I had a pretty good time with Redfall, which I think for a precious moment led to me being the most mocked and reviled games journo on the internet (mum, dad,I’ve made it!). As explained inmy review follow-up, quite a few things could’ve contributed to why I had such a different experience to most other people, not least freakishly good performance. But I did also play through the entirety of the game single-player as hands-down the best character in the game; not the character himself—ol’ Davinder was a bit grating with his posh-boy English accent—but specifically one of the gadgets he wields: the translocator.
The translocation concept is nothing new in games. Essentially, it’s a teleporter between two locations. Relatively recent games like Overwatch and Returnal feature stationary ones, which are effectively teleport beacons sitting around on the levels, but Redfall is the first time I’d used a handheld one in a game inages. It’s really good fun, unlocking your mobility in a big way by letting you shoot a little disc a good long distance, then teleport to it when it lands; I used it to sneak into the top floors of spooky houses, to insta-teleport myself hundreds of feet down to the bottom of a cliff, and to get up onto rooftops from where I could get oversight on an area and pick off enemies unseen. There’s something incredibly liberating about this little tool.
Davinder’s Translocator in Redfall is a big part of why I had a good time in Redfall, giving my experience some hint of that verticality and hyper-mobility that I enjoyed so much in games like Dishonored and Deathloop. Should you, despite everything, be tempted to try Redfall,do it in single-player, and do it as Davinder.
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But in what could be seen as a bit of creative paucity from Arkane, the translocator in Redfall is pretty much a straight rip from a way,wayolder game. The identically named translocator first featured in Unreal Tournament back in 1999 (though yours truly first got his hands on it in Unreal Tournament 2004). And in testament to just how great a piece of gadget design it is, the Translocator basically remained unchanged across four Unreal Tournament games. Redfall pretty much kept it intact exactly as it was too—complete with the little trail so you could track its flight. The only thing Redfall changed is that it sticks around a bit after landing, allowing you and teammates to travel back and forth between where the translocator lands and where you fired it from.
But Redfall’s take is actually inferior to the original in some ways. Crucially, the original Translocator not only let you get to hard-to-reach places, but it was actually a super-efficient mobility tool unto itself. See, unlike Redfall, in Unreal Tournament you didn’t need to wait for the translocator disc to land before using it, so you could insta-beam yourself to it while it was in mid-flight.
On the legendary Facing Worlds map, I remember going to the top of one of those vertiginous towers, firing the translocator across the abyss towards the enemy base, then throwing myself off the tower Ezio-style before beaming myself to the disc just as I was hurtling towards the ground. I’d then keep firing the translocator while mid-air, effectively bunny-hoppingthrough the airacross the map. Wild times!
The UT translocator could also save you from a certain death. There were a lot of big drops in that game, some of which opened out into deadly cosmic chasms, but using the translocator you could defy gravity and translocate yourself back to safety as you were falling. It was also great for bamboozling enemies; a classic trick in Capture The Flag was that when two teams were running at each other, you’d simply fire it over the enemy team’s head to either avoid confrontation altogether or attack them from behind. Of course, the other team would be doing the same, making for some intense and strange skirmishes with the combatants disappearing and reappearing all over the place.
The translocator was—and still is—the epitome of video game playfulness, and is a big part of the reason why I fell into the Unreal Tournament rather than the Quake 3: Arena camp back in the day. It made every part of a level’s geometry felt accessible, and made it feel like you were screwing with the game’s design even though the maps were meticulously dotted with sneaky ledges that were only accessible by translocator. Those guys at Epic knew what they were doing!
It looks likeUnreal Tournament’s best days may be behind it, and that’s a damn shame, but every now and then I still like to go back to its best maps in single-player and blast away some hapless AI enemies while pissing around with the translocator—a gadget that rubs shoulders with the Portal Gun as one of the best in gaming.
