Redfall’s Jacob is way too powerful
Players picking up Redfall today might struggle to choose which character to pick when starting, but one character in particular is absolutely busted in the best way. Players have discovered that Jacob Boyer, the deadeye with an undead eye, can bypass a pretty big chunk of a whole lot of missions with his invisibility cloak.
Jacob is pegged as Redfall’s stealth character, and although Redfall is pretty light on stealth elements – there’s no backstab or stealth attack bonus – he does have one pretty big trick up his sleeve, the cloak ability. The cloak ability lets Jacob turn invisible for a short while, effectively making him unnoticeable by enemies.
While that’s good for traversing the often hostile world in peace, it can also be quite game breaking. It can only be used for a limited time, but upgrades to the ability let you use it for just long enough to do some very silly things with it.
For one, going invisible will make you entirely undetected to enemies, even if they’ve already seen you. That’s quite silly in its own right, as most other games with similar mechanics are more than willing to let enemies still attack you if they saw you before you popped the ability up.
The more absurd thing is that you can use it to skip some boss fights altogether. At the end of some missions, you can simply activate the cloak, walk right past a boss, and use extraction to finish the mission.
It’s not really clear if that’s intended behavior, but it sure is powerful, especially since some of the boss fights in Redfall can be very difficult if you’re not prepared. Being able to stealth past large groups of enemies is a huge boon too, though it becomes much less useful when playing in multiplayer, as other characters will still set off nearby enemies. You can play entirely as a group of Jacobs though…
Jacob isn’t exactly a saving grace, however. As mentioned in our Redfall review, not every character is created equal, and there are a lot of player skills that are simply useless, either in solo play as they require other players or just altogether. Jacob’s first unlocked ability lets him summon a crow that highlights nearby characters, something that is largely useless since the range is very short and you can also just use your eyes.
Bosses also got a negative mention in our review, as they tend to be “big bullet sponges that you pump all of your ammo into while strafing around an arena.” With that in mind, being able to skip some of them doesn’t sound quite so bad.
