Article by: FinalGamer 5/22/2010 4:17:10 PM
("Why yes, I DO feel lucky, bitch. Question is, do you?")
[i]MODERN GAMING[/i]
Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Year: 2010
Genre: Action/Adventure
System: Xbox 360/PS3
The more alert of you will realise why I made a review of Red Dead Revolver this month, with the spiritual sequel of such being revived with much promotion as being essentially Grand Theft Auto in the Wild West. This already sounds awesome, but does it actually work that well? Is your blood money well-spent on this game? Good thing you have me to guide you through the treacherous aisles of the West.....West Street's gamestore that is. So let's get to it, before the fucking heat makes me too limp to finish writing this.
Story - You are John Marston, a Scottish-American former outlaw hunting down an old friend Wild Bunch style on behalf of the newly formed Federal Government in 1911, nearing the end of the Wild West itself. This also concerns the fate of Marston's family back home, who have a sword of revenge permanently hanging over their head with every step John makes in his vengeful business with the Government.
Across the state of New Austin, people are struggling to get by with their lives either by aiding others, carving their own land out in the wilderness, or stealing others' lives and rights. What you decide to do during your quest across New Austin is entirely up to you, whether you want to aid others and create a good reputation for yourself, or take everything for yourself as the meanest son of a bitch this land will ever see this side of Nowhere, USA.
(There are few times in life when a man can make walking look like the coolest thing in existence WITHOUT an explosion)
Gameplay - The big marketing of this game is that it's essentially Grand Theft Auto in the Wild West, as you have guessed. It's a very accurate term for the game though there are other elements that feel inspired by other games. There's a lot of ground to cover so let's start on the basics. The shooting irons.
Marston can wield a variety of weapons from the revolvers to rifles to shotguns to knives, all of which have their own space in his inventory wheel you can access at anytime in-game, as well as within the menu whenever you want to compare stats between them in power, range, reload time and so forth.
The big feature of this game combat-wise, that founded the previous game in title as well, is the Dead Eye, which is essentially an auto-aiming Bullet-Time. When in Dead Eye mode you move your curser over an enemy and it will auto-aim up to as many shots as you can have in your weapon before it has to reload. This is also excellent for getting specific shots such as crippling the legs, disabling their arms or the all-important headshot.
A word of warning. Once you have targeted someone in Dead Eye mode, you cannot stop yourself from shooting said target, even if it is a civilian, so be fucking careful when using this in populated areas. The only way to leave Dead Eye without shooting is by pressing the same button that starts it. Even so, watch your aim.
Speaking of which, pressing the aim button quickly when facing the general direction of an enemy will auto-lock on to them for a short time, which is very helpful in the most intense of battles. Now that we've covered the shooting, let's cover everything else about this game. Brace yourself, it's gonna be a long review.
(RIFLE CONFIRMED FOR BRAWL!)
Starting in the village of the MacFarlane Ranch, it sets up like any other recent Rockstar game. You have a general store, a person to go do missions for, bounty poster, a stagecoach to travel to another town if you don't want to manually ride there, a small house you own for saving the game and a minigame. This is what you get the moment you've saved for the first time. Now that's a lot to handle so we'll break this down from the main stuff to the optional shit. The main mode of transport is the horse, of course.
Riding the horse is pretty easy after a while and you'll pick it up in no time. Horses have a Stamina meter, similar to in Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess, but without shoving carrots up your horse's ass, allegedly.
Instead it's a blue bar of endurance that will decrease when you spur your horse to go faster, but be warned, if you keep at it too long when the meter is depleted, the horse will go "fuck this shit" and buck you off.
Also, while we're on about how to move across the land besides horses and stagecoaches and a train that cuts across the wilderness, you cannot swim. Seriously. You might think this is not something you will address, until you die with your horse in Thieves' Landing. Seriously, fuck that swamphole and its stupid fucking bridge that isn't big enough for equine traffic.
(Tom Sawyer's fucked now)
Anyways, moving on, there are the missions. There are four kinds of missions in the game.
The main story ones which are signified by large letters of the people who give you the missions, the Stranger ones which are shown as question marks and while optional have their own little side stories, the random encounters shown in blue which I will explain later, and lastly the bounties which I have to explain a bit more later.
The main story missions range from escorts to racing to straight-out gunfights, as you'd expect. Once the mission is initiated you can only quit the mission by failing, and when you do, you have the choice of quitting or restarting from a checkpoint, which is very helpful.
Stranger missions take a little longer and you may even have to wait a while to continue further on with it, but because of this, they do not interfere with other missions you do while during them and can be completed at any time.
