I climb up the basin of a dry lake, the water completely emptied out by vampire magic. I’m on my way to some distant quest marker when I’m stopped in my tracks by the sound of two men arguing. They’re standing on the roof of a lakehouse not ten yards away, and I’m sure if I try to slide back down into the lake bed they’ll spot me. This leaves me with only a couple of options: I can use my stealth ability to sneak past them, or I can take them out with my sniper rifle in the hope they’re holding something valuable I can loot.
As I contemplate their fates through the scope of my rifle, a vampire appears from nowhere and attacks them. They try to shoot it at, but it teleports around, easily avoiding their shots. One of them gets slapped off the roof and dies instantly, while the other one becomes a snack. As his body falls limp, I take the split second opportunity to catch the vamp unawares with an expertly placed headshot. This stuns the cryptid, buying me just enough time to send my pet raven out to stake the bastard in his rotten heart. Not every encounter went this smoothly, but this was the first one to give me a real sense of what Redfall is all about.
Updated June 11, 2025:We’ve included our very own video going over Eric Switzer’s time with Redfall. Both he and Features Lead Jade King go over footage and talk about whether or not Redfall lives up to Arkane’s prestigious pedigree.
Related:Arkane Studios Has Moved Beyond The Need For Linear Level Design
Arkane Studios made its name with single-player games like Dishonored and Prey - immersive sims that offer lots of player choice around narrative decisions and exploration, and packed with systems and physics-based interactions that make the world feel like a living playground. It can be hard to see the Arkane brand just from Redfall’s description - an open-world, class-based, co-op FPS - but once I got my hands on it it was clear that the DNA of Dishonored does run through its decrepit, blood-sucking veins.
There’s a number of ways I could have handled that situation as Jacob, the stealthy sniper character, but each of Redfall’s four playable characters has their own bag of tricks that inform their playstyle. As Layla, you might be more inclined to rush the rooftop using a gravity boost from her telekinetic powers, then shotgun blasting everyone in sight. Or, she can put in a call to her vampire ex-boyfriend to come do the dirty work for her. Adding more players increases the options you have for dealing with each encounter exponentially, as each one will bring a different set of skills to the table. This feels like Arkane stretching a lot more than Arkane chasing a trend - my initial fear about Redfall has now been thoroughly assuaged.
I have a lot of questions left over from my brief time with the game, but the basics came pretty naturally, especially if you’ve played the main games that inspired Redfall - Dying Light and Far Cry. The city of Redfall, Massachusetts is divided into two medium-sized maps (there’s your first Dying Light connection) and in between completing story missions - which I’ll touch on later - you’re free to explore the town, do side quests, and unlock safehouses that serve as respawn points (that’s the second). I didn’t play enough to comment on how deep progression is, how much variety in overworld activities there is, or how powerful weapon upgrades feel - all important things to examine in the full game - but I did play enough to know that this is the best gunplay Arkane has ever produced.
There’s a great assortment of vampiric weapons to play around with. Along with your classic pistol, assault rifles, and snipers are also UV-emitting weapons that can briefly turn vampires to stone, flare guns that set them ablaze, and canons that launch wooden stakes, just to name a few. A vampire isn’t dead until you stake it in the heart, so a lot of the standard weapons come equipped (or can be modified) with bayonet-style stakes strapped to the end. Among your three weapon slots, it feels there’s a lot of room, and perhaps necessity, to consider utility and versatility. You’ll be facing an assortment of vampire monsters and human gangs as well, so diversifying your loadout can help you be more prepared. The weapons all feel great to shoot, and the audio-visual feedback you get from doming a vamp is Overwatch-level good. The gunplay has always been the worst quality of Arkane’s games, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it so improved here.
You won’t find loot scattered around the environment or exploding out of dead vampires a la Borderlands, thankfully. Weapons can be purchased from the hub area where you reconvene after each main quest, or they can be earned through questing. One of the best places to collect gear is the vampire nests, which seems to be Redfall’s star piece of gameplay. Nests appear randomly in the world, represented by a regular-looking door that can appear free-standing almost anywhere. The vampires inside the nest are in a shared psychic dream, which manifests as a procedurally-generated dungeon made of fractured spaces stitched together in impossible configurations. They seem relatively small, but I had a great time descending a nest and marveling at the weird psycho-urban designs within. At the heart of the nest is a giant beating heart you have to destroy, then you only have a few seconds to hoover up as much loot as you can before the nest collapses. For a checklist-style map marker activity, I’m already impressed.
I only got a small taste of one campaign mission, which involved infiltrating the home-lab of the vampire progenitor called the Hollow Man to find some clues about his origin and figure out how to kill him. There’s a lot of ways to get into the house, depending on your abilities and playstyle, but once you’re in, it becomes a scavenger hunt for a bunch of tiny collectibles. I may not have minded so much if I wasn’t playing on a time limit (I did ask a dev to show me where the items were just to speed things along) but I’m not a fan of scouring areas for quest items. Even when I did stumble upon enemies in the house, dispatching them was no issue, and it didn’t seem to trigger any further consequences the way getting detected in Dishonored does. When I eventually acquired the goobers, I was treated to a cutscene that revealed some pretty grim scene of the Hollow Man killing his own daughter… to which my character responded, “That ain’t right,” just so you know where our heroes stand on dead kids.
The dialogue I’ve been exposed to is pretty rough. Jacob seems to fall into thatneedlessly dickish archetypeno one appears to be a fan of. When I summon my crow to stake vampires for me, Jacob says, “Earn your keep, Shithead!” I don’t really know their relationship, maybe the bird is a shithead, it just seems like a rude way to talk to your pets. The trailers don’t give me a lot of hope for the other characters either, but I haven’t totally written them off yet. Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio has moved on to form his own indie studio, but I have to imagine that some of the brilliant minds behind Prey’s incredible narrative are still at Arkane Austin, and still doing incredible work on Redfall. Based on the preview, it remains to be seen.
Redfall may not immediately appeal to Arkane’s biggest fans, but my main takeaway from the play session was how much it still feels like an Arkane game. The thoughtful level design, the variety of exploration options, the deep world building, and the inventive powers are all present in Redfall, even if the packaging is different from what we’re used to. I never felt like I was missing the co-op element as a solo player, but at the same time, I can imagine how many cool interactions open up when you can combine the abilities of multiple characters together. I have some concerns about the writing and the mission design, but I’m eager to explore Redfall and get acquainted with more of its residents. I will become the bane of these bloodsuckers. Even if that’s all it’s Redfall’s worth, that might just be good enough for me.
