shikamaru317 on 01 May 2023
My Redfall early impressions after 3 and a half hours of playtime tonight:
The Good
- The story and characters are interesting so far
- The shooting is pretty good, better than Deathloop I'd say
- Art design is nice, good atmosphere to the town
- Good lore, lots of nice notes and such to find
- Character movement is quite good, you can slide, you can sprint pretty quickly with no stamina to slow you down, you can clamber, you can auto-climb ladders by walking into them (something missing in Ghostwire Tokyo which is why I make note of it), most of the characters have movement abilities to get height
The Not So Good
- The AI is pretty dumb on the human enemies
- World design feels dated, lots of empty space and inaccessible buildings, too few fast travel points
- Un-uniform achievement values, 17 GS achievements are so dumb
- Graphics are pretty lackluster as I expected, some areas look good and you can tell that Arkane put actual effort into them, like the museum, others have bland repeated building interiors and meh texturework
- Already ran into bugs with vampire enemies that would neither aggro nor could be killed by me, more than once, they'd just sit their watching and doing nothing while taking no damage when I shot at them. Also a bug on burst fire assault rifles with an inconsistent number of bullets being fired on each trigger pull, sometimes 1, sometimes 2, sometimes 3.
I can see it being at least a 7.5/10 for me, maybe an 8, especially after some bug fixes and the 60 fps patch. Definitely feels like critics underrated it a bit, reminds me of many last gen Xbox exclusives like ReCore, Crimson Dragon, and Quantum Break in that regard. Xbox just can't catch a break with critics sometimes, often feels like they are biased against Xbox exclusives while biased for Nintendo and Sony exclusives.
