Redfall - It Sucks 

When even Jon can't be positive about a game, something has gone very wrong

Jon normally: "This game is _flawed,_ but these flaws make it very _interesting,_ and I find it rather enjoyable at certain points!" Jon here: "I feel nothing but hatred, and once I am finished you will feel nothing at all."

Crouching’s not broken. They’ve just inherited Jon’s perception stats.

31:50 - Well, you're at the crash site, the game basically warned you.

When Many A True Nerd says your game sucks you know you fucked up.

As a game developer I've always found Jon's ability to find something good, even in a somewhat bad game, very valuable and encouraging. This may be the first time ever that I've seen him just say 'it's awful, nothing more'. Shame since I was looking forward to another Arcane game...

Can already tell from the thumbnail that jon is going to have some very strong feelings

I’ve actually never seen Jon get unironically angry I mean holy shit, that outro was full of hatred

Really tragic how this turned out, since like you said, Arkane normally makes some real bangers.

A clear concise ending if there ever was one. We don't see brutal Jon often, but when we do you know you done fucked up.

I knew that Arkane was split into multiple studios, and looking it up, this is indeed made by their secondary studio, Arkane Austin. Whose last production was... Prey, an actually good game. Yeah, I have no idea what happened. First thought is that key personnel left/got fired/got moved around; as we've seen in other companies, the studio name only matters so much if all the people who made the Great Games left.

I burst out laughing when that guy walked up to you behind the log and then he just looked up to the sky. Must have been the wind that shot his friend in the face.

This is one of the best MATN pun titles of all time but it's so brutal at the same time 😭

You know what could wash the bad taste away? Vampire:the masquerade!

The sincerity of Jon's descent from trepidation to disappointment to rage was really appealing. I'm amazed how even if you ignore all the bugs, the game loop here is so lifeless and boring. It reeks of corporate bosses demanding a Destiny clone a day late and a dollar short after the trend was already dead and bankrupt.

Well damn, this title alone tells me everything. We're seeing the return of a Jon we haven't seen since the XIII demasters

I find the generic "prescription pills" hilarious. Yes, let the protagonist eat opioids and Plan B whenever they are bleeding, that'll help :D

This has to be another Anthem situation, where the project was in such severe development hell that the actual game ended up being slapped together in the last 12-18 months of development.

So these vampires aren’t just out to suck your blood, they’re out to suck all the joy out of your gaming experience as well.

When Jon can’t even be bothered to use a thumbnail of the game, you know it’s a game he feels very strongly about.

Apart from the obvious bugs, there’s something uncanny about graphics here, it’s like shaders took a day off

AA and AAA developers are rapidly unlearning how to make games. I see the plague of "every thing that used to be a button press, now requires you to hold the button for no good reason" continues to spread.

The positivity even in regard to flawed games is one of the things I really like about this channel but I'm glad to see there are limits on that when there need to be

The NPC head turning is reminding me of a weeping angel moment I had in Skyrim. There was a modded house that had a room with multiple mannequins in it. For those who have never modded Skyrim, mannequins in that game are NPCs frozen into place with a script in the game, but sometimes it doesn't take immediately upon entering a room which can give you mannequins in places they shouldn't be. In this instance, four of them were by the door and turned to look at me as I entered before the script froze them in place.

This video made me go back and watch Jon's Binary Domain video. I go back to that VOD sometimes (It's apparently 9 COCKING YEARS OLD now) for the positive vibes. That one was out of Jon's wheelhouse and Jon went into that one with a negative mindset. Halfway through, he admits he picked it up expecting it to be bad, and planned to make a video mocking it for how bad it was. So the video starts out like that, Jon trying to make a comedic mockument. But the game turns him around and he ends up massively enjoying it. By the end of it, he's mentioning games like RE4 and Mass Effect in his praise for Binary Domain, that's how much he was having fun with a game he expected to hate.

It's so rare for Jon to highlight the negative over positive in his reviews. The ones he does, like this, tend to deserve it or are a studio that should know how to manage a game. May still try this one once patched.

