Redfall is Embarrassingly Bad

Another Big Miss for Microsoft

Look at that low poly truck! Look at how much screen space the gun takes up! What is happening in this terrible game? PC screenshot take by the author.

If I hadn’t promised a friend that I would try the PC version of Redfall with him in co-op tonight, I’d be all the way done playing it.

I invested a few hours into the game, mostly on the PC, but I also spent an hour each with the Xbox Series S and Series X versions. Regardless of where you play it, Redfall is a total mess in every way. I think it’s sad and reductive when gamers online accuse a game of “feeling old” or “looking like a last generation game” but I’m going to make a special exception here because there’s just no getting around it:

Redfall looks and plays like a game from a hardware generation or two in the past. And not a good old game, but rather a middling one at best. It has rough edges on every single visual asset even if you play it cranked up on PC, and things get much worse over on the lil’ Series S, where I caught moments that would have looked unfortunate running on an Xbox 360 or PS3.

This game is brazenly unfinished and undercooked in a way that makes that old janky launch version of Cyberpunk 2077 look good. There’s a cheap, sad quality to every aspect of the game save for the musical score and the UI design. I found both of those elements quite enjoyable.

Given this game’s long development cycle, I have no doubt that it was originally targeting Xbox One-era hardware, but in its current state it would be barely passable on that older machine. Bad textures abound. Models have constantly visible polygon edges where they should be rounded. Lighting is flat and basic where it even exists at all. Environmental objects that should probably be interactive like traffic cones and other world debris are glued firmly in place.

Redfall’s cutscenes feature zero animation whatsoever. PC screenshot taken by the author.

Redfall’s story is like a bad spoof of early Resident Evil titles. An evil company has been doing nefarious experiments and then accidentally unleashes vampires on a random fake coastal town. In an RE game the main characters are all cool soldiers or action heroes, but here they are four random weirdos that happened to be nearby. Each character has their own tiny set of powers and their own…