Game review: Red Dead Redemption
“What, bitch is reviewing an old game?” Yeah, I know Red Dead Redemption has been out a while, but I didn’t have an Xbox to get it when it first came out. Once again, I was lured to a game by the siren call of an engrossing story, and that turned out to be a half truth. Before I get to the gushing and ranting about the game, I want to make clear that this is a two-part review, and a long review at that. First, I need to review the game itself, as in the game mechanics, the graphics, the sound, and the overall atmosphere. Then in the second part, I’ll review the story.
So, I loved the game, but I didn’t like the story. The story is all about this pissy outlaw who finally got caught and was made to pay for his crimes. Despite this, the main character manages to look down on everyone else he works with, or for, even with him being worse or no better than some of his cohorts.
But let’s set all of that aside and talk about that after I talk about the game play. First of all, the world is fantastically detailed, with every ride on horseback leading to a nature hunt of sorts. Throughout the game, I was spotting new species of animals. I saw incredible animal interactions occurring randomly, like an owl swooping down on a rattlesnake, or foxes trying to sneak into a hen house. At one point, I even decided to look for the rattlesnakes to see if they were really there, and sure enough, they are, and they look and act like real rattlesnakes when provoked.
The models are so well animated that just by the lope and profile, I could tell what animals were long before I could make out the details of their fur. That’s AMAZING recreation of a world environment, and I cannot gush enough about how much I enjoyed riding around on my horse, just watching the world around me. Day or night, the trips to any location are so engrossing that even after I learned about fast traveling using a camp, I only used it for really, really long trips.
The towns and cities are just as detailed, and the people in every location have enough variety in the models that I never got a clone world feeling like I did while playing Prototype. People also talk to my character, and he talks back. When the other characters talk, their mouths move. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve seen that give the main characters facial animations, but don’t do the same for NPC characters. Here, the models are all detailed with as much care as the main star.
The music and sound effects are fantastic, and where I normally play games with my phone blasting tunes, here, I turned up the TV to hear the great backing tracks. Even the slowest guitar or mariachi piece feels fitting for the pace of the game, and as the action speeds up, the tempo of the music shifts for the best dramatic effect. The sound effects are just as good, and as I mentioned before, the sounds in the game aren’t just background noise. If you hear a rattlesnake rattling loudly, it means you’re threatening it. You’ll hear wolves and coyotes long before you see them, though the mountain lions and bears don’t give nearly as much advance warning of their arrival. In any case, the animals sound as real as they look, and the other sound effects like guns loading or whatnot also sound authentic.
The basic selection of guns is pretty good, and to be honest, I ignored a lot of weapon upgrades in the stores because the guns I got for free just playing through the missions were fine. About the only standard-issue gun that I hated using was the sniper rifle. Sniper rifles are supposed to make a far away target easier to spot, but the scope on this gun is dirty, and the magnifying lens is warped. It’s like shooting using a cola bottle as your lens. Yeah. So not liking that.
The missions you take on can be part of the story, or you can just go to a bounty board and take jobs for cash. Along every trip, there will also be little tasks, like stopping a wagon thief or saving some dude’s kidnapped wife from being hung. The missions for the story have even more variety, although some missions are better than others. For western flavor, some of my jobs were breaking in horses or herding cattle, but most everything else was variations on killing people.
Now we get to the semi-muddled bit in the transition between game play and story. I played the game trying to be as honorable as possible. If I shot a sheriff accidentally during a wild gunfight, I’d reload a saved checkpoint. Of course with the random nature of the open world, sometimes I would ride back through the same spot, and there is no gunfight on the second try, and thus no sheriff accidentally wandering into the mix at the wrong time. Maybe this time the random encounter is a wolf who’s going to kill my horse. Or maybe it’s a chick in her underwear, looking to steal my horse. (But if a horse dies, just walk away a bit, and then whistle. Like magic, a new loyal steed appears. I both hated and loved this feature.) So I’d make a mistake, reload, and then muddle my way back through to the bounty hunt or mission I’d agreed to take on. (Assuming I didn’t get eat by a bear during the trip, of course.)
For all the trouble I went to to be good, though, the good people of the game never stopped complaining about me. Every mission where I had to ride in a posse, people were going “We don’t like you city folk and your strange ways.” This despite John Marston looking nothing at all like city folk. Instead of recruiting the cowpokes to form a posse after all the work I did with them, honorable John instead hooks up with a drug dealing con man, a grave robber, and a drunken Irish thief named…wait for it…Irish.
No matter who I had to ride with among the criminals, John spends the entire trip in a moral argument. Why? Why is a killer trying to argue that he’s better than a grave robber or a snake oil salesman? “Because I’ve changed,” John says, over, and over, and over. And yet, he still sounds like a pissy outlaw to me, not a reformed farmer who’s mended his ways. Everyone John deals with, it’s always the same tired spiel: “I saved your life! Now, help me, or I’m going to shoot you!” And this charming rapport is repeated like every other ten minutes. FOR TWENTY FUCKING HOURS.
The criminals almost make convincing arguments for their loose lifestyles, until you realize they’re all full of shit cutthroats who really shouldn’t be working together to assault a fort. The plan stinks, and it should have failed…oh wait, it did, multiple times.
