GTA’s Gone All Wild West On Us?

by Chief Jimbolaya:

©2010 Aaron Klein:

Red Dead Redemption is the most complete realization of the Wild West ever expressed in a video game.

The easiest way to describe Red Dead Redemption is “Grand Theft Auto” on horseback. With Rockstar behind both games, it is no surprise that the mechanics and structure of both games is similar.

In the single-player game, players navigate an expansive map that covers numerous biomes representing the American West and Mexico, from the Great Plains to rocky deserts.

This varied environment, and freedom to explore it, lends a great deal of magic to Red Dead Redemption. The scenery is breathtaking, diverse and immense. It takes 10 minutes to traverse the landscape from corner to corner on horseback.

There are a multitude of diversions between missions, from hunting treasure and buffalo to gambling, cattle driving and bronco taming. These minigames round out the cowboy experience explored in the narrative to create a playground of cowboy legends.

• Red Dead: Redemption Trailer.

Beyond these minigames, the player often stumbles across strangers along the trail who need assistance hunting down horse thieves, saving loved ones from lynchings or hogtieing escaping prisoners. On the other hand, they also might pull out a revolver and shoot you dead as you near their camp… you’ve got to be cautious.

The player takes the role of John Marston, a reformed outlaw who is coerced by the federal government to hunt down his former gang members under threat of harm to family.

For most of the game he is being jerked around by others who claim they will help Marston locate his former friends, if only Marston will first help them with their tasks.

• Red Dead: Redemption Multiplayer

The characters are cliché and outrageous, but the voice acting and animation are outstanding. In your travels you will run across a number of classic Western characters, such as graverobbers, snake oil salesmen, cannibals, drunk Irishmen, Mexican revolutionaries and extremely lonely men.

While it is essentially a third-person shooter, Red Dead Redemption also has a lot of role-playing elements. You don’t earn experience points per-se, but certain actions do progressively unlock new outfits and abilities.

So instead of purchasing new outfits for your character, you have to earn the right to wear them by doing things like winning in poker or clearing gang hideouts. This suits the Western mentality that success is earned by the sweat of the brow.

One of the reasons there are not many cowboy games is that slow-loading period weaponry is clumsy next to often fantastic and overpowered arms of most video games.

Red Dead Redemption overcomes this by setting the story in the transitory era of the 1910s, a time when new inventions like the telephone and automobile were shrinking distances and changing the country. The dusk of the Wild West.

This allows for weapons like semi-automatic shotguns, sniper rifles and Gatling guns along side the traditional revolvers and repeaters of Cowboy lore.

One source of irritation—and this is a nitpick in the face of an overall excellent game—is a cutscene that appears whenever you skin an animal, which you end up doing a lot as a source of revenue early in the game. As cool as it is the first few times, the 10-second clip gets old very quickly when you are on a hunting trip and watch it a dozen times over a few minutes.

When you finish with the single-player game, which can take dozens of hours depending on how directly you approach the missions, multiplayer offers potentially hundreds of additional hours of gameplay.

In multiplayer, players can form posses to tackle missions like gang hideouts, or terrorize the countryside and try to rack up a huge bounty. The more chaos you cause, the higher the bounty and the more lucrative a target you become for other posses to hunt down.

This free-roam mode is a hub from which players can organize into smaller, more classic multiplayer games like team deathmatch and capture the flag.

Red Dead Redemption fully captures a romanticized cowboy experience.

It borrows heavily from every cowboy book and movie from Louis L’Amour to Clint Eastwood, but lets the player live out their gun-slinging fantasies by providing a vast sandbox to play in.

Note: Aaron Klein is a U.S.-based freelance video game writer. Read more of his reviews at cornfedgamer.com.

“9/10

©2010 Aaron Klein:

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