InsaneBear

Review: Red Dead Redemption

Score: Good
Difficulty played on: Normal
Time to beat: Around 35 hours with most side-quests
Loved the most: Dynamic and organic world that was fun to explore. Treasure maps.
Hated the most: Uninspired mission design, shallow mechanics, and extreme length left me wishing for the end half-way through.

Before you read this review, I’d just like to let you know that I’m writing this under some unusual circumstances. Due to the personal happenings of my life, it took me nearly a month and a half to beat this game–far longer than it would usually take me. Some more personal complications led to me delaying this review for about three weeks after beating the game. I’d like to think that these conditions haven’t negatively affected my opinion of Red Dead Redemption, but it is a definite possibility. Still, I will do my best to inform and explain.

Critics across the world are saying it. Startling sales figures are saying it. Everybody seems to be saying it: “Red Dead Redemption is a masterpiece.” I’m here to tell you that it’s not. Far from it, in fact. Of course this is just my opinion, but Rockstar’s latest actually seems to be a regression from the already boring Grand Theft Auto IV. The controversial developer seems to have fallen into a comfortable formula of cinematic dramas that draw so heavily on film that they fail to utilize any of the many strengths inherent to the medium of video games. And unlike the equally cinematic Metal Gear Solid series, Rockstar’s games simply cannot merge gameplay and narrative into a cohesive whole. What we’re left with is a bunch of interesting characters and cut-scenes that make watching the game more fun than actually playing through its tedious and repetitive missions. The story and gameplay aren’t connected and have absolutely no bearing on each other. In my eyes, this is unacceptable for a title that’s supposed to set the standard on sandbox games for years to come.

As unique as the American West setting is in video games, RDR‘s core story is hardly different from Mario saving the Princess. Your character, reformed outlaw turned family-man John Marston, is forced back into action by a couple of U.S. Marshalls who kidnap his wife and child. You track down your old gang and serve some justice and everybody returns home happy. But while saving the Princess may work in the context of a Mario game, it feels a little shallow after a dozen or so hours in the world of Red Dead Redemption. As you bust your butt all over the American frontier (and Mexico too!), you’ll begin to wonder why this is so important. After all, as the player, you’ve never actually seen this wife or son. Why should we care? There’s zero empathy there. The developers just gave us an excuse to go shoot stuff without emotionally earning it. This is a bit puzzling too, as Red Dead Redemption actually features a very innovative epilogue that lets you get to know your family. So if Rockstar went through the trouble of adding that unorthodox component, why not throw in a prologue? At the very least, it would have been nice to know what the people I was trying to save looked like.

Red Dead is at its best when it’s just man and nature. The first time you take in the majesty of a distant mountain basking in the glow of a full moon it’s hard not to smile. Starry skies, romantic sunsets, scorching sand, and everything else one would associate with the great outdoors are a feast for the eyes, even if there is an obscene amount of texture pop-in. Dozens of animals roam the wilderness to create a truly lived in feeling (although, I’m just noticing that there’s no ecology there–none of them actually hunt each other). Other travelers tell stories by the fireside and beckon for you to join in as you pass by. Bandits ambush stage coaches on the dusty highways of the frontier, giving you a choice on who, if anybody to side with. Towns of all sizes bustle with activity, waiting for you to come explore their unique architecture. You’d be doing a disservice to this beautiful game if you only focused on the polygon count of character models or the animations of your foes–the visual grandeur of Red Dead Redemption lies in the way all of its systems come together to create a living world.

Top-notch voice acting and writing also aid in this rare feat of authenticity. The score is phenomenal on every level. The sound effects of deadly firearms, chugging steam-engines, territorial beasts, and so on round everything out for a truly sublime audio/visual experience. Once again, RDR is far from the best looking or sounding game I’ve ever played, but the way everything meshes together in the boundless sandbox of the old west is special.

But you probably won’t be spending all of your time wandering the wilderness just for the experience of it. Actually, there is quite a bit of exploration thanks to survival challenges that task you with skinning a certain number of animals or collecting a specific plant and so on. And then there’s the best part of the game–treasure maps! These maps are essentially hand-drawn pictures of landmarks with crude arrows pointing towards the location of the treasure. The only way to find the loot is to actively explore the world and recognize the major landmarks when you see them. It’s completely engaging and somebody could probably make an entire game out of it.

But as I was saying, you’ll be spending most of your time grinding through the missions of the main story, with maybe 15 or so side-quests thrown in along the way. The side-quests are actually pretty long and are broken into segments, so it takes a good long while to complete any one of them, even if they are mostly stupid collection mini-games and the like. The core missions typically fly by at 10 to 15 minutes a pop, but there are just so many of them that you’ll forget all about the majesty of the wilderness by the end of the lengthy campaign. Your adventures will take you to three distinct regions full of cheats and scoundrels who want you to do them favors in exchange for their help. Most of these favors involve shooting people. I take that back. With the exception of a lovely little lady who has you herd a lot of cattle, everybody else wants you to shoot people.

