Eventually the game arrived (a day early, thanks www.gameplay.com) and I set off on my adventure into the west, which is when the first problem I had reared its head. I had come into this game with the idea of being a badarse outlaw out on the lamb murdering and robbing anything that moves, but I couldn’t. Although nothing is technically stopping you from being a bad guy the contrast between the John Marston I wanted to be and the John Marston the cut scenes forced me to be was jarring. One minute I was lassoing women and leaving them on train tracks and the next I was telling Bonnie Macfarlane how much a loved my wife and tipping my hat like a Victorian gentleman.
The mild West
It actually made me long for the days when the GTA characters were just silent mannequins of death dealing. Ooh, that was a bit naughty did I just refer to Red Dead Redemption as a GTA game? Well it is and it isn’t. Rockstar have absolutely stuck with the format they seem to think they perfected in GTA 3 whereby the letters appear on the map and you go to the letters and you commit some ‘errand’ for somebody (Whose usually either in the mafia or working for a shady government agency). The world doesn’t feel like GTA though even if the characters do and they really have made an effort to move away from the ‘go to X and kill everyone there’ which I commended. Even if a lot of the missions are things like ‘Herd some cows’ or ‘Abuse a horse’.
Usually when I play a GTA game at the start there is this sense of joy and wonder as you marvel at the fine polish and wonderful craftsmanship worked into the game but as time goes by the goodwill starts to ebb away and it starts to become a bit of a grind. Well Red Dead Redemption is the same. It’s cut into 4 acts so to speak and during act 2 (Mexico) the 160 mile horse rides started to take their toll on me. I’d say it felt like they were padding the game out but it didn’t feel like that, it felt like they were punishing me for daring to get a bit bored. I almost gave up in the final act when it stops being a free roaming cowboy adventure and turns into Harvest Moon.
My point is Red Dead Redemption falls into the same trap every single GTA game falls into – I think the developers get bored and lazy half way through and suddenly the innovation and interesting characters go away and are replaced by shady men in suits who antagonize you. Seriously, think about it, GTA 3, Gay Tony, Happy Biking Adventure, Grand Theft Eastern European War Criminal all end up in you working for the suits and so does Red Dead Redemption. In fact Rockstar could make a game called Grand Theft Dinosaur set in the Jurassic period and you’d still end up working for the CIA or the Italian mafia. Just stop it – I play games to avoid ‘The Man’ and he keeps turning up in my adventures with his glasses and his tax returns.
Leave me alone!
There are other problems with the game – you can go out collecting all manner of random crud like armadillo skins or bear hearts to sell but everything you buy in the shop you can pretty much find for free. It’s like buying bottled water. They also play a rather cheap trick here in letting you buy an awesome bandolier that actually attached to your character model. I got all excited thinking about personalising my character but that was the only example of real customization in the game, poor show.
The absolute worst aspect for me was the music. Apart from some stand out moments like entering Mexico the music feels like a huge let down. There’s no chanting Indians or swelling trumpets just a bit of looped whistling and the strings of the psycho theme up in the mountains around Blackwater. I think I would have felt a lot better about the whole thing if they’d gotten the music right. I actually though the end credits music was a piss take to start with.
Now let’s talk about the multiplayer. Parts of this are very good parts are very disappointing. I kind of expected the ‘Free Roam’ to be a bit floppy after the ‘Free Roam’ in GTA 4. I don’t miss the minigames all that much as trust me I’ve seen people play online poker for real money so seeing 15 year olds play for no money isn’t going to be a true representation of the game. What I do miss is the trains, again. Why do Rockstar insist on taking trains out of multiplayer in every game they produce? All I want to do is somehow force a situation where I will see a fellow human being splatted by an enormous locomotion engine and they bloody won’t let me do it. They also left out the lasso for ‘technical’ reasons but it can’t be any more complicated than rendering 16 horses falling down a cliff and into a river can it? And I’ve seen the game handle that, lots.
The structured multiplayer is better – I honestly ADORE the auto aim and I think every console shooter should use that system. It means you can actually take snapshots even if you don’t have the reactions of a kingfisher on speed. The shootouts are fun and the guns are balanced. I don’t think I’ll play it for very long but it’s the best Rockstar multiplayer offering so far.
So in the end Red Dead Redemption doesn’t feel exactly like GTA in some ways but in a lot of ways it does... The chief one being the sense of vague disappointment at what could have been.
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