Red Dead Redemption Review: Busy in the Wild West

By now Rockstar is synonymous with open-world, sandbox games. They're great at giving us a huge story, with a huge environment littered with tools, then standing back with their arms crossed with an expecting expression on their face. With GTA, they've worked with big cities and a variety of firearms. This time in Red Dead Redemption, we get a large, rolling ecosystem, populated with all manner of lawmen, banditos, and outlaws with turn of the century weaponry.

You play as John Marston, family man, reformed outlaw, and current dog of the federal government. In a nutshell, some government suits have taken his family hostage, and John's forced to hunt down his old posse to get them back.

If I may borrow something from Gamesradar, John Marston has about as much depth as a cardboard cut out with a fancy cowboy hat somehow balancing on top of it. While Marston seems to look like a conflicted, reformed outlaw forced to dirty his hands again to save his family, Gamesradar's review bring up a point that pretty much Marston's only big defining feature is his drive to rescue his family. This one-dimensional character is made obvious when Marston is promised help on capturing his old gang, only to either get short changed in the end or double crossed.

From Gamesradar: an interesting analogy

It happens so so often in story missions that it starts to get predictable and makes you wonder just how gullible Marston is. Mentioned in most other reviews, your entry into Mexico seems to pad for time unnecessarily and drags on for a long time when a few missions could've sufficed. You seriously get promises of capturing one of your targets in almost every mission and every mission pretty much ends along the lines of, “LOL, sorry! I don't have anything useful for you! Come back later!”

Story aside, Red Dead Redemption pretty much rewards classic sandbox behavior, and by that, I mean wandering aimlessly looking for cool stuff to do. Crackdown does this with agility orbs scattered around. In GTA, you might stumble across a cool car you want to steal or maybe even a conveniently parked helicopter. I remember being tempted more then once robbing stores in Saints Row for money, only to be chased by the cops and fending them off.

In Red Dead Redemption, you can ride your horse for a few minutes and encounter a man being chased by cougars. Other times it'll be lawmen chasing an outlaw. Or maybe a victim asking you to catch a horse thief. Several times in the game I simply get sucked into hunting wildlife. On more than one occasion, as soon as I shoot one bear, I find out another bear wandered into the area as I tried skinning it. Sometimes there's a genuinely painful choice between fast travel huffing it by horse manually. I might be strapped for time, but by fast traveling via stagecoach or campsite, I miss out on fun little nuggets of adventure.

Robbing with a bandanna on is fun. Not only do you look cool, but it keeps your fame and honor intact.

And running into marauding bandits or murderous wildlife is enhanced by relatively simple controls and weapons. While you can turn off this feature, the game pretty much let's you look at a general target and lock onto with when you aim your gun. It's dead simple with a large group of predators/gunmen and the weapons feel well adjusted to combat. A revolver shoots fast and reloads fast but generally has less ammo than a rifle which takes longer to reload.

Even if you turn off the lock on aim, dead eye vision turns even your starting six shooter into a land clearing lead spitter. With it on, you can take out several easily without much effort, but the dead eye meter recharges slowly unless you score some kills manually. It strikes a fine balance in making the game challenging enough while making harder part easier if you ration your dead eye.

I mentioned this in the picture above,  but there is a morale system in the game. Honor is a measure of your good and evil choices while fame is a reflection of all the missions you've done making it more likely that people recognize you. I should mention that while present in the game, it hasn't really affected how I play the game. I played through as a good guy for the most part, playing the role of a reformed outlaw trying to do (mostly) good but it doesn't change the overall outcome of the game.

There's a lot of stuff to do in single player, simply put. Story missions, side missions, random events, hunting and gathering, treasure hunting, outlaw strongholds, all within a few moments of galloping across the wild west landscape. But multiplayer? It gets a little more complicated.

The biggest thing about multiplayer is free roam mode. In a free roam session, several people in a single lobby are placed together in their own wild west landscape. The best way to enjoy free roam mode is to get together with some friends and form a posse. Together, hitting strongholds together, looking to finish hunting challenges, and generally exploring is more fun. Alone, the best you can do with random strangers who may not have a mic on is troll them with random acts of violence. The problem I have with multiplayer in general, including competitive modes as well as free roam is the Call of Duty-style of progression. Everything you do earns you experience points to level up, from hunting to killing other players and hitting strongholds (the most popular as it has the biggest yield).

An example of some random shits and giggles you and some friends can find

The progression by itself should work in competitive modes, but as I enjoy single player a lot more, this leaves everyone else time to level up their characters, letting them access better stuff to spawn kill me with (you always spawn near where you died, making it easy to spawn kill). I didn't get a decent horse for three days, so my friends always traveled faster than me for that time, and got stuck in one area being spawn killed by someone with a much better double action revolver and much faster turkmen horse.

However, the free roam still works with friends, though wildlife becomes much more sparse and random encounters don't occur. Taking multiplayer and single player together gives you the impression that Red Dead Redemption is the culmination of all of Rockstar's current experience on making open-ended games. I have friends who complain about a lack of focus in games like RDR.
 
But the thing RDR does best is have plenty of stuff lying around this big, unfocused play area. You can't go five minutes without being distracted by something cool, from a stagecoach attack to the sight of a rare herd of buffalo tempting you to skin them for profit.

Images from IGN and Gamesradar, obviously.