---
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.