A waste of everyone involveds time. The players, the devs, everyone. I have no clue why Arkane of Dishonored and Prey fame decided to make this hollow shell of an idea taped onto a basic early 2010s shooter with worse gunplay than whatever you can think of. This team can do so much better and they did with Prey and Prey Mooncrash phenomenal experiences worth playing - this isn't that. It's not worth your time for story, gameplay, or "loot" (it is a looter shooter.) Enemies don't work, abilities break aspects of the game or cause bugs, repetitive missions, cookie cutter open world filler, and a mission to boss structure of something like Ghost Recon Wildlands of all things. On top of that last point the map is completely barren with only fast-travel points to cut the long walk between locations. So no interesting vehicles or more notably movement options IN AN ARKANE GAME. Remember Blink from dishonored forget about it, the gloo gun from Prey, what even is that again? This is all made worse by arguably the most important staple of an Arkane game - level design. The clockwork mansion from Dishonored 2 goes in my hall of fame best levels in gaming, the space station in Prey is extremely interconnected and fun to navigate for shortcuts, and creating paths with the gloo gun. Here then comes Redfall which is; big open flat spaces with 1 or 2 enemies, if you're lucky a group of 4 to 6 (that don't work btw), average repeated houses with very crampt corridors, and show piece vampire locations which end up being corridors. Nothing here screams it was made by Arkane besides the character designs, and how full rooms and buildings can be with knick nacks and gizmos you can look at or interact with. Seeing a whale oil canister in this game was just a fundamentally sad moment and exemplifies how cursed of an experience this game is and what it isn't. Do not pay money for this game, if you use gamepass for other games don't pick this one. Supposedly this game is going to be recieving content updates and fixes. But this is not No Mans Sky there's nothing here that's salvagable or worth changing. It's a complete failure on every front I can't believe Xbox bought Bethesda (which includes Arkane) and completely looked over this game and said "yeah let's release this game". Someone in publishing and development should've steered this ship on course to something good years ago. But we're here now with this wreck.

Edit: It's come to light that Redfall was originally planned as a microtransaction filled multiplayer Arkane game due to Prey failing to meet sales expectations. During that time 70% of the people that worked on Prey in Arkane Austin left the company. Making it even more evidently clear the people who could do better had already left, and to them doing better would be not making this game at all. So it's a shame they left because I'd hoped to see more from the Prey IP but good to know there's many reasons this is not an Arkane studios best work, clearly barely even a product of that studios creative intent.