The moment the games dialogue was presented my heart sank. The dialogue is not human to human speech nor internal dialogue, it's a twitter feed 🤦‍♀

This... this is the kind of thing I expect to see from one of those games that are eternally in early access on steam and never see a release... not from an actual studio... What the hell happened on the development end to make this the end product?

The mention of Arkane really set my expectations high, considering they'd had brilliant title after brilliant title beforehand. I think it's safe to say the change in management at Arkane in late 2021 has had some significant effects

Your ending was unique, beautiful, and worked perfectly.

Thank you Jon for pointing problems out as you played. It is a great help for people like me trying to decide if I want to invest time and money into a game.

God damn! First time in a long time I see Jon`s competent gunplay, the use of tactics, no panic, consistent headshots, timely use of acting skills. And in what game? In this mess?! But still, good job, Jon, you endured this shitshow of a title.

I’ve never seen Jon so cynical about a game; he even had a tilted appreciation for Fallout 76.

15:05 I love that if you shoot while sprinting, the gun fires before you point it at the enemy

For that final fight I'm pretty sure several of the enemies died by walking into the fire and burned to death

Had the tool tips for the firehouse all load after the vampire fight, then had two vampires in one of houses that couldn't be interacted with or acknowledge me at all.

9:50 "This is actually the most technically broken game I've played since, and I don't say this lightly, XIII remastered!" Keep in mind, between playing XIII remastered and this, Jon finished the entirety of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

At 14:22 it kinda looks like for a split second you could loot the item despite the safe being locked.

Arkane, are you feeling alright? I feel like this is them doing a "blink twice if someone has a gun to your head" thing

I'm surprised that Jon is complaining about not seeing enemies with the scope when windows won't appear until you're in the yard.

Its a shame the game looks like the team took the "Minimum Viable Product" approach too far, because that whole deal with the sea being pushed back (thus solving vampires' issues with running water around an island) suggests there were some clever ideas for worldbuilding at some point.

Congrats to Redfall, it's not easy for a game to outright offend Jon

Jon is one of the kinder content creators. So this pasting is a serious criticism.

Right at the end of the video, I did look at the time remaining and think "Blimey Jon's going to have to wrap this up quickly" and then of course he did, just not in the way I was expecting.

Hollow Man Cultist has the same perception level as Jon.

Why did I keep thinking to myself "This looks like an unfinished beta version of Fallout 4 with vampires." Also, when you hit an explosive canister next to someone's foot, and their healthbar doesn't move but they DO start taking 12 burning damage... game of the year that one.

I'm not sure what the bigger joke is, the fact that this game got released in this state, or the fact that it costs $70.

0:45 There's no such thing as brand loyalty anymore - not in the video game industry, at least. You would have said the same thing about Bioware, but then Andromeda happened. You would have said the same thing about CDPR, but then CP2077 happened. It hasn't been safe to make any assumptions about the quality of a video game based on its developer or publisher for many years now.

Always a good sign when a game has you saying 'Maybe the game proper will be better', inside the first 3 minutes

Damn, that outro. I don't think anything else I have seen has hammered home the state of Redfall anywhere near as well.

"There's no bullet holes! It's 2023!" Okay, maybe this is my memory going a bit fuzzy, but I remember GoldenEye for the N64 having bullet holes. They were very obviously 'decals' and not anything on the actual environment, but there was a mark...

The glimmer on those windows is like a visual metaphor for the lack of care this game had.

This genuinely feels like Arkane's take on Fallout 76 but they gave up half way.

*No Outro* = most devastating review imaginable

14:22 there was about 2 frames where you could have picked up the assault rifle without having to have unlocked the door. Outstanding looting mechanics.

I have never laughed so hard at one of your title puns, so true

I think that one cultist at the beginning was fully aware he was there but was hoping hed live if he said he didn't see anyone. Thats why he was desperately trying to look away from you

I remember the backlash on Cyberpunk 2077 (which, while I played on PS4 I didn't have any big issues with) and yet I see nearly no comments where this game is compared to it... Also goes to show for me for much of a repair CDPR did to get Cyberpunk into being an actually lovely game. Granted, it should have been from the getgo, but the question is: what will happen to this game, will it be a Cyberpunk/No Man Sky redeption story, or will it be an Anthem story.

