As every long-reigning monarch, emperor, and Tony Soprano has wearily said in one form or another at one point, ‘it can get awfully lonely at the top.’ Now, I don’t think they were talking about giving a widely criticised and reviled video gamethe highest review score on the internet, but waking up today to find a game that I really rather liked inRedfallgot utterly trashed by players and critics alike does lead you to reflect on things a little bit. Not the actual score I gave it, which I stand by through hell and high water, but how my experience has managed to be so drastically different to the majority of people out there.
First up, let’s address the elephant in the room, looming behind me with that slick fixed smile and an intense reptilian gaze that wouldn’t look out of place beaming at you from a Scientology recruitment poster. I’m not in Phil Spencer’s pocket, and I’ve not been paid off in a lifetime membership to Game Pass. Don’t get me wrong, I do love thesurprises that pop up on Game Passevery month, but at the same time I do thinkthe Activision-Blizzard takeover is, at its core, bad news. I do think theXbox has made some good gamer-friendly movesover the past couple of generations, but you know what? I never have and probably never will own an Xbox.
I think it’s cool how Phil Spencer has always been modest enough to praise Sony consoles, but I do also get Patrick Bateman/American Psycho vibes off him. The point is, all these conflicting feelings can coexist about a video game corporation or figurehead. It’s a complex beast, and it’s probably healthy not to align ourselves fully with or against such things, and simply acknowledge when they do good and when they do bad.
ALSO READ:Assassin’s Creed Mirage Needs To Git Gud With AssassinationsWith that out the way, how is it that my review score of 85 can exist in a seemingly a parallel dimension (or ahemPhil Spencer’s pocket dimension—am I right, haters? You can keep that one) to so many of the others. WithRedfall’s current Metacritic score at 62, I’m the outlier, but there’s always gotta be one, right?
First up, ‘Parallel dimensions’ is an apt way of describing what it’s like to play a modern triple-A game on PC in this day and age. Technical performance is something that we can probably all agree is one of the biggest determiners of a game’s score, and particularly on PC almost every major title released these days hasextremevariation in performance across individual systems that can result in the game being broken on the one hand, and a seamless experience on the other. It’s why one low-scoring review on Metacritic called Redfall ‘a horror show on PC’ and another talks of “horrible and outright disgraceful performance,” whileour pals over at Screen Rantsaid that “the game looks and plays great on PC.”
Despite the authoritative voice of all these reviews, there clearly is no objective reality there. What are they?Living in parallel dimensions? Well yeah, kind of.
That’s why when I review a game, I tend not to talk about the performance unless it’s really game-cripplingly bad. In the case of Redfall, my experience was almost completely bug-free and technically sound, chugging along at a smooth frame rate that I couldn’t track because my Nvidia Overlay crapped out, but seemed to be comfortably in excess of 60 fps (RTX 3080, Ryzen 5800X, 16GB RAM, fyi). There were a couple of moments of slowdown, and one NPC did self-duplicate and do the classic t-pose at one point, but it didn’t detract from the overall experience.
10 of the 13 bad to middling PC Redfall reviews on Metacritic at the time of writing foreground Redfall’s terrible performance, which of course drags the average down, and makes my high praise (based on a seamless technical experience) look even more outlandish. How different would that average score-o-meter would look were the game reviewed following a Day One patch, let alone a few weeks or months down the line?
Of course, the game should have been released well-optimised across the board, and the‘30 fps now, 60 fps later’ nonsenseon Xbox Series was a pretty clear red flag that performance might be a bit iffy on launch. However, that doesn’t change the fact that for me, the game performed in a way that for the majority, it’s like to perform a few patches from now. So, at the risk of sounding like Mr. Privilege here, I seem to have been in the minority to play the game in the state that Arkane actually intended it, and in the state it’s likely to be in the near future. Just think of me as a humble time-traveller, reporting back to you from June or July 2023 to tell you that Redfall isn’tinherentlya broken mess, and that there’s a perfectly playable game under there that I was lucky enough to experience sooner than most.
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But, to paraphraseanother unloved game that I’ve championedin the face of widespread hate, we’ve covered the variables (performance), now let’s talk about the constants, which is the game design itself. That’s where the subjectivity—my personal gaming tastes—comes in. If it wasn’t apparent from my constant callbacks to previous Arkane games, IloveArkane Studios. Iinterviewed Harvey Smith and Raph Colantonio about Dishonoreda while back, I’veprattled on about Dishonored 2, and in the past I’ve written about Arx Fatalis and declared Prey my GOTY 2017.
Now, I’d say Redfall is the worst Arkane game I’ve played—certainly of the modern bunch—but that’s not saying much when I rank two of their games among my all-time favourites. All those things I really like about Arkane games—imaginative level designs, cool worldbuilding, wild powers that let you approach an encounter multiple ways—are in Redfall, albeit in a diluted form from the more meaty offerings in their other games. I can see how that could put people off, but not me.
‘Parallel dimensions’ is an apt way of describing what it’s like to play a modern triple-A game on PC.
Redfall lets me play in a ‘Lite’ version of the immersive-simmy way that is probably my absolute favourite way to play a game; I like that the world contains mysteries that I’m yet to discover, like what the deal is with the creepy house with all the locked doors with weird symbols on them, or why there are empty handcuffs attached to a boiler in someone’s basement, with talk of a ‘Voice in the Woods’ that comes at night. The fact that in many of the buildings the mortal world gives way to a vampiric psychic dimension gives me vibes of the Void from Dishonored, and it’s all stuff that I love. And yes, a lot of this is compromised to accommodate an online-only co-op shooter, but you know what? That aspect of the game is good dumb fun in itself, and I’ll be jumping into that with a couple of my fellow DualShockers this week (assuming it’s playable on their rigs).
So there you have it, folks. You’ll find no green cash-filled envelopes marked with an ‘X’ here, no conspiracies, just a guy with a fortuitous combo of PC components that happen to run the game properly, and who thinks that a watered-down Arkane game is still a pretty good game.
NEXT:As A Final Fantasy Veteran, I’m Ready For An Older Hero
