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Review: Red Dead Redemption

Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3. Developed by Rock Star San Diego. Published by Rock Star

Many years in the making, this sorta-sequel to Red Dead Revolver, offers the industry to take another crack at making the definitive western-based game. I don’t know if this is that game.

The original game was started off by Capcom before Rock Star/Take 2 tool over publishing duties. It was a relatively linear third-person shooter that was a reasonably successful game at retail, competing against a few disappointing western games such as Dead Man’s Hand and Gun (which seems like the best game to compare RDR to).

You play as John Marston, a former outlaw roped by unscrupulous government agents into hunting down his former gang members. Along the the way you take on missions for various people- sometimes on opposing factions, engage in a number of diversions and take your cousin Roman to a strip club.

The theme of this review will be similarities between this game and GTAIV. Considering GTA uses the Rage engine developed for this game, and considering that GTA is Rock Star and Take 2’s major source of income, it’s not surprising that we’re seeing such a similar game.

So you can walk around with the lft analog stick, press A to run, tap A repeatedly to sprint (despite the fact you have an ANALOG stick to control movement. You can also ride a horse and move the horse by pressing… well, you can guess, can’t you? You can jump and climb but these actions are best used occasionally.

Of course, this being a western, it’s all about guns. You have access to pistols, rifles, shotguns, knives, bombs, a lasso and of course, your fists. GTA has never gotten the hang of shooting in third-person mode without locking on to targets. Here, it has been greatly simplified, so much so that it’s inordinately easy to pull the left trigger to zoom in on the nearest foe and shoot with the right trigger. Perhaps, too easy.

To get around, you have a horse, who thankfully will appear whenever you whistle for it. Since so much of the game’s exposition is relayed to you while you’re travelling to somewhere new with someone, holding down A will more or less put you on autopilot so you can just sit back and marvel at how much you don’t want to listen to the conversation. Occasionally, the game gives you the option to skip the journey.

Missions consist of the usual “kill this person and his henchmen” though often you’re given the chance to use your cowboy skills with a rope and hog tie the target and carry him on your horse. Then there are numerous missions where you escort a train, and others where you ride shotgun on a carriage. And then a fair few on rails sequences where you’re manning a gatling gun. Truth be told, they get a bit stale as the game wears on since so many seem cut and paste.

Some missions involve you performing actual cowboy work such as herding cattle and breaking in wild horses. These are so much fun that I intend on shooting any stray cattle or horses if ever come across them in real life. The kicker is some of these are not optional and you need to do these to progress. And there’s another kicker, you have to do some of this right at the end of the game before you can undertake the final mission.

This being an open world game, there needs to be a plethora of side missions to keep you busy and in this regard, Rock Star does not disappoint. Well, it doesn’t disappoint in terms on numbers of side missions, but it might in terms of how much fun they are for anyone not having OCD tendencies. You can collect herbs, hunt and skin animals, herd cattle, find missing people, stop robbers and cattle rustlers, break horses, and test the limits of your patience.
The game lets you save more or less anywhere apart from someone else’s settlement and a road by setting up a campsite. Campsites also give you access to fast travel to anywhere you’ve been before, but at some point you can also warp to a waypoint. This is a little sluggish since you select the campsite, wait for a nice animation of Marston kneeling down by the campfire, then select fast travel, then your destination, then watch Marston put out the fire before you go to a loading screen. Not for this game, the instantly changing HUD of, say, Mass Effect or Gun.

The game’s presentation is top notch with the only minor niggle being some sometimes very obvious pop-in (something that many open world games suffer from). The art style is appealing and nicely rendered and animations are detailed as you would expect from a game utilising Euphoria for it’s animations. Of course, you often have to wait for these animations to do their thang so while that takes away some immediacy to your actions, it does offer a level of polish not seen this side of a cadet review.

The sound is noteworthy. Voice acting, like most Rock Star games, is top notch and feature some of the Houser twins cynical wit. Something to note is the lack of familiar voices (no Keith David or Nolan North) which sometimes pull you out of the game. Music is fantastic, evoking the west and the best of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores without being a slave to the era *cough* folk rock *cough*

So it’s mostly fun, then again, I avoided almost every side mission where possible and skipped the cutscenes. “Why would you do that? They’re beautiful,” you say. Well, they are paced to show off the animation, meaning they’re mostly dull (the ones I sat through anyway). I find that in GTA games, knowing the motivations of the characters is moot since   many of you allies will eventually be your enemies. And then there are the interminable conversations when you travel with someone. These are mostly unskippable and while they fill in the details for skippers like me, they still just remind you that your are watching a cinematic without any editing. Checkpoints are mostly well spaced and seem a lot less punitive than GTA, so there’s one major improvement on the template. You can be a rogue or a good guy, but as it’s not really going to affect the story or more than a few of your character’s stats, it’s up to you how douche you go.

I didn’t touch multiplayer since it seems to be a bit unfocused and chaotic (not in a good way) for my liking (as in GTAIV), but there’s a decent amount of single-player fun to be had. How much fun is down to your enjoyment of the side missions on offer here- bounty and stranger missions aside, are close to Animal Crossing type mundanity.

Worth the praise it’s received? No. Good? Yes? Worth playing? Probably. you have to enjoy cutscenes and have some patience as there is not the ability to cause as much mayhem as in GTA. If tooling around doing nothing is your thing, you might find this world to be a little lacklustre.

Controller1.com Rating 2/3