It's interesting to listen to Jon lose enthusiasm as he plays the game.

Something I've learnt over the years is that no matter how much you liked all a studios previous work, never assume that every game they make will be great or to your liking, because when you set that bar of expectation and it's not met the you'll always be disappointed. And I know that's kind of pessimistic but everyone makes mistakes or will make things that you are not intersted in, unfortunately this game was the former rather than the latter.

Me: Oh, there's a stake at the end of the shotgun! That's nice. Jon: [being hit woth Negative Perception Curse] Where's a stake weapin? I need a stake weapon! Please Jon - never change. Never, ever change.

One thing I noticed while watching, did the town of Redfall mandated all the vehicles to have their own license plates for all their vehicles (and even their public service vehicles) instead of the Mass. state license plates?

When Jon isn’t even candy coating the title very much, you know that it isn’t a good game

First time I played this game, I joined a friend's game so we could start from scratch. I had his footage in a Discord stream, and he could see mine too. His cutscene was 10 seconds ahead of mine, straight off the bat. Normally not a problem, but the cutscene leads into an in game cutscene which ends with your character slowly getting up. So for 10 seconds my friend was able to move around...and then suddenly was forced back onto the floor and had to watch the slowly getting up animation again when my screen caught up. We carry on and he finds a gun in an abandoned car. I don't find a gun, just bullets. I assume loot isn't unique, it's just scattered around for anyone to find. We look around for a gun and can't find one, so we carry on. Maybe an enemy will drop one. My friend kills an enemy, so I run over, see a gun on the floor and can't pick it up. I watch it fade out of existence. He points to a dead body on a shipping container and I realise...I cannot see the shipping container on my screen. Half the level's objects have not loaded in my session. He jumps on the box and floats in the air in my perspective. I vibrate against nothing if I try to go through as the game tries to reconcile "There's nothing here" with "There's supposed to be a box here" We carry on into the fire house, I still don't have a gun. The door upstairs where the survivors are is not there for me, so we hear people calling out of a room I can physically see is completely empty and that I cannot enter. Into the basement and my friend finds a stake gun on the floor. It's not there for me. Nor is the blood stain next to it. My friend kills the vampire that was eating a dude. The dude isn't on screen for me, and neither is the blood stain below him. We restart the session. I load up into the recreation room on the ground floor of the fire house with nothing in it. Just three bare walls, a bare floor and a bare ceiling. And get this, not even the LIGHTING had loaded in the firehouse. Pitch dark unless I used my torch. Absolutely stunning and bloody hilarious. I had a ridiculous amount of ammo, but not a single weapon. Half the containers my friend could look through didn't even exist for me. Stunning game.

This feels like a game that even the developers didn’t want to Make.

1) I love the thumbnail for this video. 2) From what I've read about this game that is the perfect video title.

I'm really sad to see this game come out like this

Shame to hear that! Your prey video is what originally got me into arkane games

If Arkane can crap the bed this hard, this REALLY does not fill me with hope for Starfield... Dishonored 1 is one of my favorite games of all time, Dishonored 2, while not as tight as the original, is still one of the best stealth action games I have ever played, and Prey is a masterpiece. Like you said, how the hell did this happen?

Even the shotgun looks like a Prey reskin. Instead of golden etchings, they're a glowy turquoise.

Oh look, it’s Back4Blood vampire edition! Also I think this is the first MATN video that has a thumbnail that’s not something game related art for the game he’s playing.

"needs lockpick" "breaks window and jumps in" my god.

Going through this game is the equivalent of a character from a horror movie entering a house to escape the killer, but finding the bodies of all their friends one after another, but the bodies are bugs and poor gameplay elements.

There was me, thinking the title was ironic and contextual... but nope, this not a game i look to play :( Thank you MaTN for playtesting it so exhaustively for us!

I love Jon's negative reviews of games Also, this game exemplifies exactly why we used to separate skills, attributes, and perks in the Fallout 3/NV days. "+X to whatever" without some kind of unique theme is not a perk. It's a skill increase.

