SoulIsTheGoal reviews Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption is a sidestep for Rockstar in some ways. Despite the franchise having a precursor Rockstar’s usual method of making games is to design a playground (be it a city or a school) fill it with weirdoes (school kids or gangsters) and then allow you to run rampant causing terror and provide some story based missions for you to see the main character beat up someone who deserves it. So it should come as a massive surprise to you that Red Dead Redemption is set in a huge, but fictional, part of the Wild West and features your main character trying to kill his former partner whilst he’s not shooting deer for his mates… oh. You may be wondering where the sidestep is, well it comes in the level of maturity that’s brought to the game. Whilst the Grand Theft Auto franchise has a lot of knob gags and characters with odd sensibilities and Bully featured the same sort of characters but miniaturised, Red Dead has constricted these traits and allowed character humour to sometimes poke its head up and each characters different eccentricities are explained by their interaction with the plot. Basically, the characters aren’t just caricatures of gangsters, they’re more complex and each have motivations which feels a little more than the shallow “I wanted money” that seems to pervade the Grand Theft Auto series.

A lot of criticism has been levelled at this game for being Grand Theft Horsey and as much as I didn’t want to use this term and think I was clever the parallels have to be drawn. Like I said, it features a huge map, guns and various ways to break the law which hardly wins it in the originality stakes, it also features wild animals (different), cacti (different) and a horse riding mechanic (different) which I hate. The controls in this game aren’t BAD they’re just not EXCELLENT. To make horsey (I called mine Simon) go faster, you have to tap A. This is supposed to represent you jabbing it with your spurs I suppose but it doesn’t quite work. As any horse rider will tell you horses have 4 levels of running: walk, trot, canter, gallop and you can never quite get the speed right. I suppose this is because they guessed you’d probably run at full pelt everywhere but some of the side quests involve being slow and checking for plants and things so it would have been nice to canter as opposed to full to full on gallop. Despite this, the horses LOOK stunning and I found myself ending up very attached to Simon. The gun mechanic is functional and you have to hold A to run, so I’m hardly going to praise this game for its controls.

What I shall praise this game for is its feel, I stopped thinking of it as a game and started thinking of it as a “Wild West Simulator” and that’s when I started to enjoy it more, in some ways I ended up treating it like an MMO having more fun with the fetch-quests and side missions just to soak up the gorgeous scenery. The writing helps this feel, because Rockstar seem to have grown up and abandoned their knob gags and started going for deep characters, all of whom really open up the world because they contribute to the character of where they live. If a character is a world-weary sheriff you understand how fragile law and order is in the area and how the town feels about their sheriff, seriously, that is how strongly I feel about the writing (and voice acting) in this game.

I feel I’ve gushed a little too much because a lot of this game is broken as fuck. You have bullet-time (called Dead Eye) and it isn’t needed in the first quarter of the game and it might as well be unlimited considering it regenerates so bloody quick. You have regenerating health AND med kits which kind of ruins any pretence of this game being a challenge. Timed missions don’t have timers which therefore made me shout at the game for essentially not allowing me to complete the mission out of skill, but out of trial and error. It’s sometimes so glitchy you have to reset and occasionally plot points are so big and so obvious you have the tendency to think “HOW FUCKING THICK ARE YOU JOHN!” at the telly. Also, I did as much of the sidequests as I could from the first half of the map and found by the time I’d entered Mexico I had full fame and full honour. I shall briefly talk about these systems because they annoy me. Fable 2 managed to get this system basically right somehow. If you go about the game trying to be good by the end of the game you’ll have roughly reached full good on your first play through and this is how it SHOULD be, you should see your achievement in upgrading as an indicator that you’re coming to a close on the game, not that you’ve entered the second act.

I’d like to put a big disclaimer over this review. The game IS good, in fact it’s absorbing and gorgeous and extremely funny witty and clever in a lot of places. However, it has its problems and despite the recommendation from me to buy this game I warn you that it has its issues and you should only buy it if the things I’ve mentioned won’t destroy the experience too much for you.