Let me preface this review with a few things:
1. This is my first review
2. I’m pretty hard on games
3. I am not very good at convincing myself that something is fun when it is not.
Now that that’s out of the way that will help you when reading this review, as well as any other review I do. Lets get started!
Red Dead Redemption, which I will call RDR to save my fingers the typing, is an open world wild western game. You can expect a good amount of gun slinging, horse riding, pig skinning, cowboy hat wearin, stage coachin, cow hurding, and the list goes on. It lets you do pretty much everything a true cowboy would do.
You play as the character John Marston an ex outlaw who is now coming to bring some order and reconcile his past. As the story goes a long, John bring our more of his tale and explains what he is there to do. I personally have not played through the whole game. The bits of the campaign I did play though were fairly thrilling and kept me wanting to complete “just 1 more mission”.
The game plays and controls a lot like Rockstars other open world titles. It feeds off of both GTA and Bully’s setup. When you play the game you will understand more of what I mean by that. None the less GTA has mastered the open world arena and it is safe to say they have figured out the formula.
Like GTA, RDR is full of side quests to keep you busy outside of the regular story mode missions. This is a great feature for those of you who love to leave no stone unturned. The regular missions will keep you busy as well.
The graphics are awesome in RDR! There is nothing like riding your horse through the desert while its pouring down rain in this game. Its very fluid and doesn’t have as many jerky movements as you would expect from these kinds of games with tons of characters.
The controls are good but not amazing. It takes some getting used to to successfully ride a horse. The first couple times you will find yourself falling off only to realize you need to steadily tap A so that your horse does not lose stamina and end up bucking you off. The cover system isn’t very helpful at all. At times you will find yourself accidentally circling around to the front of a rock to only expose yourself to get shot. The aiming system can be just as successful and annoying as GTA’s. I’ll let you be the judge of that one. All in all, I wouldn’t say the controls are terrible but in order to not screw yourself over it will take a bit of mastering.
I don’t have much to say about the multiplayer. It is only a step above GTA’s in my opinion. Certain weapons clearly overpower the other ones. This pretty much levels out as average at best. A feature I found very cool was the showdown at the beginning of each match type. You face off against your opposing players in a duel to the death before you being playing. Pretty sweet. Although I do not think the multiplayer adds any longevity to the game. The replay factor is definitely with the campaign.
To be honest I didn’t find the extreme wow factor that most found with this game but I tend not to find that with a lot of games. It’s safe to say I’m hard to impress. I’d definitely say its worth it to rent and definitely could be taken into consideration for purchase.
