	8.5 / 10	05-01-2023	Redfall is an open-world shooter where you can creep through a spooky mansion alone at night, then link up with some friends to take on a giga-vampire in another dimension. It's weird, and it's the right kind of weird.	Read review
Eurogamer	Christian Donlan	Recommended	05-02-2023	I'd say there are some good bones here. The tech seems to be creaking and some of the ideas	Read review
Game Informer	Alex Van Aken	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	As a whole, Redfall’s gameplay is unbalanced. Several puzzling decisions, like a lack of stealth takedowns or the inability to pause the game in single-player mode, are far from what I’d expect from an Arkane game. Rampant technical issues hinder the brighter moments of the experience, including frequent server crashes, inputs failing to work, NPCs and enemies spawning duplicate versions of themselves, and one very frustrating bug which prevents me from closing the world map and main menu in cooperative play.	Read review
Game Rant	Joshua Duckworth	3.5 / 5 stars	05-01-2023	Redfall is ultimately a fun experience thanks to the world, the enemies, and the gunplay itself, but as a whole, it's an incredibly shallow one too. Because of this, some may question whether it's worth the price tag, but it's noteworthy that Redfall is launching on Xbox Game Pass. It feels like the game is designed for the service, with an experience that is easily digestible, is full of simple mindless fun, and is easy to move on from.	Read review
Gamefa	Mohammad Reza Nowroozi	5 / 10	05-02-2023	The idea of fighting vampires in a world designed by arkane sounded exciting, but unfortunately, Redfall cannot meet the 2-year wait of fans and becomes a one-time and forgettable experience. Numerous technical problems, lack of innovation and outdated gameplay are some of the problems that ruin the experience. For now, maybe the existence of the game on Game Pass can be the only reason to justify playing this title and it might entertain you for a short period of time.	Read review
GameGrin	Violet Plata	7.5 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall's a great title with lots to do throughout its world, but the lifelessness of the NPCs and story alongside the amounts of bugs and the steep entering fee, I can't assume it'll be for everyone.	Read review
Gamersky	心灵奇兵	6 / 10	03-02-2023	Redfall is a letdown. Arkane Studios' signature immersive simulation and level design are nowhere to be found in the game. Instead, their typical poor shooting experience, lack of polish, and rough performance issues are present in the game, which is a little too rebellious.	Read review
GameSpew	Richard Seagrave	5 / 10	05-02-2023	After some updates, Redfall may well become a Game Pass must-play, whether you like to play alone or with others. But right now, while you can have fun with it if you grit your teeth and give it some leeway, it’s very hard to wholeheartedly recommend. While some issues here are likely to persist even once the title has been polished up a little, such as the world feeling too empty at times and skill trees being underwhelming, it’s the technical problems that are the stake to Redfall‘s heart.	Read review
GameSpot	Mark Delaney	4 / 10	05-02-2023	Arkane takes a stab at infusing the genre du jour with its signature style, but the end results are a bloody mess.	Read review
GamesRadar+	Sam Loveridge	2.5 / 5 stars	05-02-2023	Redfall is ultimately not up to Arkane's usual standards. It feels rushed, unfinished, and unsatisfying to play.	Read review
Gaming Nexus	Eric Hauter	7.4 / 10	05-01-2023	Redfall is a bigger and much more deliberately paced game than I was expecting. Fun in multiplayer, I found that I enjoyed it even more solo. Creeping around with a sniper rifle, shooting vamps with stake launchers from afar, I was able to play Redfall as a stealth game, which was highly enjoyable. Some technical issues still need to be ironed out, but there is a lot of fun here for folks that vibe with the spooky open world.	Read review
GamingBolt	Shubhankar Parijat	5 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is Arkane's most underwhelming game to date. A fascinating setting and some remnants of the developer's beloved gameplay formula aren't enough to overcome the game's numerous issues, from stiff controls and disappointingly rote design choices to lackluster storytelling and technical deficiencies.	Read review
GamingTrend	David Burdette	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	My concern at this point is that the fun I had will be short-lived. I’m not sure if Redfall will build on this. I hope it will and I expect it to, but seeing how many stumbles there are along the way to get to a point where it’s somewhat enjoyable, I’m not going to hold my breath.	Read review
God is a Geek	Chris White	6 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is hampered by issues like poor AI, texture pop-ins, and bland missions, meaning its stronger moments are overshadowed.	Read review
Hardcore Gamer	Jordan Helm	2 / 5 stars	05-02-2023	From a studio having delivered far better and should in all likelihood have done so once more, Redfall is an uncharacteristically poor and cobbled-together brand of tedium.	Read review
Hey Poor Player	Shane Boyle	2 / 5 stars	04-01-2023	In all my years of gaming, I struggle to think of ever feeling a sense of disappointment as profound as I do when playing Redfall. Sure, you can increase the fun factor by adding a few buddies into the equation, the varied classes lending themselves well to group play, and there are glimpses of something great when you’re afforded the opportunity to slow down in one of the more tightly scripted missions, but these positives merely serve as momentary distractions from the multitude of issues that plague Arkane Austin’s latest effort. Between the half-baked gameplay loops, repetitive open-world busy work, and shockingly poor optimization, Redfall feels like a title that’s still in alpha, never mind a product that’s supposed to represent a flagship release for Microsoft’s premium subscription service.	Read review
