Arkane Studios has just launched Redfall. While the company is known for making some classic titles, its new co-op shooter is definitely not the case.
Released on May 2, the Xbox version of Redfall currently has an average score of 64/100 on Metacritic, and the PC version sits at 62/100. Most journalists found the game to be a step backwards from Arkane’s previous projects and criticized it for the repetitive open world, lifeless NPCs, and lack of the studio’s signature game design and immersive sim elements.
At the moment of writing, Redfall is the lowest rated title in the history of Arkane, which released its debut game in 2002. It is behind the Xbox version of Arx Fatalis (71), the PC version of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (72).
Dishonored remains Arkane’s highest rated game with an average Metascore of 91/100. It is followed by Dishonored 2 (88), Deathloop (87), and Prey (84).
Redfall’s user score is yet to be determined, but the game had a weak launch on Steam. It currently has a “Mostly Negative” rating, with only 29% of user reviews being positive.
As with many other big titles released in recent months (e.g. The Last of Us, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, etc.), players are upset by Redfall’s poor technical state. “How did Arkane regress from Dishonored to this?,” one user asked.
Optimization issues aside, negative reviews are also focused on the game’s “non-existent story and bad fighting and gun-play system.”
According to SteamDB, Redfall peaked at 6,124 concurrent users (CCU) on Valve’s platform. This is also the worst result for any game developed by Arkane, not counting really old releases like Dark Messiah or Arx Fatalis.
For comparison, Prey had a peak CCU of 24.5k, and Dishonored 2 peaked at 22.4k concurrent players.
Announced in 2021, Redfall was presented as Arkane’s attempt to apply its game design approach to the co-op shooter genre and blend it with the vampire aesthetic. However, it is unclear how long the studio and Microsoft will support the game given a weird marketing campaign and the poor reception at launch.