Red Dead Redemption Review

At first glance, nothing about Red Dead Redemption makes me excited to play it. It's a western, likely doesn't have any new-age ideas, but, for whatever reason, I rented it, and it was great! I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Red Dead Redemption is essentially Grand Theft Auto 4: The Western. The concept, game engine and basic gameplay are pretty obviously connected to GTA4. Only difference is that instead of cars and rocket launchers, you have horses, trains, wagons and revolvers or old bolt-action rifles. Oh, and 90% of the map in the game has no civilization whatsoever, but who am I to nitpick?

Gameplay: Like GTA 4, it is a 3rd-person shooter with it's sort of convoluted sub-genre of action/adventure/etc.

There is actually a lot more to do on the side in Red Dead versus GTA 4, and it seems like the developers really went out of their way to put in side quests very regularly since traveling from point to point among endless wilderness is a huge part of the game. Side quests will constantly pop up and you can choose to complete them or totally ignore them, and you can even go out hunting animals of all sorts if you feel like it, or if you want to complete their in-game challenges. I found myself on several occasions just wandering the wilderness, hunting or looking for random missions or quests to do.

The basic mission concept is the same as GTA4 though - shoot a lot of guys, travel somewhere and watch some cut-scenes.

Presentation: Wonderful presentation. Absolutely no complaints about sound or basic visuals. Better than most games in both regards.

Theatrics: Considering I can't name a single Western movie that I regularly watch (Back to the Future 3 would be my most watched, but I've watched it maybe once in the past 5 years), I came into the game expecting to not care about the story at all simply because a typical Western story just doesn't appeal to me. But, the story and cut-scenes drew me in.

Your character is John Marston and your objective is to pay off debts to the government by taking out your former gang members. Like most GTA-style games, the story starts off a little slow and getting into your environment takes some time. But once the story takes off it starts to get rather interesting and I never once skipped a cut-scene, unless I had already seen it.

The end of the game is rather ambiguous though. I finished the "last" mission thinking "wait, that's it? No credits or anything?" and then wound up wandering off into the world and completing the game by total mistake considering there were no marks of guidance on my map or even hints as to what to do. The story is definitely unusual though.. something I would not have expected, particularly since most games have a pretty standard ending. Considering the ending, the last 10% or so of the game is actually pretty boring. They could have done a better job on hurrying up the last bit of the story since a lot of it was pretty unnecessary.

Controls: It seems like every game that has a horse-riding aspect of it has some element of very awkward controls. It's certainly not as smooth as driving a car, but Red Dead did a pretty fair job at making controls feel correct. My only complaint is how awkward driving a wagon or a carriage is. They feel like driving a super-charged semi truck down a mountain side. They're really tough to control and you'll find yourself getting stuck on rocks and trees because you can't handle your accelerating and decelerating along with your wide turning radius.

Replay Value: The replay value heavily hinges on whether you find the initial game fun. It provides for a lot of play time if you enjoy going out into the world and doing non-essential quests and tasks in the game. You can always cause trouble and chaos in multiplayer, or just find funny things to do in single player (jumping off cliffs, messing with trains, etc).

There also is a multiplayer aspect of the game, which, again, if you find the game engine fun will provide for plenty of entertainment. Most of the time GTA games don't translate particularly well to multiplayer, and it causes for a pretty segregated crowd. No harm in getting together with your buddies and rampaging around the world in free-roam though.

My Overall Rating: 9.2