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Gameplay

The side missions themselves have received some long overdue TLC. Unlike GTA, you can bump into a stranger and receive a mission and complete it at any time later in the game, which should definitely be standard for any open world game from here on in. Many of these missions have small but fun little things for you to do, such as encouraging a man not to cheat on his wife (or the opposite), blackmailing a rumour spreading politician and finding a crazy old lady’s husband. One particular side mission tasked me with gathering flowers (seriously) for a sweet old man out in the woods. I avoided doing this for a while but eventually got on with it, hoping for some sweet reward for my boredom. What I ended up getting was completely unexpected and absolutely fantastic. I wont spoil anything here but let me just say Rockstar’s fucked up sense of humour shone like the blinding western sun.

Despite his diminutive size, Ankle-High Eamonn was one of the most feared gunslingers in the west

Anyone who has played GTA IV will be somewhat familiar with the controls and HUD. Marston can walk, run, shoot, climb, and take cover just like his contemporary cousins. You can also ride horses, which is intuitive and the best in a game since Shadow of the Colossus. Marston also has access to the Dead Eye ability, a modified bullet-time like mechanic that lets you slow down time and pick your shots. The mechanic has three levels and is limited by a metre so as not to become a crutch. It also works with the great animation system to allow for some cruel, vicious and utterly pant-tightening gunplay, allowing you to kneecap baddies nordie style or shoot the gun out of their hands if you get bored of shooting them in the head.

Marston gets to use all sorts of sweet ye oldey weaponry. It’s a pity, however, that some of the more interesting weapons like throwing knives and the sniper rifle never really get a chance to shine outside of their brief tutorial sections. It’s a shame that the game has you repeatedly man a Gatling gun at all the climactic points rather than explore some of the more interesting mechanics available. Unlike GTA IV though, you’ll find all of the story missions here varied and fun – it’s just a shame that they didn’t use everything they had available to them.

"You cunts owe us some fucking royalties"

One excellent and fun addition to the typical gaming arsenal is the lasso. With this tool you can hogtie anyone and carry em around, either back to the authorities or just to mess with. When I heard about this I thought that it would interfere with my pathetic secondary school delusions of being a badass cowboy, but it’s actually quite a bit more fun (and challenging) to capture bounties and the like alive. It also means that sneaky bitch who set you up for the ambush can be left on the train tracks. Violence aside, the lasso is also used to break wild horses, allowing you to upgrade your flea-bitten nag to a classier version.

To go over all the different things to do in Red Dead Redemption would take about 4 pages, and we need that precious internet space for more porn. Half the fun is finding out that stuff while you play. Let me just say that there is a ridiculous amount of things Marston can get up to, and while some are definitely stronger than others, they are all well thought out and (mostly) well executed. There is an economy in the game, involving trading animal skins and the like, and all usual action game staples like gun shops, doctors etc are all present. Money isn’t really an issue throughout the game, for better and for worse, as you’re only ever a couple of skinned wolves away from buying that house or shotgun you’ve been pining for. Every corpse in the game can be looted and hidden chests of goodies are everywhere.

Presentation

In keeping with Rockstar’s style, the presentation is all about the whole. The atmosphere is faultless, you can almost smell the scenery. Lighting and weather effects are a joy to behold, and overall the game looks really pretty. There’s occasional visual hiccups but it’s definitely a looker, with some breathtaking scenes as you travel across the landscape.

Marston's success as a rancher and horse breaker was due to his knowledge that wild horses find Mexicans delicious

Like GTA, RDR uses the euphoria physics engine, which without going into boring detail is a very nice bit of software that makes objects and character move and react to their environment like real people as opposed to ragdolls filled with Styrofoam. They do this by creating each character (be it human, horse, rabbit etc) with a skeleton, nervous system and muscles. All animations in game are in real time, with no “canned” parts. If you shoot a guy in the leg, he’ll crumple realistically and painfully off his horse, getting caught in the stirrup on the way down and eventually collapsing. Seeing people react so realistically in a game (even if they are just collapsing out the door of a saloon) is a pure joy to behold, and makes the combat even more exciting. Its impossible not to mention how fun it is to get a bounty by carefully picking off his leg in Dead Eye mode before lassoing him, all animated gorgeously.

The soundtrack is excellent and perfectly suited, offering just the right accents when action heats up or during those nice ambient rides across the desert. Voice acting is uniformly excellent, and it seems that some of the more irritating cartoony voices from GTA IV and its expansions have been booted. The only fault in the voice acting department is the Irish character, who sounds like a leprechaun and is pretty much the definition of an Irish stereotype. Still though, he gets no worse a time than any other ethnicity in a Rockstar game, and as anyone else knows only one game ever got an Irish accent right.

Overall

Even without the multitude of side-missions and other activities Red Dead Redemption would be easy to recommend to any action game fan. Whether you’re a GTA fan or not you owe it to yourself to hand over a fistful of dollars and give this a go.

The Good: Red Dead Redemption bears the usual Rockstar qualities of amazing atmosphere, visual design, and game play. Dialogue and voice acting is top notch too. Marston is a real badass and is one of Rockstar’s most likeable characters in many years.

The Bad: Not a lot. Some of the animations like skinning animals become very repetitive, and for some reason the gambling mini-games (Poker, Blackjack, Liars dice etc) seem incredibly slow. There’s the very rare bug here or there but it’s a fairly watertight title.

The Ugly: The DLC that comes with the game only works on one profile… which is a bit stingy if not weird . That’s only serious nitpicking though.