Then there are the random encounters. Shown on the maps randomly within your area as blue circles, similar to the Errands of Bully, these will take place at anytime and you can choose to do them or not without having any effect at all on your reputation. A number of random encounters I faced involved:
People asking me to help rescue friends, people having their horses stolen wanting me to get them back, people trying to steal my horse, ambushes by gang members, holdups of stagecoaches or wagons by gang members, drunkards assaulting and killing barmaids or prostitutes, being challenged to collect a number of plants or kill a number of animals within a time limit and finally, being challenged to a duel. All of them are pretty easy to guess but you have to pay attention to when they happen.
(The only way a man can be disarmed in the Wild West)
Out of all of them, the duel is the only one actually unique to its own idea. The duels work exactly like in Red Dead Revolver. When you accept the challenge, you face off against one of the land's many gun-wielding reprobates and as soon as you see "DRAW", you either pull the right analog stick back and then forward like in the original Red Dead Revolver, or press the Left Trigger which you will probably use always because it is the main button for aiming.
You have two choices when you draw your weapon in a duel, which automatically puts you into Dead Eye mode.
One, you can just shoot the fucker and kill him. Two, you can try the even trickier shot of shooting the gun out of his hand, which boosts your reputation a LOT more than just straight-up killing him.
Now I better explain about reputation in this game, because it comes in two forms. Fame, and Honour. Fame is how well-known you are and it increases by various acts or missions be they good or evil, in varying degrees. For example, killing someone in a duel gives you 50 points of Fame, but disarming him in a duel nets you a whopping 200 points. The only benefit of Fame is that it reduces the prices of items in stores as well as increase the value of items you sell.
Honour is the game's morality system with two ends of it, from the Good to the Bad, but things might get Ugly. The only things that are affected by Honour is certain groups of people will like you or hate you more depending on how much or how little Honour you have, as well as some side effects such as how much it takes to bribe the sherriff. But not the deputy, because fuck him.
On that note, time to talk about Bounties. Wanted posters are posted up around the towns and you can go hunt down the wanted people with a reward for killing him, but if you take him back alive, you get twice as much money. Some of the random encounters will also put in added bonuses for bringing back wanted people alive, and there are some missions which REQUIRE you bring them back alive.
So how do you do it? With the lasso, which you obtain from Bonnie MacFarlane and is in your weapon inventory. The lasso is used for two things. Trapping people to hogtie them whereby you can then carry them back on foot, carry them back by horse, or setting them free like a dumb-ass trout. The lasso is also used to break in horses, which require you lassoing a horse, then getting on its back to partake in a small easy QTE where you keep your balance on the horse before it eventually becomes tame.
(All the horses in this game are female....even the stallions. Believe me, I checked)
Dealing with the law is a more deeper matter in this game than in Rockstar's other works. When you commit a crime, you may have an eyewitness within the area who will run to report the police. If you fail to stop this eyewitness by any means, you become Wanted with a bounty on your head, and the sherriffs will come after you. Strangers will also not give you missions during this.
There are ways however to get rid of being Wanted. You can either bribe the police, which costs less if you are more Honourable with a good record, or you can head to the nearest Telegraph Office and wire the bounty to the police, essentially paying off your crime, like how you could choose to pay for your crimes in Oblivion, but with a hell of a lot more criminal scum.
There is also the much rarer Pardon Letter, which is essentially the Get Out Of Jail card, allowing all crimes and bounty on you to be cleared for absolutely nothing. Naturally this is a very rare and very awesome item to possess.
Speaking of items, there's a large variety of stuff to obtain in the game. Let's start with your inventory. Your inventory, separate from the pause menu, is split into three categories. Consumables, Kit and Provisions. Consumables are items you can immediately use, such as Medicine to restore health, Chewing Tobacco to restore some of the Dead Eye meter and Apples to restore your horse's stamina.
Kit is the section of items that aid you in the field. A few examples are the maps which allow you to fast travel to locations within that area, a bandana which decreases your wanted level more when wearing it during crimes, and lastly the campfire. The campfire works pretty much like the tents of Final Fantasy, surprisingly, and are essentially a save point in the wilderness.
You can also use them to, like other save points, change costumes and refill your ammo capacity. The unique thing of the campfire, is you can travel to anywhere in the wilderness that you have the map for. Lastly there's Provisions, which are things you obtain in the wilderness which you can sell in stores for profit, mainly herbs or animal skin and meat. The rarer the animal, the better the money.
("My good sir, could you spare me a Salisbury Steak with cheese!?" Lolcats, 1911)
Another thing to collect in the game are Costumes. Costumes can either be bought from tailors or obtained by embarking upon a treasure hunt to collect all the various scraps of clothing, which all have different criteria to obtain ranging from capturing the bounty of a specific gang alive to merely buying one of the scraps from a tailor. Some costumes have different abilities,
Speaking of treasure hunts, there's also TREASURE HUNTING to do! It feels like Wind Waker except 100% less sailing, and maybe 20% more drowning if you're a retard. After a certain random encounter you obtain a Treasure Map, which gives you a few directions to where you can go to find treasure, which you can sell for an awesome price. This also brings me to another thing about Red Dead Redemption. Challenges.