Hobby Consolas	David Rodriguez	78 / 100	05-01-2023	Redfall will be a good game for when all the technical problems that launch treasures are fixed. Arkane's good hand in terms of setting and gameplay is moved to the background due to errors and failures and despite everything, this exclusive is very fun, despite innovating rather little.	Read review
IGN	Luke Reilly	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	Right now Redfall is not the game I’d expected, certainly not following the excellent Deathloop, but you can check back with us later this week for our final assessment.	Read review
IGN Spain	Rafa Del Río	8 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall becomes Arkane's most fun game: no moral dilemmas, no existential doubts and totally enjoyable both with friends and alone.	Read review
Kinda Funny Games	Kinda Funny Games	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	Video review.	Read review
Metro GameCentral	Nick Gillett	6 / 10	05-02-2023	Immersive sim meets four-player co-op in this vampire themed first person shooter that features competent gunplay but a lack of ingenuity in its challenges.	Read review
Niche Gamer	Augusto A.	8 / 10	05-02-2023	It still feels a bit unfinished in some aspects, but it has a good amount of content that is bound to have you hooked for 20 hours or so, maybe longer considering how addicted you get to clearing the vampire nests like I did.	Read review
PC Gamer	Tyler Colp	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	After all the confusion over what it would be like to play, Redfall fails at not only being an immersive sim, but everything else, too. I'm a fan of Arkane because of its ambitiously creative and dynamic, systems-driven worlds, and Redfall disappoints in both categories. I'll play more before writing my final review, but I've played a lot already, and I don't expect it to get better.	Read review
PCGamesN	Andrew Farrell	7 / 10	05-02-2023	As long as you don't mind the truly daft AI making things a bit mindless, Redfall is a good-enough co-op action game, but it makes me sad for the vampire-hunting immersive sim Arkane could've delivered.	Read review
Polygon	Reid McCarter	Not Recommended	05-01-2023	If this tone takes center stage in the back half of the story, combined with plot developments that add some momentum to the proceedings, it may be easier to overlook the game’s weaker aspects and appreciate it as a compelling narrative work. At this point, though, the town of Redfall is sucked too dry of liveliness for players to be invested in whether its vampires triumph or not.	Read review
PowerUp!	Leo Stevenson	6 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is not the second coming of first-party AAA games on Xbox and it was never going to be. It's an average co-op shooter with half-baked ideas that never fully come together. It's fun for a few minutes but it wears thin very quickly. Give it a try on Game Pass but don't expect too much.	Read review
Press Start	Brodie Gibbons	6.5 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is a gold dust-rare miss for what has been a very consistent deliverer of quality video games. If you are able to look beyond the game's several questionable design choices, Redfall can serve up just a small bite of mindless fun beneath the island's black hole sun.	Read review
Saudi Gamer	خالد أحمد	5 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall may be Arkane's first disappointing game! This is not because the studio moved away from what distinguished it in its previous games, but rather through the game itself as an open-world game that did not offer anything special and did not try to move away from the issues of this type of game that has been criticized in many games since the beginning of the last generation. And on top of that the fact that the game is technically tragic, and it is preferable to wait for a lot of updates to fix its problems, whether from technical issues or wobbly performance.	Read review
Screen Rant	Jason Hon	3.5 / 5 stars	05-01-2023	There is a lot to enjoy with Arkane's latest, even if some aspects don't feel as fleshed out as they could be. The game looks and plays great on PC with several graphics options, including performance and ultra-performance modes. Although the gameplay could use more variation, the locations and enemies in Redfall are a lot of fun to experience with friends. Redfall does more right than wrong in a gaming genre filled with multiplayer shooters competing for limited screen time	Read review
SECTOR.sk	Peter Dragula	6.5 / 10	05-02-2023	Arkane Studios brought co-op in the world of vampires, but the game does not reach the quality of the titles Dishonored, Deadhloop, Prey, for which autors became famous.	Read review
SpazioGames	Gianluca Arena	7 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall shows some good ideas (especially in its level design), but they are not enough to compete with the brilliant previous works that Arkane gave birth to.	Read review
Stevivor	Steve Wright	7.5 / 10	05-02-2023	Redfall is a truly exciting experience. It's great solo, has the potential to be great with friends -- especially if someone has a save so I can access that last 17 Gamerscore I need, thanks. It’ll be perfect for anyone who's loved an Arkane game -- sci-fi, fantasy or otherwise -- in the past.	Read review
The Outerhaven Productions	Keith Mitchell	3 / 5 stars	05-02-2023	For all its shortcomings, Redfall isn’t a bad game, a bit dated but not bad.	Read review
