Redfall

Don't buy, game just is stuck on a connecting to server page.

Ahhh Redfall... the game that shutdown Arkane Austin. To be honest, this game isn't THAT bad, but it's not that good either. The gunplay is good, but the enemy AI is SO dumb. Also, the story is laughably bad and shot in these weird still image cutscenes that make it look SO SO cheap. It's a mid game, play it or don't - it doesn't really matter :/ RIP Arkane Austin - we'll always have Prey 5/10

It's an absolute mystery to me why this game wasn't a success. I guess that when it first came out it must have had more bugs or performance issues, and I'm sure a number of people were pissed about how much simpler it is than other games from this studio. But coming to it a couple years after the rest of the world forgot about it, I think it's one of my favorite looter-shooter games of all time. It pairs the gameplay of Borderlands with the vibes of Silent Hill, which, come on. It's hard to top that combo. This game does the same thing a number of other games do, like Dead Island or Dying Light or Far Cry, but with one crucial difference, which is that there is ABSOLUTELY NO ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. So often I get into an open world shooter like this and find myself losing endless time to things that are neither looting nor shooting: long, dull cutscenes; unnecessary travel time across unnecessarily oversized and empty maps; horribly designed mini-games and side activities. None of it is ever fun, just terrible padding. This game does not have that problem. You explore, you shoot, and you loot. And it's very good at all of those things. The hallmarks of Arkane are definitely still here. You can approach fights strategically, using positioning and environmental hazards. World building and design are absolutely top notch (I will say there's significantly less story than in something like Dishonored or Prey, but what there is is very well done, I think). It doesn't have those games' sophistication in terms of player choice, but it doesn't need to, because it's just not an immersive sim. It's not without its flaws, of course. Leveling happens too slowly and your choices of where to place skill points are often not very interesting. (Although to mitigate that there is a second, reputation-based progression system that does have some very helpful abilities in it.) There's a very small range of weapon types that aren't substantially different from one another. Story, like I said, is minimal. But honestly, if you like something like Borderlands and don't go in expecting something extremely complex or lengthy, this is ultimate video game comfort food. I'd have a hard time recommending it any more highly.

This is probably a wildly unpopular opinion, but I LOVE this game. Such a meticulously well-crafted world. Fun enemies that present an actual challenge, at time. The calling cards of the great Arkane Austin (Dishonored, Prey) are all here - dark narrative flourishes, fun, effective abilities, a surrealistic art style, maps full of new guns to grab and items to get. There were some issues at launch - the maps were mostly empty of enemies and I don't think they would respawn. You had to work to find enough battles to keep it interesting. Still, I could see that it had good bones. The game was rushed, insufficiently promoted, then abandoned, after Microsoft acquired the studio. The last patch fixed a lot of the issues that were there at launch and now I find it to be my second favorite Arkane Austin game, after the original Dishonored. This is a shout out to all of the Arkane Austin crew who made this happen. Thank you! I'm sorry about what happened to y'all. Your work is appreciated!

Playing through a good chunk of the Arkane's library with the recent sale, and this honestly was more solid than I initially figured. Damn shame that Bethesda pushed it as a live service game, there was some great potential here that ended up shuttered due to bad management. So it goes!

I cannot give a positive because if keeps crashing every 5 minutes of game half way to the next objective. It can be at any point of the game. And because you cannot save whenever you want, then you need to restart each time from scratch. A pity. In my opinion game should be removed from the steam store due lack of support and being randomly buggy.

This is a game of what if's and could have been. I do hope someone out there decides to remaster it to a playable state, but waiting over two hours to connect to a server was something I expect on a massively crowded mmo on an expansion launch day, not for this. It had everything I was looking for but you can't even play it because of server bugs years later. Tragic really. Save your time, sanity, and money and pass.