Now I realize that any shooter’s core gameplay revolves around shooting, but most shooters aren’t 35 hours long. With Red Dead Redemption‘s shallow template of mission design, things get old real fast. I feel confident in saying that 90% of the missions involve riding to a town on horseback and shooting people, riding somewhere in a stage coach and shooting people along the way, or ambushing/defending a train by shooting people. Almost all of them are preceded by a couple minutes of boring conversation while you ride to your destination. And as anyone who’s played any of Rockstar’s previous games knows, this developer simply cannot craft fun and intense shooting. The cover-mechanics are clunky. The auto-aim is boring. It’s difficult to quickly locate and take down enemies, especially while on horseback. Every weapon feels the same, even if the stats say one is better than the other. Enemy AI is about as bright as a brown crayon. Simply put, there is nothing satisfying about the central gameplay element of RDR. So if you take repetitive and uninspired mission design and pair it with unintuitive, boring gunplay, what do you have? What you have is a recipe for wanting the game to end roughly 15 hours before it does.

And this is what annoys me most about this “masterpiece” of a sandbox game–my John Marston got sick of saving his wife about half-way through Mexico. My John Marston prefers playing Poker or Liars Dice (or any of the other addictive mini-games found in this world) to running errands for the Mexican Army. My John Marston stopped caring about human life a long time ago and lives by the gun. Yet the John Marston portrayed in every cut-scene is some noble sap who believes in right and wrong, despite his criminal past. Oh, wait, he was stealing for the poor. I almost forgot after the 100th time he said it. He believes that people can change and that they should try to (I guess he forgets that at the ending, though). He’s got a heart of gold, even if he does gun down entire villages under player control. I simply don’t see how someone can put this linear, non-interactive trash out after games like Fallout 3 rewrote what open-world can and should be. Jeez, even GTAIV let you decide whether or not to kill some important dudes. RDR does this with a few guys, but there’s absolutely no weight or consequences to your choices.

If for some strange reason you haven’t had your fill of sloppy gun-fighting after enduring a campaign that’s far longer than it needs to be (both narratively and in terms of gameplay), then there’s always the unique multiplayer mode. Unfortunately, you’re sort of just thrown into an open world populated by various other online cowboys and not told how to do anything. At least the single-player had tutorials, even if I didn’t have time to read them all in the heat of the moment and therefore never properly learned how to do things like duel or cheat at poker. Anyways, after hitting enough buttons you’ll realize that if you want to get to any kind of organized competitive match, you have to go into the open free-roam world, access another menu, then select what type of game you want to play (and there are many different types), and finally hope that you can connect to it. For whatever reason, I had an awful time trying to connect to matches in RDR. I haven’t had issues with any other games, so I’m putting it on the networking engineers at Rockstar.

The competitive matches are all relatively traditional takes on online shooter scenarios, only with poor controls and enemies that take far too much damage unless it’s a head-shot. The fact that you can’t switch weapons with the press of a button serves to highlight how poor of a fit the controls are for multiplayer matches. I shouldn’t have to access a menu to pull out a short ranged weapon before getting meleed to death. I could talk more about competitive matches, but I’ll just save everybody’s time and say they aren’t really that fun.

The most interesting part of RDR‘s multiplayer is the free-roaming open world sessions. Players can essentially wander about the world and do whatever they please, as if nobody else were there with them. If you want to be a little more constructive, you can fumble through menus until you finally figure out how to form a posse. Posses are groups of players that can get pretty large. These gangs can then put their collective strength towards goals like conquering AI filled gang hide-outs or just pestering other posses. It’s pretty cool to work together, but there really isn’t a lot to do unless you get creative.

Really, Red Dead‘s online component is very similar to GTAIV‘s in that the open world aspect is both awesome and daunting. All of the organized games are pretty lack-luster and all the persistent leveling in the world can’t change that. If you have enough friends to get a 16 person free-roam together, then I imagine the cooperation of peers could lead to some really creative and awesome games. I can see myself recreating shootouts from classic Westerns with two posses facing off at high noon. Problem is, I don’t have that many friends. So I’m left to marvel at the potential of Rockstar’s unorganized and mishandled multiplayer.

Now I could go on and on about Red Dead Redemption‘s lack of progression (every gun feels the same, unlockable outfits have weak benefits for all the work that goes into them), utter disregard for player choice (“This is the story we’re telling and you’re going to like it, good guy!”), it’s many glitches (Donkey Lady, anyone?), the poor interface design (Really, I have to go into a menu to go to load a camping menu to load a save menu before I can save…and I can’t do this at any location in the world?), or it’s bloated length, but I don’t have to. All you need to know is that for as breath-taking as the game-world is, for as unique and developed as many of the characters are, this game simply is not fun. The core gameplay is boring and out-dated. Nobody will have a truly unique experience with this game. And worst of all, it doesn’t even have Rockstar’s signature humor. How anyone could pay $60 for this over-rated heap of potential is beyond me.

Author: Cody

Tags: red dead redemption, review, rockstar games, rockstar san diego