Written by: Ian

 

 

 

Red Dead Revolver was definitely a disappointment- so will Rockstar get it right this time with their GTA style Western game? Using the impressive GTA engine, and with a development budget rumoured to be nearly that of GTA, "Red Dead Redemption" looks like it will redeem past sins to become the first truly successful game in the genre.

 

 

You play as John Marston. As a character, I found him to be one of the most interesting characters in a game for many years. A ‘reformed’ criminal, who married his prostitute, who now helps out Federal Agents, but has no concerns about killing, and who has convinced himself that his old gang (who is now trying to hunt down and kill) were really good men because they only robbed those who had too much.

 

The plot is interesting generally, although, like many open world game, a little padded and bloated in places, and takes you on a rollercoaster ride across the old west, into Mexico, and back again over its 15-20 hour duration.

 

 

The motley cast of characters is definitely amongst Rockstar’s best efforts, although they are perhaps more clichéd than in previous games. Either way, it’s a great story, with a fantastic twist right at the end that is genuinely very emotional.

 

 

Gameplay-wise, if you’ve played GTA IV; you know what to expect here- a 3rd person open world game. There are, of course, some differences, and most of them are thankfully for the better.

 

The game finally introduces recovering health to proceedings, which makes the difficulty much more palatable, and negates the need to constantly buy health and armour. The cover system has been somewhat improved, to include various dives in and out, but it still feels pretty dated in comparison to other contemporary titles.

 

You also get a slow-mo bullet-time mode called Dead Eye, where you can mark targets and take them down in one awesome hail of bullets. Duels, which make great use of Dead Eye, are particularly fun. Horses also handle much better than cars in GTA, although they are slower, and it’s pretty annoying that you have to constantly mash the A Button to keep the speed of them up. Thankfully, fast travel options are plentiful, and loading times also seem to have decreased.

 

Other improvements include better ‘stranger’ missions, map navigation, and map alerts, whilst the number of side games, side quests and jobs, not to mention the challenges, could take a player dozens of hours to complete, even if the story was completely ignored. Most of the side missions are pretty decent as well, and it’s nice that there seems to be a greater variety of missions (particularly where you ride shotgun), even if many of them seem to follow the classic GTA mission structure of drive to location, shoot everything up, and then drive back.

 

 

Certainly, I’m not bored of the formula just yet; with the gameplay improvements, and the novelty of the setting and old-school weaponry, things certainly felt fresh enough, right up until the climax of the story.