Vitals
Game: Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Games
Release: Available Now
Platform: XBox 360, PlayStation 3
I suppose I should start out by confessing that I had to invoke the Twelve-Hour rule on Red Dead Redemption. The Twelve-Hour Rule absolves me as a reviewer (and a gamer, first and foremost) from having to play more than twelve hours of a game before passing judgement on both its overall quality, and deciding whether or not to recommend it to you, my fellow gamers. And yes, in case you were wondering, I did in fact make up the Twelve-Hour Rule. Now, on to the game.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Red Dead Redemption throws you into an dusty world at the turn of the century as an enigmatic bounty-hunter type with a shadowy past and a chip on his shoulder. Yeah, I thought so. This doesn’t make for the most compelling story in the world and all the usual cowboy cliches are firmly in place here. You’ll meet the drunk gunslingers, the crooked lawmen, and of course, the hookers.
That said, when compared to Rockstar’s previous sandbox love story, GTA4, (we’re going to be doing that a number of times in this review so brace yourself), the protagonist of Redemption, John Marston is roughly a trillion times more likable than Liberty City’s Niko. Unfortunately for us this time around, a great protagonist and a great gaming experience are not mutually exclusive.
The world of Redemption is the classic wild west setting that games like the original Red Dead and GUN have explored a number of times before. Granted, no game has ever rendered this particular setting in such a stunningly detailed and vast way. And in the same way that GTA4 (there it is again) improved on the PS2 versions of that franchise, Redemption adds another dozen layers of detail to the Red Dead universe.
The only problem with this is that in the end it’s still the wild west. A romantic and rich time period for mediums like film and painting, but not necessarily the greatest placemat for a sandbox dinner these days. I’m trying to bite my tongue here, but what it all comes down to is that a lot of the time the only word I can use to describe the world is, well, boring.
There, I said it. I find the game to be boring in many respects. Spending up to five minutes riding between towns isn’t my idea of edge-of-your-seat entertainment. Sure, you can fast travel sometimes, but there are rules to that. If you’re in a town you’ll need to ante up some coin for the stagecoach. It’s not much, but it adds up quick. If you’re out on the range (and not in a mission, or near an enemy) you can build a makeshift camp and fast travel to places you’ve already been, but there are problems with both of these options; if you don’t ride from town to town on your own you end up losing money, as one of the best ways to gain some cash is to do a little hunting on the way. Either way, it’s almost counter-productive to use the fast travel system, which is a punishment that just doesn’t need to be dealt with these days.
It also doesn’t help that finding and starting new story missions requires that you travel directly to the person in order for them to deal the objectives out. GTA got away with this by using the cell phone to deal you missions, meaning you could start or report on a mission from anywhere in the city. You don’t have that luxury this time around, and unless they introduce smoke signals as DLC, that isn’t changing. It becomes especially tedious when a story character guides you to a destination, via horse, which can take five or more minutes, leaving you to complete a mission that takes 45 seconds or less, and then ride back to town alone to report to that same character that the objective has been completed.
Then, after returning to town and reporting your victory, you can take a walk around town and see things like horses floating two or three feet off the ground, or hookers yelling from windows and then disappearing in an instant, like they were never there to begin with. In case my subtlety has blown your mind, I’m trying to say that the game is a wee bit glitchy in spots. Sure, these things are inevitable in a game world as large as Rockstar has created for Redemption, but it still bears mentioning.
It’s not all meh though, and to be honest there are large stretches of play time where I was completely in love with Redemption. Things like the gunplay, which is greatly improved since GTA4, make taking out gang hideouts extremely enjoyable. The Dead Eye shooting mechanic (essentially Bullet Time) can really lead to some insanely cool shootouts. Being challenged to duels by random gunslingers makes for fun diversions and you really do feel like a badass when the townsfolk give you encouraging yells as you’re ravaging through your opponent’s corpse for the few dollars or repeater rounds they had on them.
The story, while as cliche as I mentioned earlier, is still enjoyable enough to keep you going, and it’s due in large part to the absolutely amazing voice acting and facial animations during the real-time cinematic sequences. As I tweeted to any of you following me during the early parts of my playthrough, I felt like I could really just watch the story sequences and be completely entertained.
Then, almost like clockwork, right when you’re getting into the story and enjoying some solid gunplay… BAM. Like getting pulled over by a state trooper as you set out for your Memorial Day vacation, Redemption slaps you in the face with the poorly designed mission structure, or a remarkably glitchy walk around town, and reminds you that in the end it’s still a video game.
Speaking of being a video game, did you hear that the wild west now has a multiplayer mode? Like the rest of the game, Redemption‘s multiplayer offering will remind you of GTA4. You start by being tossed into a free roam mode and can pick deathmatch or other team games from there, or just run around and plug your friends in the head a few times and take off on your horse (or burro, if you’re a newbie). It’s basically the same as single player, and is based on the same areas and weapons, but with the added bonus of being able to yell at the people you’re killing. It’s certainly not a focal point of the experience, but it’s good for a few hours here and there.
So that’s where Red Dead Redemption left me. It left me wanting more out of it. Not more of what it was already offering, but more from the world itself. More action, less open. I want the characters I love from Red Dead in a world I can wreak havoc in like Liberty City. In fact, can you get on that, Rockstar? Let me know. I’ll be first in line.
This review is based on a review copy of Red Dead Redemption that was sent to SideQuesting by Rockstar Games. All images courtesy of Rockstar Games.
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