Stalker, Far Cry 2, and, well, Arkane: Redfall proudly wears its most obvious influences on its bloody sleeve

Arkane has a problem. Its games, by all accounts, are great. The Dishonored series, Prey, Deathloop – they all review well. Arkane, for generations now, has been a favourite of critics and developer peers. But that acclaim and clout does not translate into sales (or player count, if you’re taking services like Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus into account). Deathloop’s sales were the lowest of any Arkane game at the time it launched on PS5, at least in the physical market. Prey fared only slightly better – and that was a multiplatform release.

Redfall, then, is in a unique position. Arriving on Xbox Game Pass, day and date, means that around 29 million people will be able to boot up the game and immerse themselves in its vampire fantasy at launch. Without asking for a £60+ buy-in, without asking players to gamble what may be their quarterly game budget on an as-yet-unproven new IP, Arkane can finally show the mainstream what it’s capable of. And Redfall, from what I’ve played so far, seems like it has what it takes to capture your imagination.

First thing’s first, the shooting feels better than Deathloop. This is something that Arkane Austin’s studio director, Harvey Smith, chatted casually to me about before the hands-on. The development team, only fairly recently, figured out how to make the various different guns – stake launchers, UV light blasters, magnums, high-calibre sniper rifles, and more – feel really, really good. Each class feels right in your hands, whether you’re fanning the hammer of a revolver or wretching the level of a rifle back before popping another headshot, this is what shooting should feel like – not the paper-thin water pistols we had in Deathloop.

Towards the end of my hands-on, I managed to unlock the Redfall equivalent of an ‘exotic’ weapon by killing some unscripted superboss that hunts you down if you slay enough notable vamps. This brute – the sort of boss you’d come across in a later Resi – took a lot of beating, but by cycling through weapons, managing the cooldowns of my abilities, and getting off one last cheeky headshot before I bled out, I managed to come out on top. My reward? An assault rifle not dissimilar to Destiny’s ‘Bad Juju’, all decked out in occult symbols and skulls and bones.

It was a taster of the risk/reward Redfall seems to revolve around. I didn’t play the story, I explored. And by exploring, I killed named vampire heroes and some of the more reputable ghouls of the city. My reward? The vampire gods tried to eliminate me with one of their gnarlier goons, but I won. And I got a killer gun for it – a gun that felt incredible in the hands, and could take down even the most stubborn undead bastard with a few rounds in the head.

And that’s important, because in Redfall you are underpowered. This game is hard, and that’s where I see the Stalker influence coming through. Your enemies are faster than you, stronger than you, louder than you and – unless you play well – they’re probably smarter than you, too. And you can’t just shoot them. The game encourages high-paced, risky gameplay by making you execute enemies once their health reaches zero. If you don’t get there in time, they come back to life, and you need to spend more precious ability points and ammo to finish them off. Firing stakes into their hearts, or using a weapon with a stake attached at melee range, will do the job. But these finishers add another level of on-the-fly decision-making into the mix. And it feels incredible to be in the midst of this bloody chaos, clinging to life and diving from body to body and driving stakes through hearts.

You probably won’t be able to take all the vampires on at once. So you need to plan. There are four main characters in the game: Jacob, the long-range specialist with a smack-talking crow friend; Devinder ‘Dev’ Crousley, a cryptozoologist and tinkerer; Remi De La Rosa, a robotics engineer with a smart lil’ AI pal; and Layla Ellison, a biomedical professional with telekinetic powers. Given that this is an Arcane game, each of these characters has a suite of very specific powers that you’ll need to leverage in order to cut a path through the vamps.

Emptying the map and killing everything isn’t the play here. You can’t. You’ll get overrun. Instead (like in the Far Cry games), you need to play to the objective. Need to make it to a big mansion in order to empty it out and kill the mad scientist residing inside? If you’re playing as Jacob, you’ll need to use your crow to spot the enemies acting as lookouts, snipe the heads off the sentries, and cloak yourself to sneak in. Getting into a 5v1 fight isn’t going to go well for you, even if you activate your special move and auto-pop headshots on all of the undead rushing you.

Playing as Remi? Your lil’ robo-pal, Bribón (that’s ‘rascal’ in Spanish) will be your eyes and ears. It acts as a decoy that can draw fire and allow you to get into better position and, say, nuke a vamp with a massive UV cannon, petrifying it before you come in and shatter it with melee. Alternatively, send the rascal into a mob, and sneak up behind vamps to assassinate them.

I didn’t get to play co-op, but this is where Redfall is really going to shine. Even the two characters outlined above will have wonderful synergy – using Bribón to draw attention with Remi, cloaking as Jacob, and orchestrating a dual assassination sweep on a group? Catnip! – and Smith admitted in the preview preamble that, currently, ‘testers are figuring synergies out we hadn’t even considered’. That’s where the meat of the game is going to be for lots of players – think about all those wild Dishonored runs you’ve seen, and imagine that chaos amplified multiple times over.

I think Redfall is Arkane’s attempt at appealing to a larger crowd. Whilst echoes of Dishonored and Deathloop run rampant through the design, this is not an immersive sim. It’s closer to Left 4 Dead, honestly. Arkane has leant into what it’s really, really good at – the hero of this game is the eponymous coastal town, and the short stories imbued into its varied locations are already calling to me, after just a few hours of play. The varied, satisfying weapons and the promise of a deep and complex story adds to the mainstream appeal, and by stripping back some of the systems that made previous titles intimidating and unwelcoming to some, Arkane could finally be onto a real mainstream winner.

Redfall launches on May 2 for PC, Xbox, and Game Pass.