redfall

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@xeiaso.net>

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+---
+title: "Redfall: somehow they made vampires boring"
+date: 2023-05-03
+series: reviews
+tags:
+  - game
+  - redfall
+  - steam
+---
+
+I bought an RTX 4080 recently. It's a fantastic card and can easily
+handle literally everything I throw at it. When I bought the card,
+Canada Computers told me it came with a copy of The Last of Us Part I.
+When we got home and redeemed the codes, turns out it wasn't for The
+Last of Us. It was for Redfall. My husband got a 4080 with the same
+game too, so we decided to wait for it to release and then brace for
+impact.
+
+They really did try when making this game, but it's nowhere near ready
+for release. Their intent was to make a co-op focused looter shooter
+about vampires taking over a small island, but what we found was a
+bland, boring, and overall uninspired mess of a game that I'm glad I
+didn't pay for.
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Ligne Claire" file="vampire" prompt="ligne claire, flat colors, vampire, spooky house, 1girl, green hair, green eyes, flashlight, indoors, ambiance, face mask, hoodie, pop art"></xeblog-hero>
+
+I would get some pictures or video of the game (we forgot to record
+our playthrough) but I can't be assed to download the game and endure
+it again.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Aoi" mood="wut">Wait, they made _vampires_ boring?
+How do you _do_ that?</xeblog-conv>
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">The same way they did in
+Morbius, not using social constructs around vampires to do innovative
+things. The island is invaded by vampires but none of them really do
+anything different. It's just the same enemy a billion
+times.</xeblog-conv>
+
+In our testing, we had the following issues:
+
+- Flashlights are local-only and seem to work by increasing brightness
+  in a cone of vision like how they do in Half-Life 2. This would be
+  fine, but because this is a co-op game you can't use your friend's
+  flashlight to your advantage.
+- Our characters have psychic powers but they were almost never as
+  useful as shooting enemies in the face to kill them.
+- Shader compilation stutters were constant and made me think I was
+  playing a game on a Wii emulator. This is a problem endemic to
+  Unreal Engine 4 games on PC from what I understand, but it was too
+  frequent to be ignored.
+- Many "distant" objects Z-fighted until we got close to them and then
+  the higher LOD models were able to resovle that.
+- Nearly identical weapons are impossible to tell apart on the
+  inventory screen (a model of shotgun with a red dot sight and the
+  same model of shotgun without a red dot sight).
+- At one point my husband's character was running around pantomiming
+  holding a gun but wasn't actually holding one. Really wish I got a
+  screenshot of that.
+- If you hide behind a car, the enemy AI can't pathfind its way to
+  you.
+- They do the horrible pretend mouse cursor thing on controller
+  instead of just using normal menu navigation. I know why they're
+  doing this, because Destiny does it. I hate it there and I hate it
+  here. I use a controller because I want to navigate around the menu
+  directly, not because I want to pretend I'm using a mouse.
+- Tree pop-in made Pokemon Violet look good.
+- Loot is instanced, but if someone is looking through a chest another
+  co-op player can't look through it until they're done. This has lead
+  to my husband mentioning guns that I can't see or get ahold of. This
+  confused us both greatly until we figured out loot was instanced.
+- Your player characters will frequently fail to pick up ammo. No
+  matter how many times you press the button. No matter how many times
+  you walk away from the ammo and come back.
+- Having two nearly identical weapons makes the weapon switching
+  button Y fail to switch weapons.
+- The inter-character dialogue is very uninspired and overall feels
+  quite forced.
+- The cutscenes are ken burns effect vignettes of dramatis personae
+  doing actions like cleaning the firehouse. It reminds me of the kind
+  of animation quality you get when you need to finish the TV season
+  but you ran out of budget, just like the last episode of Evangelion.
+  This is not a complement. The last episode of Evangelion is much
+  better made than the cutscenes in Redfall.
+- Alt-tabbing out of the game gave you a 2% chance that it would
+  crash. It made having a second monitor for replying to Discord
+  messages irrelevant.
+- We didn't choose to end our playthrough, the game just disconnected
+  us after we finished rescuing hostages.
+
+Many of the issues in this kind of game would be "immersion-breaking",
+or the kind of issues that make you suspend your suspension of
+disbelief that you're playing a game. I would be willing to wager that
+this game cannot suspend disbelief because it didn't even induce the
+suspension of disbelief for me and my husband.
+
+I feel really bad for the team that made this because this game is
+obviously not done yet, but the critical reception is so bad that the
+game may never be finished. I understand why reviewers usually don't
+talk about performance or game quality because those can and will
+change in this day and age, but at least the game looked decent. The
+RTX cores on my 4080 were certainly a huge part of why it looked
+decent though.
+
+There is a good game here and it is trying so hard to break free, but
+this just ain't it chief. This game is a solid 4/10. Wait a few months
+for it to be patched if you really want to get it, but don't hold your
+breath.