If you’ve been considering playing Redfall, be aware that the game has received mostly negative reviews and has been criticized for its performance issues and lack of polish. It might be best to wait and see if improvements are made before diving into this co-op shooter by Arkane Studios.
Redfall received mostly negative reviews from critics and players alike. Now, things have gone from bad to worse for the co-op shooter by Arkane Studios.
Redfall currently holds a 59% rating on Metacritic on the PC and 64% on the Xbox Series X. To make matters worse, there’s no silver lining. Unlike Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which was nearly unplayable on the PC at launch, Redfall has nothing going for it. Users are review-bombing Redfall because it’s an objectively bad game and has performance issues. It’s a AAA game priced at a $70 price point best described as an unfinished and very flawed product.
Redfall had generated controversy for several other reasons ahead of its launch. For starters, one of the developers claimed that Microsoft had asked the studio to cancel the PS5 version. Microsoft later denied this claim. Then, Redfall was locked to 30 FPS on the Xbox Series X with a 60 FPS patch coming in a post-launch update.
In a nutshell, Redfall is a case of Murphy’s Law in action – everything that could go wrong went wrong with it.
Unfortunately, the trend of releasing broken PC ports and games at launch and gradually fixing performance has become a major problem in recent years. Last year’s GOTY winner, and one of the most awarded games of all time, Elden Ring, was review bombed when it came out as well due to the subpar performance of the PC port.
It’s unclear what’s next for Redfall and Arkane Studios. Maybe there’s some truth to what an insider recently said about how Microsoft pushed Redfall out to market because it was already in development when it acquired ZeniMax Media. At least fans can take solace in the “ambitious” project that Arkane Lyon is reportedly working on.
We’ve still got a long way to go before the year is over. Around a dozen AAA games are scheduled to launch in the coming months. Fingers crossed, most of them will perform better than Redfall. But, don’t be surprised if they end up in a similar situation if not worse.
