Wherever things have gone wrong in Redfall, and there are several places, it feels like the result of a team with a foot in disjointed worlds: what it's known for and what it's tasked with doing.īy clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's In their place are run-and-gun fights with unresponsive AI enemies amid a host of bugs that are so prevalent, it genuinely feels dejecting to see the game launch in this state. Most aspects of what the team is known for-unrivaled world design, intricate immersive sim elements, improvisational combat-are rarely found here.

The story premise is classic Arkane stuff, but in practice, it plays like a tug-of-war that its usually inventive team could not win. Redfall is a four-player co-op loot-shooter that pits players against vampires and the cultists who follow them. Redfall is Arkane making compromises to its own design philosophies to serve a genre it may have been better off avoiding.

This surprise would become emblematic of my time in the vampire-infested Massachusetts town.

And yet, there are ladders early and often in Redfall. The team has said ladders feel limiting by putting players in a 'mode' where they can't use their weapons or abilities, and they often even fall to their deaths anyway-Arkane hates ladders. The team says as much with a succinctly stated poster in one of the rooms in its Austin location: 'F**k ladders,' it reads.

Redfall game trailer