I actually saw a stream on the release day where the enemies literally *did not spawn in* 😂 after the first boat area,they were just non-existent and they pretty much had free reign in the game. They noticed something was wrong and had to go to the main menu and reload for any enemies to show because they noticed it was showing "enemy is here" on the map, but no enemies were there 🤦🏾‍♀️ It's a serious bug that could be abused in the game (or future games if they do things the same way). I really had high hopes for the game because it sounded fun and lol on "You will never see the sun again" because that is the first thing I noticed 😂😂😂 so many things wrong sigh.

Good to know we're back to pushing out games that are still in late alpha.

Hey if you did not see that in some sinks including the one in the fire station the water mesh they put to appear is misplaced so the water is jutting out of the sink. Truly a master class in a rushed title that QA should feel proud to have tested.

That sounds like a candidate for a refund xD Recording this can't have taken too long and Jon should leave a review for it with this video linked in. It's also been slammed in the steam reviews to the point where it's not even in my recommended feed, I had to search for it to verify if this is even ON steam... no ads for it anywhere, unlike Epic, where this trash has a spot on the feature bar ^^

You really need to do a TimeSplitter serie! They're such nice games, better than the 2023 standard it seems!

3:45 Enemy perception level: Jon

dont forget the start of a game is almost always the most polish part of a game

6:20 this "spoiler by menu" stuff that modern games do baffles me. "you are about to meet your first vampire. TEXT WALL." no suspense, tension, buildup, just training wheel rails. "and here's a picture of it so you don't get scared later." it reminds me of that part in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy when the narrator was like 'ahead of time I just want you to know the characters are about to be in a dangerous situation, but trust me that they will be fine, so no need to worry." i HATE "spoiler by menu" and this is a cardinal gamedev sin to me.

You've already beat my record. First enemy off the boat glitched and became unkillable. Seems like I missed all the fun bugs.

I get that development for cross platform games is tough because there are so many different hardware combinations on PCs that are impossible to playtest on a reasonable budget. But I hope there’s some kind of improvement to this “release broke and fix in 6 months” approach. These super buggy releases have made me so skeptical that I don’t look forward to any game anymore out of fear of exactly this.

This is what happens when the board of executives demand a multiplayer game from a singleplayer studio. See: Fallout 76

"This is Redfall, it's unoriginal, ugly and broken. Bye" is (not undeservingly, mind you) cold, but it sounds even more cold from Jon

I love how Jon shoots a car and it explodes (which is NOT a thing that really happens) killing people several feet away and he calls it underwhelming. Even if the gas tank DID explode on a car it would probably not kill anyone not IN or touching the car. Jon has played too much fallout with nuclear cars methinks.

Well if those oblivious searching for you question marks don't become meme fuel, I don't know how to predict memes. Also I don't know how to predict memes. 😅

I still cant believe that Arkane made an open world game with superpowered vampires with in their own socital heirarchy, in a world where theres a cult worshipping the vampires and an army on the side of humanity and somehow they decided to have you play as some generic "look at how much personality these characters have" type characters with guns. Superpowered Vampires. But you play. As guy/girl with gun. Under the old Arkane, this wouldve been the Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 we deserved.

The glitches in this game are extra hard to swallow after watching Psych Odyssey and seeing thr love, passion, and care put into that game. Red fall seems to clearly be a product of crunch

I almost expected Jon to call this redfail

I think we should send somebody out to check Arcanes offices. They might have massive amounts of lead in their water. That is the only way I could explain that game

Never even heard of this game, but looks like I will stear clear. 😢 Also Jon's ending was perfect.

6:12 "They cut the power on us, we've got wounded. In here." That pause and tone shift between "wounded" and "in" is really jarring. Edit: lol, love it when the game is so offensively bad and broken that Jon can't be bothered to tack on the outro.

I can't have been the only one who thought they were having a Mandela moment when John said three Dishonoured games.

The perfect blend between Arkane ingenuity and a Bethesda open world, the result; Dishonored with a tonne of bugs.

8:31 "Vulernable"

The most literal pun I've seen in a long time. It truly does suck with things that suck. At least from what I've seen as I don't plan to touch this with a 10 foot pole. Thank you for suffering for us, this was a joy to watch, though you also have my sympathy.

Well, at least we're going to get a great Dunky video out of Redfall.