Redfall review-in-progress: It's not great, folks

I'm 10 hours into Redfall and wishing the vampires would come up with a better plan to take over the town so I don't have to play anymore, and I get an idea: Maybe I'm having a miserable time because I've been using my abilities wrong. I'm playing as Layla Ellison, a vampire hunter who can place a ghostly purple elevator on the ground and ride it into the air to gain the high-ground advantage. But the One More Floor skill says that it can send "people higher into the air," not just me. 

If Redfall truly has the DNA of an Arkane immersive sim, like the clockwork worlds of Prey and Dishonored, then surely everything in this town plays by the same rules.

It doesn't take long to find a vampire test subject floating over a sidewalk (because zombies constantly respawn in Redfall as if I'm having no effect on the town). I take some shots at it and it starts running for me. I drop my elevator between us and adjust my aim to skeet shoot this vamp out of the sky.

The vampire casually phases through the elevator like it doesn't even exist. The human cultists run through it too. This is not the immersive sim I'd hoped for, and I'm afraid it's not much of a co-op FPS or RPG, either. Redfall lets me down regardless of the genre expectations I bring:

• A co-op FPS, like Left 4 Dead: There aren't enough enemies or enemy types and the world is big and empty
• A singleplayer Fallout-style RPG: Every gun feels the same and half of the skill tree is useless for singleplayer
• A survival horror FPS: Redfall's vampires aren't all that scary or dangerous, just loud and annoying
• A hero-based FPS: Abilities have long cooldowns and don't meaningfully interact with the world or enemies
• A story-focused FPS: The science-gone-wrong narrative is presented like an audiobook because Redfall's characters are barely characters

Redfall is exactly what I worried it would be: a lifeless multiplayer shooter without any of the playful, systemic creativity of a singleplayer Arkane game. After around 40 hours with it, I'm not sure I'd even recommend it to Game Pass subscribers—100GB is a big download for an FPS this bland. 

Perfect stranger 

After choosing one of four heroes you wake up in the boat you were meant to escape on before the vampire gods peeled back the ocean surrounding Redfall. Waves of water curl over the boat as you search around for supplies and start to piece together what's going on. It's an eerie, visually striking opening sequence that I wish the shooter did more often. Eventually, you escape and clear out the local fire station, joining a group of survivors hoping to rebuild what they can and escape. Many of these characters have names and yet none of them have much to say or seem to recognize you. You accept a mission from a glowing videogamey table and step outside.

The town of Redfall may be one of the emptiest open worlds I've ever seen, but it does have exquisite autumnal vibes. I've spent long stretches of time running back and forth admiring the kind of neighborhood I would have loved to trick-or-treat in as a kid, the perfect cozy little town to set a vampire story in. But when you look a little closer, you realize how much of this town feels like what an AI would spit out if you prompted it with "open world immersive sim".

Every human enemy in Redfall has helpfully gathered around the most explosive object they could find. The town is littered with so many gas tanks, oil spills, and propane tanks that I'm not sure the vampires are its biggest problem. If this had the zany tone of Borderlands where blowing up stupid enemies was the entire point, I wouldn't mind. But Redfall's dramatic text logs and side quests are about the horror of the townspeople's friends and family being turned into immortal monsters. Reading these notes and letters while combing through the town for loot and XP as your character quips about how adept they are confuses Redfall's tone. It's like if you dropped an Overwatch hero into Netflix's Midnight Mass. Characters ask you to return mementos from their loved ones and you go out and slaughter them hoping they'll drop a rare shotgun.

There are brief moments where the narrative and the environmental design coalesce and give you the kind of strange and haunting spaces that Arkane is known for. One mission sent my co-op partner and I into the house of the Hollow Man, the progenitor of the vampire plague and the annoying voice yelling out of TV speakers and radios for the first half of your journey. Redfall frequently shoves you inside of pitch black houses and basements with only a flashlight to lead your way. We crouch-walked through this abandoned home until we turned a corner into a room that, much like the ocean in the opening, had been frozen in time. Through the floating wooden splinters and debris you could see another world just beyond the ceiling. It was like stumbling into the dark limbo-like expanse of The Void in Dishonored, but naturally and unexpectedly.

After spending far too long searching for hidden dolls around the house to complete the mission objective, we were transported to the same house, but sitting atop a floating chunk of land in this alternate reality. There's not much to do there except listen to the predictable origins of the Hollow Man before you're kicked back into reality. Redfall has deployed warped setpieces like this a few other times in my 40 hours with it, and there's never anything to do in them except think about the other, better games I could be playing.

Hot mess

You can tell that Redfall is an always-online game by the way enemies jerk and stutter around and the way landlocked boats and abandoned campsites have items that respawn after a while. It's a far too vacant world for any of its weapons or abilities to matter. Alone or in co-op, the hero abilities interact weakly with the game world. The most useful abilities help you teleport or jump past enemies so you don't have to engage in Redfall's exceptionally boring firefights.

Scraps with vampires are more challenging when solo, but that's only because they all run straight at you. Without another person to distract them, you spend intense fights running in circles trying to make enough space to heal. It's a nightmare. I only made it through the vampire nests, which are difficult, dungeon-like levels with randomized enemy modifiers, by finding places to crouch where the vampires couldn't reach me. The same goes for the powerful vampire that descends on you when you've alerted them by clearing enough of their fanged friends out, and the major boss fight in the middle of the game.

Fragments of Arkane's typically sharp art direction and smooth stealth action do show up in Redfall. I snuck through a broken window and peered down at a group of cultists listening to a leader make a speech over a loudspeaker just like you'd see in Deathloop or Dishonored, but the enemy patterns and alternative paths are so limited that you might as well light the place up in the most efficient way possible and move on.

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.