Redfall arrives with a pedigree that makes its problems harder to forgive. Arkane Austin built Prey and Dishonored, two games that treated level design as a moral argument. Its new shooter puts that legacy in an open world, adds vampires, and loses most of what made the studio worth trusting.
Redfall is out now on Xbox Series X|S and PC. It is a first-person shooter with role-playing and adventure elements, built for single player and for co-op teams of up to four. It scored 5.9 out of 10 on Metacritic. That number is fair, and the reasons are not mysterious.
Trailer, via Bethesda Softworks.
The island town of Redfall, Massachusetts
The setup is strong on paper. A legion of vampires has taken the fictional island town of Redfall, Massachusetts, cut it off from the outside world, and blotted out the sun with a permanent eclipse so they can move freely. The vampires came from a failed scientific experiment and keep evolving, some growing into bigger, more powerful forms.
Players pick from four survivors and fight both the vampires and the human cultists who worship the island’s new leadership, hoping to join their ranks. The four are a diverse roster with distinct backgrounds and abilities:
- Devinder Crousley, a fame-seeking cryptozoologist and inventor
- Layla Ellison, a telekinetic student
- Remi de la Rosa, a combat engineer
- Jacob Boyer, a former US military special forces sniper turned operator for Bellwether Security
That roster is the best idea in the game. Each character has a reason to be on the island, and the co-op pitch — group up to build the perfect team of vampire slayers — is the one Redfall never stops selling.
District 1, District 2, and the loot loop
The playable area splits into two maps, District 1 and District 2. The core loop is looting weapons and gear, chasing rarity, and getting better equipment by leveling up, exploring and finishing quest objectives. It is a familiar shape, and Redfall does not improve on it.
The story runs through Dr. Peter Addison, a scientist at Aevum Therapeutics, which has a lab on the island. Addison used an experimental procedure to become a vampire god called the “Hollow Man” and spread vampirism across Redfall. The hunters liberate the local fire station and turn it into their headquarters and a safe haven. They later take the Redfall Maritime Center as a second survivor haven and learn that two more vampire gods, Bloody Tom and Miss Whisper, are in the area.
One beat stands out. Investigating the Hollow Man’s home, the hunters find that Addison experimented on his own daughter while trying to cure her illness. It is the only moment in the plot that lands with any weight, and it arrives buried inside a quest chain that mostly asks players to clear another building.
The Hollow Man is not enough
A vampire god should be the spine of the game. The Hollow Man is not. He broadcasts, he leaves psychic echoes, and the hunters track him to his lair and kill him, after which the island’s radios work again and other survivors can be reached. That is a plot, but it is not a presence. For a villain built on a father’s experiment on his own child, he barely registers.
The same goes for Bloody Tom and Miss Whisper. Two more vampire gods are introduced late, and the game treats them as content rather than characters. The cultists get even less. They worship the island’s hungry new leadership in the hope of joining the ranks, and that is essentially all they do.
What Arkane Austin built here
Redfall’s problems are not subtle. The gameplay design, the story and the technical state all drew criticism at launch, and playing it now confirms each complaint. The shooting is serviceable. The looting is functional. The two maps are large without being interesting, and the open world does not give the studio’s signature systems room to breathe the way a tighter, hand-built space did in Prey or Dishonored.
Co-op is where the game wants to live, and it is also where the cracks show hardest. A team of four moves through the same objectives, fights the same enemies, and shares the same thin story. The vampires evolving into bigger, badder forms is a fine idea that the game never turns into a real threat curve.
This is the part worth watching: Arkane Austin’s strength was always the crafted world, the space that responds to how you move through it. Redfall keeps the surface of that idea and drops the substance. An open world is not a substitute for a designed one, and vampires are not a substitute for a reason to care.
A 5.9, and what it means
Redfall is not a disaster. It runs, it has a cast worth casting, and the premise — a Massachusetts island under a permanent eclipse, cut off by a wall of water, overrun by vampires and the people who worship them — is genuinely good. The Hollow Man’s daughter is a real story hiding in here.
But a game is not a premise. Redfall shipped with technical problems, a story that never finds its center, and a design that mistakes size for depth. The four survivors deserved a better island. The studio that made Prey deserved a better game.
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