IGN gave Redfall a 6/10. Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin 12 months later.
The Original Review
“Redfall is rough around the edges and clearly unfinished in places, but its co-op fundamentals offer glimpses of something worthwhile underneath the performance problems.”
Let's establish the commercial context. Microsoft is gaming journalism's single largest advertising client. Xbox Game Pass promotional integration, hardware review units, exclusive preview access, sponsored editorial content across YouTube and print — the relationship is structural, not incidental. Against this, examine the score: a 6/10 for a game whose enemy AI would stand completely still waiting to be shot, whose frame rate on Series X averaged in the high twenties, and whose online co-op — the entire pitch, the entire marketing campaign, the entire reason this game exists — was functionally broken at launch. The 6/10 is IGN saying 'we noticed the problems' in the most commercially safe phrasing available to them.
The review went live on embargo day, which for Redfall was also launch day, which means the reviewer's verified playtime was identical to anyone who preordered. Study the language: 'rough around the edges,' 'clearly unfinished in places,' 'glimpses of something worthwhile.' This is not criticism. This is a managed landing. The aerospace industry has a phrase for this: controlled descent. You're still falling — you're just falling at a rate that keeps all parties involved legally comfortable. One critical sentence every two paragraphs. Score lands at 6. Everyone goes home.
The Xbox exclusive scoring distribution at IGN tells the story more clearly than any individual review. In the Microsoft era: Halo Infinite campaign, 8. Redfall, 6. Forza Motorsport reboot, 7. Starfield, 7. The range is 6 to 8. The floor never breaks below 6 for a first-party Microsoft title regardless of audience reception. Audience scores on the same titles average 1.8 points lower across the catalogue. That is not a difference of critical taste. That is a statistical artifact of a revenue relationship that nobody at IGN is being paid to acknowledge.
Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin in May 2024 — one year and five days after Redfall launched. The studio that made Prey, that helped define the immersive sim genre alongside Looking Glass and Irrational Games, was dissolved to trim a Microsoft Gaming spreadsheet. IGN's 6/10 remains indexed, search-optimized, and outranks the studio closure announcement in Google results for 'Redfall review.' The managed landing is permanent. The studio is not. Sponsored by the truth.
