Ghost Redfall: Breakpoint - The Definitive Review

But I kinda like it?

I wrote previously that I cannot see how Arkane Austin could fuck up Redfall, and yet it seems that the studio has managed to exceed my expectations in that regard. I did feel a slight tear in the pit of my stomach as I saw the initial tweets regarding those leaked/embargo-confused early reviews. Wading through a general critical mass assigning middling scores to Redfall left an eerie sense of Deja-Vu that I could not shake. Imagine my surprise when embarking on actual play, that I discover Redfall is Arkane’s very own Ghost Recon: Breakpoint. And here’s the delicious part: I fucking loved Ghost Recon: Breakpoint.

Ubisoft’s transcendental journey with its later Ghost Recons is something I’ll go into at a later date and in considerable depth. Instead, I’ll explain a little about my lack of colossal outrage that Redfall is a bit shit. Leaving technical aspects aside, the main critiques circle around a dull core loop and poor AI. Now, I am a very specific kind of player. Particularly when it comes to open worlds: I am obsessed and utterly driven by the urge to acquire. The raw curiosity of exploration is always a hook, but looking for stuff I can use and getting hold of it is my prime source of momentum - and I can exhaust myself on remarkably mediocre worlds while undertaking this pursuit. So far, Redfall’s world does not appear to be mediocre. Generic perhaps, but interesting enough. And I am thirsty for those guns, all of them. How long this can propel me is unclear at this stage. I just offed my first underboss, so we’ve graduated to the actual game and I still want all the guns. My route for the rest of play is clear. I do whatever bare minimum shit I can get away with to keep acquiring acquisitions without having to expend effort on things like understanding stories or completing main questlines. In this respect, I am not looking for any kind of serious challenge. Redfall’s comedically farcical AI is a tactical aid for me. I want to get shooting done quickly and easily. I don’t want to dance with Elites on legendary, and I’ve already paid the orthopaedic price for braving Ninja Gaidens 1 and 2. I just want to pop melons with ease and grace, preferably from a safe distance. Sadly Redfall isn’t the best at providing all the tools for this slacker-shooter approach. Stealth indication is almost non-existent and enemy marking is from the Sniper Elite school rather than Metal Gear Solid V.

This is a more relevant reference than you might expect. Arkane has a great history of astute thievery, but Redfall seems to be stealing from the wrong games and doing it badly. Instead of MGSV and Dead Rising, it steals from Borderlands and Left for Dead, but it also does it shamefully, with exactly the kind of timid reimplementation that’s anathema to the rest of Arkane’s catalogue. Though really it’s a depressing inversion of Arkane Lyon’s talent for pillage, so it seems that a lot of Redfall’s woes lie with Austin. Now that we have to tread warily when (or if) the next Lyon project arrives, I’d level the charge that Redfall’s biggest problem is that it’s just too fucking American. It may bear the skeleton of a Canadian open-worlder, but its sources are too commonly domestic. Its painful sunk-cost fallaciousness is pure US commerce, the charmless explicitness around the baddies being vampires (surely the most exhausted and tired of all the horror archetypes) is American shlock, its borrowing of Carpenter tropes here and there as shameless dressing, instead of deep influence, is in the most American vogue of facile showboating. The game’s sense of extreme insularity and apparent ignorance of the wider co-op body, combined with the aspiration to appeal to a far wider audience is American society and its cultural imperialism combined. But the stunning aspect is how incredibly divergent it is from the rest of Arkane’s catalogue. Redfall’s state is so anomalous, so incongruent, that it practically demands a public enquiry. I wrote that “there would be little worse than seeing Arkane’s wonderfully individual vision commercially homogenised into dull mainstream fare”, and that’s nearly what’s happened here. You can see the ‘real’ Arkane as spectral mists, hiding in the gaps and behind the game’s furniture. The real tragedy is that it fails to live up to Dana Nightingale’s creed that to triumph creatively is the more noble goal, something that Redfall seems to completely ignore. It’s a chilling prospect and I have to face the possibility that Deathloop really was the grand send-off I suspected it might be. But all hope is never lost. Phoenixes can rise, Arkane Lyon must be making something. But if that follows Redfall’s dance, then holy shit; we are truly fucked. From this, there can be no saner course of action than to dive headlong into the sweet, sweet waters of conspiratorial denial.

If you really want to piss the Internet off, insist that Redfall is actually a deeply coded protest. Yes, it has the haunted quality of an attempted 2020 live service game with microtransactions stripped out. Of course it bears spiritual kinship with Fallout ‘76. Sure, the graphical style falls somewhere between Voodoo 2 tribute and gaudy mid-2000s Survival Horror, and I can totally see how it’s ‘just’ a piss-poor Borderlands in suburbia with less guns, but I desperately believe there’s a rich message here, somewhere. Perhaps it’s that platform holder strategies suck. Perhaps it’s that American AAA is so fucked, here’s a game that should suit it to a tee. Harvey Smith has made it pretty clear that the boss vampires are direct references to the 0.01% billionaire class, so let’s just pretend that the whole game is some bitter, sarcastic joke at capitalism’s expense. One can imagine the stereotypical corporate suits swanning into an Arkane meeting room and issuing edicts for co-op play and cosmetic purchases that absolutely must dominate whatever they’re currently making. Smith lapses into a gallic indignance, secretly forming La Résistance against these corpo-Vichy assholes, fulfilling the brief in the most destructive way possible. 

If that’s not to your taste, let’s go full conspiracist black-ops and demand they release the Colantonio cut that Bethesda obviously has locked in its vaults, for it was an open-world RPG so mind-blowingly incredible that it threatened to blast Skyrim, Fallout and Starfield into utter irrelevance. Unthinkable for a US publisher owned by a US platform holder to allow a half-French studio to rise to the top, MS and Bethesda instead conspired to release Redfall’s old internal beta to protect their dominance and made Arkane’s entire staff sign NDAs. I mean, it’s the only explanation that makes any sense, right? I joke, but as many have commented on Redfall, the story behind it is likely far juicier and more compelling than any the game tries to tell.

I look forward to Arkane and Bethesda and Microsoft’s response to Redfall’s reception, and await some grand uberpatch that miraculously transforms the game. Amazingly, this actually happened for Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, but I’m wise enough to know that miracles are all too rare in the modern industry. I know I should be much more disappointed that I don’t have something closer to Dinga Bakaba’s artful and passionate cuisine on my lap, but I’m not too ashamed to admit that I also love chomping through American fast food.

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