I’ve tried Redfall before and it’s not what I expected (for better or for worse)

“The Hesitation of the Vampires” It’s a meme that particularly amuses me, but that I consider sufficiently complex in itself to be so generous in lending itself to being used in very diverse situations: will we say it to talk about politicians? To refer to those people we’ve all had in our lives who subtract far more than they add? Well, I’m sorry that I can’t go on justifying the nuances of an expression that has a lot more depth than it looks: I’ll use it literally, since I’m talking about Redfall.

I’ve already wasted an entire paragraph explaining that the game is about vampires, but it’s never too late to be more direct, so I’ll start with something that might surprise you: my relationship with Arkane games is quite strange. My cycle when the studio releases a new proposal is always the same: I try it, I don’t get it the first time, I leave the game parked for two years, I come back to it, something clicks and it goes automatically to my top 20 favorite video games in history. .

• Redfall goes on sale May 2 on Xbox Series and PC (available on Xbox Game Pass).

it happened to me with Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Dark Messiah, Prey and Deathloop without exception. But what happened to me with Redfall was something different.; I got a taste of Redfall from the first five minutes of the game when I got to try it out exclusively for just over an hour and a half. And that’s precisely what saddens me the most, what I don’t know if he speaks very well or not so much. of a game that made me want less and more at the same time.

That’s all I’ve tried from Redfall

Whenever I come to tell you what I think of a game I tried beforehand in order to share some first impressions, I like to focus on the what before the how; giving context to what my eyes saw when I was playing it before filming it with completely subjective perceptions. Afterwards, I summarize in a few points what the demo that I was able to try consisted of:

• I played with an action-oriented character which had an electric grenade, a teleport and a devastating final attack
• I was able to explore a good part of the Redfall map and perform various types of tasks, among which the following stand out:
  • The main mission was to go to certain final bosses that will be in the game to investigate his past and find a way to defeat him 1⃣
  • vampire nests: a kind of dungeons that appear randomly on the map and in which you can find good loot to improve your character 2⃣
  • Another side mission focused on finding a specific item in a building or killing a special vampire 3⃣
• I got to take a look at the game’s loot system and character upgrades
• I occasionally faced vampire minibosses which appears when you meet a series of conditions on the game map

What left me wanting less than Redfall

I am not a negative person. I always walk into preview events with the illusion of someone whose brain is saturated with hype to try something new and equal parts caffeine to get you started in the morning. And yet, I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow as I played Redfall over and over. I wanted the game to take my breath away and my first impressions were bittersweet, like all other Arkane games.

However, on this occasion, my insides didn’t turn while I played it because I found it too complex and dense a proposal like in previous studio installments, but because it upset me to play a Arkane title that I didn’t like. it looked like that in no time. The reasons ? The following:

• Redfall’s open world was a little emptier than expected: I understand that there shouldn’t be people dancing in the street, but I missed this density that characterizes the previous opuses of the studio in its level design
• Houses that are in the city, but cannot be accessed certainly not; trucks whose doors you can open, but there is nothing inside; Redfall felt like a less generous game when it came to giving you reasons to explore its world. instead of going straight to the point of the mission that was playing at that moment
• Added to this is the idea that Didn’t feel like I was playing the lead role in finding something valuable all the time. in other games esoteric exploration is rewarded with something very useful for the character, but here I was picking up bottles of cologne, binoculars, and keys that automatically turn into money to spend on weapons and resources once you touch them
• What scares me the most about Redfall is with the option that Arkane chose when designing his open world: You will perform tasks and missions in a sector of the map until you free it from enemy influence and end up with a final boss of the area
• The latter is a matter of tastebut in my case, this system turns the complexity of the world you have to explore in a video game into a to-do list

And despite everything… I want to burst while playing Redfall

I don’t want to be a prophet of doom, or embittered, or angry. I don’t want to be that person who stops breathing just because one of his favorite video game studios didn’t give him the opportunity to try out the game he was hoping for. But what I don’t want to be, above all, is dishonest: despite what I’ve already told you red fall, the warning that time for the test was running out felt like a stab in the heart.

And that’s when I noticed how I gradually reconciled with the game until I understood that maybe it was me who was looking at him from the wrong point of view. At the end of the day, I will continue to play it backwards when it comes out for the following reasons:

• The basics are neat to perfection: the feeling of shooting with all the weapons is insane, the skills give the firefights an incredible dynamism and the loot system will tickle your brains
• Although I said I expected a denser world in the game, It is true that there are areas of the map that are. In that sense, it reminds me a lot of Elden Ring, where important story locations are a masterclass in level design
• Redfall in this case has that essence that characterizes Arkane so much: in the missions as such there are several routes and ways to face the same objective
• Redfall in co-op must earn a lot of points (although that’s something I couldn’t test at the event)
• Also, the setting of the game is amazing.:Walking down a street lit only by a flickering lamp post while staring at the sun and seeing that the vampires have eclipsed it with some sort of spell and hearing the cry of an undead around the corner is something you have to be afraid.

Conclusion: it was not the game I expected… and at the same time yes

On the one hand, I’m sorry to feel that red fall It’s not so much Arkane’s take on open worlds, but rather a recreation of the genre’s effective formula with a tinge of studio idiosyncrasy. It’s a game that it terrifies me and hypes me in equal measure; a proposal that generated all sorts of mixed feelings in me.

And it wasn’t until I wrote those final words that I realized what had just happened to me here: With Redfall, the same thing I was saying before actually happened to me con Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Dark Messiah, Prey and Deathloop. It was like opening my eyes for the first time, but this time it was in record time by actively getting how I felt about the game so I could share it with you.