The game's two maps are bigger than anything Arkane has done before, from either its team in Texas or France, but the team struggles to fill that space with the same intricacies that made games like Dishonored and Deathloop both Game of the Year winners and Prey a cult classic. Now Playing: Redfall Review - Half-Staked 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.

Where in tamriel is redfall