Okay Geek Farm
PS3 Review - Red Dead Redemption
Okay Geek Team
Seldom comes the times when there’s a game that needs two people to review it just so all its bases are covered. Read Dead Redemption is that game; Rockstar first gave us a glimpse into this “Old West project” back in 2005 when everyone associated it with its spiritual predecessor, Red Dead Revolver. However, after years of development and a couple of delays later its finally launched, and with it has come a response that’s been more than positive - including us. We’re not going to tease you: we love this game.
Story
(by: Alex)
Red Dead Redemption follows John Marston, a former outlaw on a mission to see his wife and child again, who have been taken into custody by government officials. The only way he get them back home safely is if he can bring in one of the men he used to ride with in a gang. He doesn’t make much progress by his lonesome, and he is shot and left for dead in the opening cutscene. He is saved by some local farmers, and after he recovers, John sets off to find his old group and deal with them personally.
Rockstar took a mostly untapped genre here and really made it living, breathing, believable world. But the only way they could sell it, however, was to have the right characters playing the right parts, and so just like in GTA fashion, you are introduced to a number of characters who you become acquainted to and help you along your travels. Whether it’s securing a machine gun or just rustling up some cattle, each person you meet will be their own entity of their own with a story all their own. In the first few hours you immediately start to build some true to life relationships with the farmers that saved you, and this sort of building up of friendships, or lack there of, evolves as more people are introduced into the game.
At first, you wouldn’t assume that the Wild West could be this thriving oasis of character and personality, I mean how far can you go with just cowboys and Indians? But Rockstar, with their amazing ability to create characters, who might as well be real humans beings, does it again and introduces us to a world that is self sufficient and makes you want to light a match with your beard stubble and start riding around town with a trusty steed.
(by: Ricardo)
I’ll be upfront about this: I’ve never touched a Grand Theft Auto game. Perhaps the reason why is because none of the characters have ever appealed to me. Seeing the usual gang fights and mob stories just wasn’t for me, but when I saw that Rockstar had given due attention a setting that seems all but forgotten in video games, well you could say I was hooked. To me this old west, cowboy backdrop was the proper space to explore the morality choices prevalent in Rockstar games, really giving you a look see at the very real life good and bad (and the ugly).
The basic gist of the plot was enough to hook me in; former outlaw wants to redeem himself and get back to living an honest life, however, before he can do that he must confront his past and use the deadly skills he learned as one usually seen on a bounty poster to serve the common good. With a story like that driving the game it seems like you just can’t go wrong, and luckily for myself, and for anyone who picks this up, it doesn’t disappoint.
Gameplay
(by: Alex)
Where to even begin! Rockstar has, yet again, created a third person experience that makes you feel like you’re one with the setting. Since there are very few automatic weapons in the game, it forces you to be extremely accurate with your weapons, making some of the later fights in the game decently challenging as they literally throw hundreds of guys at you.
But let’s talk about the really interesting parts you do other than shooting dudes on horses. When Rockstar created this world, they literally made you an inhabitant of the Wild West, with you being able to play games for money that you would typically find in that time period. Want to play horseshoes or how about some poker? You can do all that and then some. Players can even watch fake black and white movies at the theater house which really just serve to immerse you in the world. Earlier in the game you also get a lasso which is used to great effect; When you’re chasing a bandit for example, you can lasso their legs, hogtie them, and bring them back to the local Sheriff, but more interestingly you can also use the item to lasso wild broncos and break them (tame them) via an interesting mini-game, so that their yours to ride when you please.
Speaking of horses, these are some of the best I’ve ever used in a video game before. When you get on a horse and start riding you can kick’em with you spurs to make them go faster but you don’t want to hammer on the button because they will eventually knock you off, and if you’re in a middle of a chase when this happens, well… you’re screwed. I thought this mechanic worked so well for a couple of reasons, but the most important for myself was that it added some difficulty to the feature, which you haven’t really seen in any other game that involve these fast animals. After a while, riding becomes second nature but it’s always interesting to see how different types of horses ride as well as how chases play out.
It’s hard to find a flaw with the gameplay but there a few. For instance, the pacing can be a little weird. One minute you can be killing everything that moves, and then the next minute you’re helping farmers do a cattle drive. I can see where they’re coming from, especially since you have this open world to choose various missions as you place, but sometimes it almost doesn’t fit the character you play as to be doing some of these tasks right after another. Though I’m grateful to the developers not sticking to the stealth missions for very long because they were pretty terrible in my opinion.
And finally, there’s the multiplayer mode that I didn’t really bother trying out for a while into the game. Surprisingly, it’s actually quite fun since you’re given the ability to free roam with your friends wherever you want, killing bad guys… or good guys if you feel like it. There’s tons of stuff for you and your friends to play around with cooperatively, or you can go at it in a series of competitive mode, which all of the missions and game seem to work well in an online setting. I didn’t have any problems online myself so expect smooth sailing if you ever take your cowboy boots into an online game.
(by: Ricardo)
I mentioned earlier that I’ve never touched a GTA game, but that’s not saying I’ve never played a game with an open world before. One that comes to mind when I think of how Red Dead’s is set up is Crackdown. Obviously, it’s not the exact same thing but their comparable to each other in the least. But since I didn’t have much experience in this type of game I suppose you could say I was coming in blind.
