Redfall – better with friends, probably (pic: Microsoft)

From the creators of Dishonored and Prey comes a new four-player shooter that is Bethesda’s biggest budget Xbox Series X/S exclusive so far.

Whether you loathe the term immersive sim or merely dislike it, the genre it describes, in which you solve problems using weapons, special powers, and the environment, is a rarefied one, with developer Arkane one of its last remaining proponents. Starting with Arx Fatalis in the early 2000s, then Dishonored and its sequel, they also made Prey and more recently Deathloop, all of which rely on elements of the genre.

Perhaps less well known is that the studio was also developing a multiplayer game, called The Crossing, in the mid-2000s, which was cancelled before release. Since then Arkane’s interest in online gaming hasn’t abated. Deathloop had an interesting mechanic where a second player could invade your game as an assassin, forcing you to abandon your current objective and defend yourself. And now there’s Redfall, which is designed to be played in up to four-player co-op.

Like Deathloop it, too, is set on a strange island, cut off from the rest of the world, only this time it’s not populated by immortals from the 1960s, but a nasty cadre of vampires and the cult members who support them. The perimeter of the island’s surrounded by a massive tidal wave, frozen in time, its vast curled crest hanging threateningly in the sky, with ships and debris trapped inside it.

On land there’s a mixture of houses and commercial buildings, as well as a scattering of twisted magical structures. It’s largely empty though, the island’s citizens having either run away or been used as food by the blood suckers – there are a few hapless residents to rescue, but not many. Meanwhile armed cult members roam the island and will shoot you on sight.

Unlike their followers, vampires don’t carry guns, instead swooping in for clawed melee attacks. Fortunately, they’re susceptible to bullets, which you use to weaken them before applying a good old stake to the heart. But bullets aren’t the only thing you can use to defend yourself. More unusual weapons in Redfall include the stake launcher, which flings pretty much any sharp object you find, from pokers to broken pool cues, enabling you to spear your prey from a distance.

You can also temporarily petrify vampires using a portable UV light. Once immobilised, a quick blast from a shotgun and they explode into satisfyingly small fragments. The rest of your arsenal, from assault rifles to handguns, is more prosaic, the gunplay turning out to be competent rather than exhilarating, and certainly nothing that will have Bungie looking nervously over its shoulder.

Even more so than weapons, your choice of hero influences both play style and the options available during battles. Jacob is a former mercenary for fictional private military contractor, Bellwether. Their troops are on the island as well, albeit in smaller numbers than the cultists, but they have no regard for being his former colleagues and will shoot him just as readily as anyone else. To fight back, Jacob has an invisibility cloak, a spectral sniper rifle, and a raven who marks nearby enemies, so that both you and teammates can see them through walls.

Layla’s an expert in telekinesis and can fling other players into the air, throw up a bullet shield, and call in her vampire ex-boyfriend as a short-term ally. Devinder’s a famous author and YouTube cryptid hunter who can teleport, throw an electrified javelin, and has a UV light big enough to petrify whole groups of vampires. Finally, Remi works in international rescue and can heal everyone, throw C4, and distract groups of enemies with his siren command.

More interestingly, those powers combine with each other. Jacob’s cloak makes nearby players invisible, and everyone can be levitated by Layla. You can also use Remi’s explosives on vampires petrified by Devinder’s UV lamp, giving a range of possibilities for a well-balanced team of heroes. Frustratingly, Redfall has no public matchmaking, only letting you play with people on your friends list who also own a copy of the game, which during the review process was, of course, nobody at all.

It’s a peculiar choice, that seemed out of step in Nintendo’s Advance Wars 1+2 but doubly so in an 18-rated Xbox game. If you don’t happen to know three real-life friends that own the game then you’re not going to be able to play it the way Arkane obviously intended, which will force everyone to join Looking for Group communities elsewhere instead of everything just being handled sensibly in-game.

To be fair, the game works perfectly well solo, automatically rebalancing its difficulty for solo players, but there are so many places where you can tell it wants you to go in all guns blazing, popping off special powers like confetti. On your own there’s still plenty of action, but not the kind of chaotic fun that often emerges when you have three friends along for the ride.

You can detect plenty of hints of its immersive sim background, too. Bigger objectives can be approached in multiple ways, from climbing up to the roof to picking locks or breaking windows, sacrificing stealth for expediency, but these moments are in the minority. Most of the time you’ll be walking the island’s wide streets, taking out groups of cultists or vampires, or both, on the way to your next mission objective.

Vampires come in a range of flavours that includes Sin-Eaters, that trigger a psychic echo – a spooky cut scene from the past – when you kill them; Siphons who drain your blood from a distance; and the Rook. He’s massive and arrives when you’ve either killed a lot of vampires or completed a number of objectives, acting as a mini-boss to be fought wherever you happen to be when his power bar fills up.

That can also trigger some neat emergent gameplay. When the Rook arrives and there are Bellwether troops in the area, they’ll merrily fight each other while you pick off stragglers from the sidelines. The mercenaries also attack cultists, so you’ll sometimes stumble across firefights naturally occurring in the game’s ecosystem.

Vampire nests spring up at random, supercharging nearby enemies and gradually growing in power and scale until you head in and destroy them. Entering a nest is reminiscent of the surreal, fractured landscapes of the Void in Dishonored, where Corvo went to meet the Outsider. Here all you’ll be meeting is numerous angry vampires, keen to defend their home turf. You need to dispatch them and destroy the nest’s heart, then try and escape before the whole edifice collapses.

The plot’s sketched in with the usual plethora of readables, along with psychic echoes and blood-soaked environmental storytelling. You can tell Redfall cares far more about its action than the narrative underlying it, but there’s a backstory to uncover that does at least provide some overarching motivation for all the death dealing.

Redfall – it’s not really a horror game (pic: Microsoft)

You’ll also find a few bugs, all of which seemed to resolve themselves within a few minutes, and none of which required a restart of the game. There are other problems though, most notably when you have to find an object in the environment but can’t. When there are four people swarming an objective those stray quest items might well be discovered in moments, but on your own they can sometimes prove annoyingly elusive.

With its emphasis on action, there aren’t many opportunities for a more thoughtful approach, something past immersive sims have been particularly good at. There are lots of neat little touches however, from the multitude of Dishonored references to a save system that operates entirely in the background.

Unfortunately, the whole thing can feel like less than the sum of its parts. With the more strategic interest of immersive sims mostly absent you’re left with exploration and firefights, which Redfall does fine, even if neither would be anyone’s idea of best-in-class. The voice acting and art style are both excellent though, and even though it lacks Dunwall’s awesome splendour, there’s still a melancholic, lived-in beauty to the place.

It may well be that playing with friends will bring Redfall to greater life but without that option, what’s left is a decent action game that doesn’t do enough to leverage the unique properties of its developer’s favourite genre. When people were mistaking it for a Left 4 Dead clone, Bethesda were instead quick to compare Redfall to Far Cry but neither franchise seems like the sort of thing a developer of Arkane’s reputation should be looking to for inspiration, in what is a disappointingly unremarkable romp.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £69.99*
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Arcane Austin
Release Date: 2nd May 2023
Age Rating: 18

*permanently on Game Press

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From the creators of Dishonored and Prey comes a new four-player shooter that is Bethesda’s biggest budget Xbox Series X/S exclusive so far.