Red Sky Island is Arkane's new work. As an open-world FPS game that is not uncommon, this name makes it carry too much anticipation. I was lucky enough to experience the game in advance and preview it on the occasion of the game's release.
Hongxia Island丨REDFALL
Developer: Arkane Austin
Publisher: Bethesda
Release date: May 2, 2023
Platform: XSX丨S (XGP), PC
Attributes: FPS, Online Cooperation
※This review is based on PC/Steam
It should be noted that although I got the game early, my experience was not complete. PC betas require online authentication, and unstable environments often lead to kickouts, disconnections, or crashes. At the same time, due to objective reasons, I lacked an online partner, so I played the whole process alone. Of course, this game is single-player, and it didn't cut off my trip.
If you were to summarize the game with first impressions, I think it should be the kind of game that is attractive in concept but does not make you feel strange. The clip from the opening scene to entering the base is what makes me curious, you don't know what happened to bring the surrounding waves to a halt. This was an introduction that piqued my interest. But when you get down to business, you'll find that it doesn't matter.
After a series of battles and entering the fire station (base), the game officially begins. It uses a relatively standard open-world environment design: your base is at point A, which is used as a radiant range, explore the surrounding crypts and abandoned houses, constantly light up landmarks in new areas, and fight encounters between streets and alleys to defeat enemies to get better equipment.
It's a commonplace, but perfect design for gameplay. It therefore has the distinguishing feature of games of its kind: dry fun. You know exactly what you're going to do and get satisfaction from a straight goal. Whether you're exploring the map, picking up trash or brushing gear, it's all on the table in the briefing room from the moment you enter the base.
The process may not be as rich as imagined. You can see that it has a list of main quests and NPCs that deliver side quests that will take you around the various areas. But the mission objective itself is somewhat single, almost oscillating between killing monsters or running errands. Several main quests were to go to specific locations to pick up items and put them back, which made me feel like an MMORPG.
Of course, based on the open world format, the game itself does not limit how you can play. For the characters, there's an intuitive upgrade/growth tree, scattered strongholds on the map, and most of the houses that can be picked up to pick locks, so it's enough to pick up the rags.
The decisive difference at the combat level is whether the opponent is a vampire or a human, and the enemies in the game are mainly divided into these two, and the former is the specialty. Vampire dark sky is everywhere, sometimes you pass a quiet street with a dark shadow floating in the sky, that is also a guy that can be provoked. Most vampires have the ability to teleport, and if you touch him, he will instantly come to you and danger will come.
This game has a special move to deal with vampires: inserting a wooden stake. All vampires need to rush over and stick a stake when they are beaten to death, otherwise the other party will be revived. This is not a consumable skill, but a passive ability that the weapon has through modification. This design speeds up the pace of combat, adding a process that requires risking your way up between pouring bullets, leaving you to weigh the pros and cons.
There is another type of weapon in the game that plays the role of long-range stake, which is simply called "stake launcher". The sheer power of this type of weapon makes me laugh and cry, in the medium term I used a level 7 golden sniper headshot to damage more than 4,000, and the white stake transmitter casually hit more than 3,000, although the magazine capacity is its short board, but it does not prevent it from becoming a big move, and even makes vampires no longer terrible.
Since the design of this action system is relatively simple, there are no displacement skills such as retreat step and Dash, so the way to confront vampires is also more hardcore (that is, go faster). And once you master the attack rules of vampires, whether it is an ordinary Wu Ke or an elite monster like a thunderstorm demon, most of the time as long as you play well with the two-person turn, which also shows that the AI of the enemy in this work is not very sharp.
Compared to vampires, the human part of the battle is lackluster. AI is also a bottleneck for combat fun, and many times as long as you don't rush into the other person's face, the other party doesn't know what's going on. For example, the character I use is Jacob, a sniper, hiding far away to snipe, and then the other person stupidly trotts towards me one by one (presumably to run within the range of the attack), and I calmly kill them one by one.
It is very strange that there seems to be no assassination animation in this work, and lo and behold, crouching behind the other party's back, at most it is a headshot or a punch to death. So crouching, which is supposed to be an important function, is often overlooked in my process, and it's much more efficient to just dry it.
The ladder of combat difficulty is highly correlated with the quality of the weapon, which is often the joy of "brushing". However, the process of this game is not long, and the map is clearly divided into two parts, which limits the need for some "brushing". On the other hand, the randomness of the weapon's high quality seems to be too strong, and I have been getting a golden sniper rifle since a very early age, and I never bothered with weapons without exploring my fists and feet.
It's also hard to evaluate the balance of the weapons, which has to do with the fact that I use sniper characters in single-player mode. In most of the scenes, I had to use preemptive means to snipe the peripheral characters, and because the enemy had limited AI, I was able to keep succeeding and trying again and again. However, I still see the characteristics of various firearms, and this game does not set a universal template for all kinds of weapons, but sets up many branches under each category. For example, I got a strange pistol in the middle of the term, and the trajectory felt like a water gun; There are also shotguns that shoot one shot at a time like a hand cannon, and it is very refreshing to use my stealth skills to hide next to enemies and take a look at my head. From this point of view, it is interesting to experience the differences between various firearms.
The richness of weapon form should also be the catalyst for multiplayer mode. The four protagonists of this game have distinct characteristics, each with two basic skills and a big move, which can be further enhanced by talent. The Jacob's skills I use are Scan and Stealth, both of which are very powerful, especially the latter, which can be used in combat to turn the offensive; Jacob's big move is also too strong in my opinion, summoning a large sniper like an automatic rifle, and frantically shooting enemies with extremely high damage, even elite monsters can't bear it. I don't know if the other three characters are so exaggerated, but obviously they will be their own talents.
As I played, I thought of scenarios that would make co-op useful, such as attacking a vampire's lair, where there are all kinds of weird elite monsters, and it would be nice if someone could help me control enemies or provide blood-added buffs. However, the process mentioned above is still inevitable here, as an online game built in an open world environment, its process is obviously not long enough, and the content is relatively not rich enough.
Overall, "Hongxia Island" is not as a huge island with no end in sight, and the filling is less delicate. After more than ten hours of dangling, it's still a relatively standard equilateral pentagon game as I initially remembered, which is a bit biased to describe as bad, but it shouldn't raise expectations too high.