When I popped in the game I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but when I saw that this wasn’t just a run’em up shoot everything that moves type of game I was sold. Breaking in broncos, carriage racing, poker, liars dice, and bounty hunting?! There’s so much to do in Red Dead that it just blew my mind. Just being given almost total freedom to trek across the vast desert where I could find myself some bounties to hogtie or just some cougars to skin. Heck, even doing the most mundane and relatively simple tasks in the game are a delight to play because everything is just presented and executed in such a fine manner.
Horseback riding, I felt, was way more fun than the usual car ride you’d find yourself commuting in a Rockstar title. I had a hard time learning how to direct my horse in the beginning, but after some practice I was blowing away wanted men with a shotgun while galloping at full speed.
On that note, shooting is handled using an automatic system, which I’ve heard some players complain about, but I actually thought it was well implemented, seeing as you can manually adjust your shot whenever you want shoot elsewhere besides a man’s chest. Just press the RT button whenever you want to switch up to your nearest target, and then move your sight around to hit’em where you want. So if you were looking to maim rather than kill then you can easily do so using this system. But nothing is more “cooler” than the Red Dead feature, which slows down time to let you target multiple enemies, or even multiples targets on a single person. Oh, there goes your face and your knee cap.
But the real heart of the game is in all the various missions you can undertake at any set time. Your map tells you whats available, and by using your steed you can travel easily between towns and settlements to begin your mission. There’s quite a variety of events you can take part in, which is a good thing considering some games, like the first Assassin’s Creed, had a bit of trouble with this issue. Rather than the same missions repeating over and over again, you’ll be seeing much originality in Red Dead.
Oh, and did I mention that as certain objectives are met and skills sets are achieved, you can unlock various new costumes to dawn, to further press the point that you’re one bad dude!
Visuals/ Audio
(by: Ricardo)
Red Dead isn’t going to win any awards for breaking ground with hyper real graphics, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t beautiful. It’s rich in the way it perfectly mimics the world of the early 1900’s. In fact, I constantly felt as if I was moving between the movies Tombstone and Back to the Future: Part III - see I know my American history!
Character models in RDR may not be the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen in a game, because Mass Effect’s characters alone are better looking than more than half of the cast of characters here. But what makes them bearable is the audio - the voice acting to be more specific. For you see, if these characters looked bad and sounded bad too, well then I wouldn’t be wasting my time talking about it. However, the characters come to life in the voices that embody them, especially the titular character, John Marston, who’s voiced by Rob Wiethoff, who just happens to sound a whole lot like Bill Paxton, an actor who starred in probably one of the best western flicks ever made, Tombstone.
And lest I not forget the amazing soundtrack that really drives home the old west setting. You can’t have a gun fight at noon without the ambiance of that whistling we’ve come accustomed to from watching old Clint Eastwood movies.
(by: Alex)
It feels a little strange that a game set in the Wild West has such great graphics. Similar to Fallout 3 though, Red Dead loves to show off vast distances of land that make you want to go and discover just what could be in them tha’r hills, which may or may not be worth the long horse trip there. Or you could just fast travel to the location but that takes away all the fun!
The character models also look fairly good but it’s the horses which, again, steal the show, with you being able to see their muscles deforming and flexing as you’re riding. It all just looks super impressive and it, again, adds to their superb immersion factor. Finally, the graphic violence in this game is quite high, unsurprising considering Rockstar’s track record. You can get some gruesomely gory kills in this game and they, in usual Rockstar fashion, pull out all the stops in over the top violence. It does all look quite good though and, despite occasionally a little ridiculous with the amount of blood it can throw at you, it adds to the relative dirtiness of the Wild West.
My major problem with the visuals is that there are tons of bugs; I couldn’t count the number of times someone’s model wouldn’t load in - a bug that makes me unable to move or a character sitting in my model during a game of poker. It’s really annoying but it’s nowhere near enough to break the experience.
Red Dead also sounds very good, with characters conveying emotions particularly well. What really hit a high point in the audio department are the guns. They all sound excellent and really add to the graphic kills with their satisfying sounds. The game’s music is barely present at all but when it is I thought it was a little repetitive or at least a little too similar sounding in my opinion.
Final Thoughts
(by: Alex)
Red Dead: Redemption embodies everything Rockstar is good at, namely making great and believable worlds, and this time they’ve done it again in an unconventional setting. If you’re a fan of open world shooters like GTA, Fallout 3, etc., then you really owe it to yourself to check this game out. It really excels in bringing a more or less unexploited time period into the spotlight by making everything extremely immersive and great to play through. Yeah, there are a few bugs here and there, but it really didn’t bother me a whole lot considering there’s so much to do and it’s consistently fun the whole way through. Looks like those 5 years of development sure paid off, eh?
(by: Ricardo)
When I think of games that are MUST PLAYS I can only come up with a short list, but Red Dead certainly makes it. And for my first shot at playing a Rockstar game it hits its mark dead on; A main character that you connect with, and a story that takes you to a setting you’re not used to seeing very much, Red Dead is playable adventure that reminds me a lot of what Mass Effect did to space games, only this time Red Dead has done that to the old west. It’s a drama in a hot and dry place, with tumbleweeds blowing passed two hombres ready to draw and blast each other away, and it’s totally awesome. Red Dead Redemption is a true western.
