I still stand by Deathloop not being as bad as everyone thinks it is. It has its problems (namely the AI being dogshit and the short length of the game) but Redfall seems to be a dumpster fire of another type entirely from what I've seen. Deathloop is worse than their previous games by quite a bit when looked at objectively but it got a lot of negative reception here just because it had a black protagonist and black antagonist when the characters themselves were shockingly inoffensive and milquetoast (they didn't even lean into the blacksploitation angle which would have at least set the cast apart from the rest). Even if you look past all the wokery with the cast of Redfall it still looks like an unfinished mess of a game with very little to redeem it.
That's it: Deathloop was still an Arkane game. A needlessly stripped down Arkane game, with a central gimmick that Arkane themselves have already employed to better effect elsewhere, but still for all that there was enough of recognizable Arkane presence to it.
With this, what is at the very least implicit to all the takes I've seen, is that it doesn't even feel like an Arkane game. Rather, even if all the technical issues were to be ironed out, this would remain something that could very much be some by the numbers, throwaway AA co-op shooter you'd get from something under Embracer's embrace.
