Red Dead Redemption

I haven’t much enjoyed playing Red Dead Redemption.

Controls

Despite using an analog stick to direct movement, your character, John, can only move on foot at four speeds. The two slowest are controlled alone by the analog stick. You hold a button to run and tap it to sprint. It’s mind boggling that you don’t have full analog control of John’s speed. Any speed slower than sprinting when on foot or riding a horse is intolerable. I constantly tapped the run button to sprint. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. I think this game halved the life of that button on my controller. John has too much inertia, so when you want him go from a walk to a run or vice versa, there’s a noticeable delay.

Riding a horse is a chore. Horses have no sense of sticking to the beaten path, following another horse, or avoiding trivial obstacles. You get hung up on rocks and cacti constantly if you’re not vigilantly steering it around the next bend in the trail. God help you if you run it head-first into an obstacle or a steep slope and have to turn around sharply. There’s a way to follow someone on a horse by holding a button, but if they turn too suddenly your horse blunders off the path. You’d like to be able to run at a gallop and enjoy the sights, but you have to choose between going slow or seeing the sights, which is a shame since it takes forever to get places.

Auto aim is enabled by default and is too easy. You simply press the target button, then the shoot button, and repeat ad infinitum until all the enemies are dead. That’s most of the gunplay. You can disable auto aim, but typically you’re shooting from a moving horse or vehicle at tiny targets with a tiny reticule, which isn’t reliably doable unless they’re at point-blank range (which the dumb AI will do sometimes). Since the gunplay is so repetitive, I didn’t find the challenge of manual aim very compelling, so I just left it as auto. There’s bullet time, which is called Dead Eye, that you can briefly use for showdowns and hitting multiple targets in fights. Using Dead Eye circumvents any need to become good at gunplay and would feel like cheating if it weren’t so ingrained in the objectives and narrative. There’s inexplicably no button to reload, so sometimes I found myself shooting at nothing to force a reload before taking on more enemies. Crouching and taking cover are two different buttons for some reason, instead of having John do the right thing. They combined crouching with moving stealthily, but they could have just made stealth part of walking slowly.

Mechanics

There’s a store and money system, but there isn’t much worth buying. I bought a lucky rabbit’s foot near the beginning of the game that increases the money you find on dead bodies. That’s about it. The guns you start out with are good enough, and you pick up the other weapons you need along the way for free. There’s a ton of horses for sale for a moderate, identical price, but aside from looks, they all go the same, normal speed. There are doctors you can visit and medicines you can buy, but your health regenerates, so there’s no need to ever use these things except for side quests where you heal other characters.

There’s a morality system that has no real impact on the course of the game. I played mostly good and it was boring; evil seems to be the way to go. There’s a notoriety system that defers posses and bounty hunters from pursuing you as you grow more famous, but this doesn’t affect you if you play as good.

John can travel quickly to across the map by “using” a “camp site” item from his inventory. Every time you want to do this, you have to run out of town, away from any beaten trail, into the middle of nowhere, and strike camp. This can take anywhere from ten seconds to a minute. Then John packs it all up and magically appears at the destination on foot without a horse. Rockstar obviously had a checklist of western things to include in their game, and this was the only way to shoehorn in campfires.

There are several uninteresting side quests to increase John’s skill that involve shooting wildlife and collecting herbs. The wildlife are dumb and not challenging. You can skin dead animals by pressing a button. It cuts to an upward shot of John as he skins them for about five seconds, but it doesn’t show anything (the cowards) and the sound effects don’t sound realistic. Also, I’m pretty sure it takes longer than five seconds to skin an entire horse. The only one of these skill side quests worth a damn is the treasure hunting. You find vague, hand-drawn maps that illustrate landscape features you’ll see throughout the land.

The AI is primitive and not challenging. During battles, enemies stay in one place and don’t flank me or move to better cover as I move up. Heads pop up in the same places at regular intervals. These guys are idiots. The only way to die in this game is to be surprised by a new weapon (bombs), make a dumb mistake, or being overwhelmed by superior numbers. In the largest engagements, the game will face you off against ten or so, but even this is unfair for them if you’ve played for a while.

Story

John’s backstory is somewhat interesting, but it’s lamely developed as awkward, rambling, shouted conversations between characters as they travel to destinations. The distances traveled are so large that the dialogue expands to fill a lot of the time, and in doing so becomes vapid and (confusingly) contradictory. It gets repetitive after having the same kind of long, drawn-out conversations with one character after another.

Effects

The only reason to play this game is to see and hear what it has to offer, which is quite stellar. I’ve never seen a landscape so lifelike. Despite there being many low-resolution textures, everything blends together well into a seamless vista. Cacti and shrubs cast ground shadows and lend a sense of depth. Rolling hills add imperfections and visual detail to a vast area that can be largely explored on a whim. Rain puddles accumulate in flat areas and reflect the light. America is somewhat bland and uniform, a mostly flat desert with some hills and valleys. Mexico is far more lush and colorful, with those tall, narrow, red columns of rock. There are some problems with scenery popping in. The voice acting is superb, especially for the character Landon Ricketts. Animations and lip sync are top notch. It’s a visceral experience.

Closing comments

It’s obvious what Rockstar has done here. They took their beloved Grand Theft Auto game play and slapped a western look on it. Rockstar really makes just a family of nearly identical games called Grand Theft Blah. In Red Dead Redemption’s case, it’s Grand Theft Horse. I haven’t played much of Grand Theft Auto, but I recognize the same formula: the same map, the same third-person perspective, the same kind of side quests. In truth there isn’t any game mechanic innovation here to see. It’s just a different skin, albeit a pretty one.

Regardless of whether the game mechanics are innovative, they’re bad in their own right, lacking compelling ideas and just seeming lazy. They took a couple core ideas, shooting guns and riding horses, and instead of making compelling experiences, they merely combined them together in obvious, boring, and repetitive ways. Most of the quests and side quests offer identical experiences. Once you’ve played a few, you’ve played them all. They artificially inflate the length of the game by making you repeat things over and over. What’s sad is how amazing this game really could have been.

In summary, the game mechanics and narrative are terrible, but the game looks beautiful and sounds superb. Rent, don’t buy.

6/10