That’s because the plan was to get a gatling gun for our big assault, hands down the most useless gun in the game. I wanted to give that honor to the sniper rifle, but during one gatling gun sequence later in the game, I decided not to use it and just go with a repeater rifle instead. The rifle had better accuracy, and I didn’t die being shot at by guys my gun couldn’t reach.
The missions themselves are fun most of the time. Ride to a spot nice and slow like, and then spend five to ten minutes shooting and moving from one cover point to the next. Simple, really, though there’s a challenge in finding the right line of attack in many missions. But far too many of the mission objectives suck, and you don’t find out until after they’re done how badly the job stinks. At one point, I agreed to get a package for a Mr. Tollets. Well the package I took from the rebels was opium, and it was stolen by me and sold to a rail boss who was using it to keep his Chinese rail workers stoned and enslaved. Well…that’s…fucked up.
During the second half of the game, the hunt for John’s old gang moves to Mexico, where things get even worse. John starts working for the Mexican Army, and for the rebels, so he sees on both sides that most everyone is loco en da cabeza. Despite working with these people seeming like a bad idea, John firebombs a village, and he helps the Army shoot women and old people. Yet, his honor just keeps going up. At the same time, he’s whacking Army soldiers in other missions for the rebels, but no one in the Army notices. This is crazy in the game world because if I shot a sheriff in the middle of nowhere in the Texas part of the game, I’d be wanted instantly. Yet, once I’m in Mexico, my actions don’t affect the authorities on either side of the revolution.
The story reaches a point that feels like the ending. John finds all the gang and they end up dead one way or another. The government releases John’s family, and now would be the best time for a typical Hollywood ending. But not this game. No, it drags on for hours after the natural place for an ending and forces me to stay on for an extended visit with the most creepy family in the world. Rockstar really drops the ball here, because where the strangers in town chatted with John, his son, wife, and “uncle” won’t speak more than a word or two at him while he’s in the house. They can’t sit down to dinner, or even have a family fight. John can go stand out by Jack for an hour and watch the stars with nary a “Yep” between them. In a game that went to all the trouble to make the animals act realistically, that went to the trouble of hiring great voice actors, this time spent on John’s farm is excruciatingly dull AND creepy for the lack of signs of life.
The few missions offered during this time show John arguing with his family, and the only time that John finally has what seems like a family moment with his son, that immediately leads to what should be the definitive ending, because *SPOILER ALERT* John dies when the agency he worked for decides it’s too risky to let him live. Hey, hero dead, and no health regens now. So, that’s game over, right, Bill Paxton? Right!
But NO, then the game moves over to Jack, who then spends more time wandering before a stranger’s quest opens up in Blackwater. This mission is where a government agent is asked about another agent by someone who looks like trouble, and then just gives the answer for exactly where to find the dude. This extremely unrealistic final clue leads Jack to the man who done shot his Pa, Agent Ross. They duel, the credits roll…and the game goes right back to playing! WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING DIE, GAME? YOUR MAIN CHARACTER ALREADY DID!
I mean seriously, how did the game let the story play out to this point without coming to the next obvious ending, Jack getting shot for avenging his dad? Jack only leaves a trail of witnesses who know what he looks like and who he was going to see. But if you play out after the rolling credits, you’re just doing the same missions that “dear” old dad did. Lame and unrealistic given the way the rest of the story played out.
And while I’m complaining, I find it crazy how I don’t have to buy anything as Jack, because everything Pa owned, Jack owns. Even the leases on hotel rooms, years after the death of his father and mother? Even the room rented for his pa in Blackwater by the agency? Right, okay, whatever.
And nothing changes about any location, despite Jack aging several years. The house looks the same; okay, I get that. But when I go to Armadillo and the same guys are still hanging around the bar, and they haven’t changed a bit, it kinda proves that Rockstar didn’t think through this last few hours of game very well. I was almost hoping Bonnie would pop up on the map, so I could continue a different story ending, but the game after that is all quest missions, all the time. It doesn’t give me much incentive to keep playing, or to play the game over.
So this is a muddled review for me because I loved playing the game but hated sitting through the shit story. I wasn’t the least bit surprised that John died, and despite riding with him some 36 hours, I still feel like it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving asshole. But even if Rockstar was going to go that route for the story, they could have skipped the Manson family reunion. It’s so weird to see a completely lifeless and unrealistic family in a game where everything else was full of seeming life and spontaneity. I really didn’t want to sit through a day of cattle ranching, or to go looking for wild horses. But I can’t just get the story missions over with because the other characters KEEP HOURS. I’m not allowed to talk to my son unless it’s 5 AM to 6 PM? He’s keeping a banker’s hours? WHAT THE FUCK?
But if I set aside the crap ending…and almost all of the plot, I really, really did love the game. So, rather than try to split the two scores and give the game a 4 out of 5 and the story a 2, I’m going to give Red Dead Redemption 3 stars. I’d recommend it to most anyone with the patience to sit through the long ass story, but I gotta say, for a game so amazing at reproducing the great outdoors and all its myriad wildlife, it sure did suck at capturing anything resembling human emotion. A great game, but what a shitty story.
