Although it is not quite as lucrative to be a completely psychopathic murder in Red Dead Redemption, you still get paid to murder people, but as a vigilante instead of just for fun. You also get the choice to just capture the baddies instead of killing them, which I guess is Rockstar’s way of saying “See, you don’t necessarily have to go to hell for this.” They even give you spontaneous chances to save hookers from being murdered outside of bars. It’s good to see Rockstar giving you the option of taking the moral high ground. However you do still have to shoot people…lots of people. Like almost everything you do results in your murdering someone or something. My first horse race resulted in me killing my horse three times before I had finally memorized where all the cliffs were. Granted I wasn’t supposed to be killing my horses, it just happened, way too easily. Horses aren’t the brightest animals in the world, but I believe in the real world the horse would not have galloped off of the cliff even if I was spurring it on. But I digress.
The point I am trying to make is that Rockstar is good at what it does. Red Dead Redemption has a pretty good story, relatively easy to pick up gameplay, and the all important aspect of any Rockstar game, gratuitous violence. But it’s not perfect, and it bothers me that so many other reviewers treat like it is something really fantastic. The fact of the matter is that Rockstar doesn’t have original thoughts anymore. Red Dead is fun, no doubt about that, but is it ground breaking in any way? Absolutely not. RDR is GTA in the old west. Instead of vehicles of 20 or so different types and colors for you to steal, you have horses, of one type with 4 colors. And I suppose you can steal some wagon’s or stage coaches, but all of these also rely on the 4 different horses for acceleration. You also have the wonderfully unoriginal mission format. You get the mission, go to the place, kill everyone inside and return home before you get caught by either the lawmen (police) or gang members (gang members). There is even a little map that tells you where to go just like in GTA. Like I said, its still fun, but it is far from original.
There is another problem with Red Dead Redemption which has carried over from GTA. Whenever you slightly nudge someone in this game they take a dive like they are playing soccer for
I can’t help it that the walking and horse riding controls aren’t perfect, so I shouldn’t fail a side mission where I am trying to help round up some criminals because the stupid lawman stands too close to my horse. And it’s not even like in Assassin’s creed where you kind of bump into people and they kind of shrug it off and keep going on their merry way. If you bump into someone in RDR you might as well just turn around and shoot them in the head because they are going to be really pissed at you like you had walked up and smacked a baby out of their hands. And thanks to RDR’s Dead Eye shooting system where you can slow time down to target multiple points on a person, you could probably shoot them 6 or so times before they finish calling you a jerk. I mean I get a little frustrated when people don’t make an effort to move to one side on the side walk but I don’t dive to the dirt screaming “Hey, watch it!”
This is a very small problem, but it’s the small problems that always bug me the most. Why not just take a little extra time and fix that mechanic of the game? I mean they thought to include a scoreboard that keeps track of how many of every thing I have killed, and how many times I chose to skip the waste of time riding shotgun in a stage coach, and which particular revolver I use most, which is particularly pointless considering that there is really no noticeable difference between each gun of a certain type as far as killing capacity.
It may sound like I have been complaining a lot, but that’s only because I am. But I want to reiterate, it’s a good game. I recommend it. It’s a lot of fun, for a lot of the same reasons that GTA is always fun. It even has a better story than most GTA games. My concern is that, with little problems like I have mentioned above, Rockstar is becoming too mainstream, and when game producers become mainstream, they never take the time to fix the little problems. These problems will then plague their games forever more. So while hoping that these are the last I see of this problem, I give Red Dead Redemption, available for the PS3 and Xbox 360, eight Dead Eye shots to the face out of ten.
All non-BBC photos from IGN and its affiliates
After Shadow of the Colossus, there is no excuse for bad horse AI. This game looks fun though. Like playing through one of the "Man with no name" movies.
ReplyDeleteBill, You know that shadow of the Colossus was one of the most metal games ever. A game of just boss fights, why didn't they think of that sooner, and why isn't there a second one?
ReplyDeletePaul,
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Guardian
I gotta say, the weakest part of the game was the story. Marston is so weak as a character; you'd think even though he wants to redeem himself, he'd still have some balls (the guy is killing people constantly!). Every single place he goes, he gets shoved around by the locals just so that Rockstar could put in some lame missions and one-time-use play mechanics. The story would have been much more enticing if Marston was hounding his various quarries through every single mission, beating clues out of people and putting fear into his prey as he follows right on their heels. I understand what you're saying Grizz, maybe they wanted to be a bit morally open. But this is Rockstar we're talking about! They didn't get rich making Hello Kitty Island Adventure! It's been cracking skulls and shooting as much as you can. The main missions seem like a waiting game until you do enough of them to complete the over-arching objective of the game: find the guys, save your family.
ReplyDeleteIt's almost as if the role of the side missions, diversions, etc. and the main story missions have been reversed. I found it more exciting and tense figuring out how to kill the cougars (mountain lions, there are no dive night-clubs in Armadillo) with a knife, than it was to capture a Mexican Army base with a bunch of rebels.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
You said it yourself, Rockstar is trying to give you more control over your moral code, like in a Fable or Mass Effect type game. The problem is that they are new at it. They have never really left anything up to the player. And rather than test this new game aspect on a GTA game and risk upsetting their loyal fans and turning people off of the game altogether, they try the idea out on a game they can afford to not have everyone like. Maybe its just because I have always liked Westerns, and have seen a lot of them, but rarely are the characters described any better than in this game. Like in most Westerns you are just supposed to accept that your character was or is an ultimate bad-ass. This is much the same in RDR, once you accept that he is the reluctant warrior who thought all of this was behind him, you can see why he lets himself get pushed around a little and also why he is so eased with killing everyone, its not like he isn't used to it, he just wishes he wasn't always in that position. That's my explanation. The more exciting parts are the things that we feel that John Marston hasn't done before, like fighting a cougar, whereas he and his gang have done these crazy shenanigans before, so he treats it more nonchalantly, as should we.
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