Similar to Borderlands, a variety of Challenges can be unlocked, such as Survivalist which consists of collecting a certain number of herbs, Master Hunter which involves killing and skinning a number of creatures, Sharpshooter which deals on shooting a certain number of things in certain conditions, and so forth. All they really do is increase your Fame.
Lastly there is an online multiplayer Free Mode where you and up to 15 other people can wreak havoc. Basically you now have The Wild Bunch as a videogame, and this is awesome if you have a good enough posse to ride with, but you don't have to team up, as you also can have Mexican Standoffs like at the end of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, or be a fugitive on the run and see how long you survive. Fun for all the family of friends you never had!
(Even for little Billy who doesn't understand how guns work yet)
Jesus, I think we've covered everything about the gameplay at last. The heat is starting to wear down on my skull now, I can feel like my skin is sticking to the base of my skull like your bare back against a car seat. OH shit wait the minigames, ffffffff.
Red Dead Redemption, as the final teeny tiny waffle on the gorgefest of gameplay it is, also has several minigames you can play purely for money. Horseshoe is basically the ring toss (and is personally my favourite game for the pretty good controls of working your arm to swing and release).
Poker is, like real life, a game of bluffing and generally not THAT difficult if you're brave enough to up the ante and make the opponent fold, even if you, like me, have absolutely no fucking clue how to play it.
Blackjack is nothing but luck, of three people versus the dealer, and despite the fact I enjoy playing Blackjack in real life, in the game it's not that fun, and I wasn't even sure how much money I won from it. Also I don't know what a Joker means in Blackjack.
Arm Wrestling is just a button-mashing minigame where you rapidly tap A to fight against the other's arm, or hold A to resist and regain some endurance back.
Liar's Dice is a weird game of chance where you have to bet how many dice roll up a certain number. So, you bet three of them roll up as having 2, if that happens you win.
And finally, there's Five-Finger Fillet, that game where you stab a knife between your fingers really fast, which is by far the most difficult minigame, being a combination of a QTE and memory game, given a few buttons to put in and having to put them all in before time runs out. Yeah, it's quite difficult if you don't pay utmost attention but hey, it's optional. Actually all the minigames only increase in difficulty if you raise your bet higher.
Well, now that I've covered every aspect of the amazingly fun-filled wasteland of New Austin, let's get to the technical stuff.
(Pictured: Grippingly tense gameplay)
Graphics - Using the RAGE engine, the characters have more of the design and look of people from Bully rather than of GTA IV, which is not a bad thing considering the excellent work done on characters looking like proper characters. Go compare the screenshots of this game to Red Dead Revolver. Looks good don't it? You know it does, the people move and feel very realistically, right down to the haggard scars and swinging bloated faces on the end of a noose. The wilderness itself is very good too with the odd tumbleweed, a "variety" of cacti, prickly pears and occasional herbs, as well as all the goddamn animals from leaping buck deer to flapping vultures.
Horses are incredible in this game. I can't count the number of times I've just stared at the ass of my horse as we rode onwards into the sunset to Cueva Seca, the muscles so well-defined, so realistically tensing and relaxing with every thunderous pound of its hoof, seeing the different levels of muscular tautness in each speed of the equine.
I just....wanted to stroke that magnificent rear and feel those muscles as they flex under my warm fingers......it gets lonely out in the wilderness and sometimes the horse is the only interesting thing to look at, when the beauty of the desert sunsets start to fade on you in all their shades of fuchsia.
Anyways, uhh as I was saying before I was....distracted, the graphics vary in detail for various things, but when they count, they do count. People act like people, horses feel like horses, and plants, who gives a fuck, it all fits into one wonderful view that brings you easily into its wilderness.
(Ohhh god those haunches will be in my prairie dreams tonight)
Music/Sound - What little music there is in the game does its job well in emulating the Western movie feel complete with light Spanish guitar and lonely whistles, with the mariachi band really picking up the pace when the bullets start flying. You'll rarely ever notice the music in the game, and that's kind of a good thing because it's nothing but background noise, further pulling you into the wilderness, and it does this job excellently.
Sound effects are brilliant too, with even individual footstep sounds on different grounds, be they the clattering of rock, the knocking of wood or the clanking of a metal rooftop I once clambered up onto in a port town.
Even the horses have this and they sound just as good! And then there's the voice acting, which is mostly good, enough that you feel every creator's personality, but nothing truly award-winning, they do their job to the limit that we wanted for each character from Marston himself all the way to the blackjack dealer.
So for those of you who were wondering, is it like GTA in the Wild West? The answer is, yes, with some small elements reminiscent of Bully, Borderlands and Wind Waker. And it is awesome.
Fun and Innovation - 5
Replayability - 4
Gameplay - 5
Presentation - 4