TheSixthAxis	Dominic Leighton	Recommended	05-02-2023	The combination of open-world and supernatural foes has become increasingly wearisome in the last few years, and immediately after playing through Dead Island 2 I wasn’t particularly looking forward to Redfall. However, Arkane Austin should never be underestimated for putting their own spin on a genre, with Redfall offering enough surprises and memorable moments so far to set it apart from the open-world crowd.	Read review
Twinfinite	Chris Jecks	3 / 5 stars	05-01-2023	Redfall feels like a victim of the great, Game Pass machine. A game with heaps of style and potential that ultimately falls short in core areas like story, mission variety and technical performance. I can’t help shake the feeling development may have been rushed in order to fill a gap in the subscription service’s exclusives release schedule. It’s fun in parts and its wider potential occasionally manages to shine through, but it ultimately serves as another reminder that Microsoft’s first-party offerings still lag behind the best the industry has to offer.	Read review
VG247	Jeremy Peel	Not Recommended	05-02-2023	An echo of Arkane’s past glories	Read review
VGC	Jordan Oloman	4 / 5 stars	05-02-2023	Redfall is a compelling adventure with killer combat and an atmospheric setting in which you can easily lose a weekend. Even though it feels watered down by Arkane’s systemic standards, it’s an ambitious, primarily successful experiment full of narrative nuance and unique ideas. Hopefully, Redfall’s shakeup of the genre will pave the way for more inspired looter shooters in the future and, selfishly… another immersive simulator?	Read review
VideoGamer	Josh Wise	7 / 10	05-01-2023	Frankly, it’s a relief to see real neck-biters treated with the proper pulp care. Arkane Austin gets right to it: teeth, claws, and clear agendas.	Read review
Wccftech	Alessio Palumbo	Not Recommended	05-02-2023	From my preliminary analysis, it's not a failed experiment by any means, but it's also not entirely successful and likely to be left behind for better fits. Stay tuned for the full verdict.	Read review
We Got This Covered	Ash Martinez	4.5 / 5 stars	05-01-2023	With rich, beautiful open worlds, a multitude of weapons, and a wide variety of enemies to square off against, Redfall amazes. Players won't regret staking their claim on Arkane's latest masterpiece.	Read review
WellPlayed	James Wood	4.5 / 10	05-02-2023	A disappointing take on open-world first-person shooters, Redfall has none of the flavour or mechanical finesse that we’ve come to expect from Arkane Studios.	Read review
Windows Central	Jez Corden	3 / 5 stars	05-01-2023	Redfall is a serviceable first-person open-world shooter with perhaps the most needless "RPG layer" in the history of always-online games. Tools that might make the sandbox more fun are arbitrarily spread across four separate playable class characters. Weapons you enjoy using will lose effectiveness as you "level up" with the game's pointless progression system, which only hinders the otherwise interesting campaign. There are far too many similar shooters out there that simply do almost everything Redfall is trying to do, only far better. Redfall struggles to grasp an identity of its own in a very noisy market. While embers of fun do exist in Redfall, it's maddening that this is the product of the legendary studio that gave us Prey. Arkane is very clearly out of its depth with Redfall.	Read review
Worth Playing	Cody Medellin	7 / 10	05-01-2023	It's a bit difficult to parse out the overall quality of Redfall. If you're talking about it from a technical perspective, it's scattershot but comes out better than some games that look and sound pretty but have terrible performance. If you're looking at it from a story perspective, it's a slow burn that cranks up things once you get close to beating the first major vampire, and the same can be said for the gameplay. Solo play is also better than co-op, based solely on the issues we ran into with connectivity, but mileage can vary. Overall, Redfall asks quite a bit of time from players before getting really good, which makes it perfect for Game Pass but tougher for those who don't have the patience to spend the time to wade through the jank to reach that point.	Read review
Xbox Achievements	Dan Webb	60 / 100	05-01-2023	Redfall is perhaps one of Bethesda and Arkane Austin's most ordinary titles. A perfectly competent first-person shooter that does little to raise itself above the competition. The perfect Game Pass game that's not worth the money, but is worth a casual weekend of play.	Read review
ZTGD	Terrence Johnson	7 / 10	05-01-2023	It just makes no sense that Microsoft promotes this game as this grand co-op experience but then put in place every system known to man to hinder that process or make it harder than necessary; no quick match in a multiplayer game in 2023 is ridiculous. Sadly, Redfall is a prime example of what current day Xbox has become, the potential for greatness is there but they can’t get out of their own way to reach it.	Read review

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Game Info

Game Description / Storyline:

Redfall is an open-world co-op FPS from Arkane Austin, the award-winning team behind Prey and Dishonored. Continuing Arkane’s legacy of carefully crafted worlds and love of creative game mechanics, Redfall brings the studio’s signature gameplay to the co-operative action and FPS genres. The quaint island town of Redfall, Massachusetts, is under siege by a legion of vampires who have blocked out the sun and cut the island off from the outside world. Trapped with a handful of survivors against diabolical enemies threatening to bleed the town dry, choose your hero from a diverse roster, grouping up with others to create the perfect team of vampire slayers.

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