Red Dead Redemption Review (PS3)
by Tom Devaney | Dec 11th, 2015
Old Review || Updated Review
It’s been years since I’ve left your beautiful, immersive world, and yet I still think of you. My time spent as John Marston looking to redeem myself, looking to make right on the way I used to live, is over, yet I still think of it. My time being the most precise gunslinger in the whole west is over, yet I still have that trigger finger. Red Dead Redemption may be 5 years old, yet it’s still one of the best video games ever made (if not the best one ever made).
Red Dead Redemption introduces you to its cowboy, and the world you will be entering, through a cutscene that gives you an immediate feel of what Rockstar has planned for you.
In this cutscene, you, John Marston, are riding a train through a desert in the Wild West. You get a good look at John: he’s a gruffy middle-aged man with scars on his face wearing a cattleman hat. He doesn’t look like your typical cowboy, depending on who you’re thinking of. If you’re thinking of a handsome, clean cut John Wayne, you’d be mistaken. This cowboy’s past is written on his face, and that face is rough.
Anyways, the cutscene might focus on John, but he isn’t the main focus of the scene. Throughout the ride, there are people talking. One of the conversations that is happening is between a young woman and an older lady. The younger lady is a devout follower of God, and she is talking about the savagery of the Native Americans, who live out west. She thinks that it is their job as civilized white folk to civilize these savages. Throughout this whole scene, it’s easy to tell it’s a Rockstar game given how well handled the scene is done—Rockstar consistently delivered some of the best looking cutscenes ever—and from the characters and dialogue. Rockstar’s knack for making realistic portrayals of stupid people is something that hasn’t diminished since the first Grand Theft Auto I played, Grand Theft Auto 3, and this scene shows the game will have plenty of satire.
But something else this scene shows is the actual theme of the game. Old ways vs new ways. Native Americans do things different than the more advanced white people, and as time has told us, the more advanced white people won. Yet this theme also applies to John Marston: he is a cowboy in a time that is advancing towards more advanced technology like automobiles. So does the west even need the old way of Cowboys anymore? This is a theme that is central to the game, and you will see that answer unfold as you play the game.
All of this stuff that is going on (beautiful cut scenes, fantastic writing, and central themes) gets me freaking giddy as a gamer who loves all of that deep, literary stuff, but one thing that I love in particular, whether it’s in a video game, a book, or a movie, is character development. Do you know where this is going?
You might know where I’m headed if you’ve played any Grand Theft Auto before: Rockstar are masters at making extremely well written, likeable, yet flawed, characters for you to play as. John Marston is all of these things.
As you travel through the west you get to know what type of a person John is, and you really get to bond with him. John is an interesting character because he is a tough mofo that will mess up anyone he feels he has to, but he’s also got a friendly vibe going on. This is an example that shows how he’s not just a one dimensional character; instead, he’s a human being with different sides.
Like I said above, complex, well written characters, themes, and great story elements are things that I love to see in video games. Yet as a gamer, I also know it’s really important for a game to have great game mechanics in place. Luckily, Rockstar delivers on that front too.
John Marston is the slickest shooter in the west, and to make you feel as slick as him, Red Dead Redemption introduced the mechanic Red Eye, which is actually almost the same thing as Bullet Time from the Max Payne series. What Red Eye does is it slows time down, and then you can aim at any animal or person and select spots on that person or animal that you will shoot at once you exit Red Eye. This might seem useless on just a person who is walking around on his two feet, but if he’s riding a horse, Red Eye will be your best friend.
Or you can use it while hunting. Speaking of hunting, hunting was one of the single, best features of Red Dead Redemption, and it started a spark through the game industry. You were given challenges in the game that would propel you to the status of The Legend of the Wild West (if completed), and some of these challenges revolved around hunting. Hunting consisted of you exploring the open-world Rockstar crafted for you and searching for increasingly rarer animals and skinning them (there were separate challenges for both hunting and skinning animals). This was a fantastic feature because hunting animals propelled me to travel across every inch of the extremely detailed world searching for different animals. Hunting was so good that games like Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, and Assassin’s Creed 3 copied it. It was so good that I would actually love to make a game solely based around hunting (I’ll go into this another day though).
All of these fantastic gameplay mechanics with the other elements like great writing, story, custscenes, and acting made the single-player an experience like no other. But the game also included a fully fledged multiplayer mode!
The multiplayer is practically an earlier version of Grand Theft Auto: Online (in my humble opinion, a much better version). This means you start online in the same open-world that you have in single-player; the difference is there’s 15 other people with you in the multiplayer world. This gives you the opportunity to gang up with your buddies and terrorize loners, other gangs, or even the inhabitants of the land you’re on.
There are also some of the typical modes you might expect a multiplayer game to have, which you can access at several points scattered throughout the world: deathmatch, along with other competitive modes, and online co-op. The competitive modes weren’t my favorite at first because there was a pretty big difficulty curve for me, but I eventually got pretty good at it.
Fun fact: something that makes me feel pretty proud is that it was actually really tough for me to get good at the competitive multiplayer because I had turned off auto aim, and I was playing with people that had it turned it. Eventually, I got better than a lot of the people who had auto-aim turned on.
Now, some of the best memories I had with the multiplayer took place in the co-op mode. You had the choice to partner up with some buddies or strangers and take on a bunch of bandits through several really well designed missions. I have to say that I probably wouldn’t have had as good of a time if I didn’t play with my really good friend. Teaming up with someone on the same skill level as myself and trying to complete all the missions was a great feeling.
It’s crazy. A game that has such a phenomenal single-player mode doesn’t need a multiplayer mode because the cake is delicious enough, but damn, when you add on the whipped cream and the cherry on top, the cake just gets better. It’s truly a spoiling moment because usually games just have a nice, spongy cake, with some alright tasting toppings on the top, or they have a dry brick of a cake with some of that Oreo cookie topping. So the fact Red Dead Redemption has that ice cream cake with the Oreo cookie topping makes all other games like dirt in comparison, and it’s provided me a harder time with finding a game better than itself. Truly, there is no flaw inside this game at all, but one bad thing that has come from it is that usually games are never as good as this one. ‘Tis the life of a gamer who is getting older…
Conclusion:
This game has had one of the biggest impacts on me as a gamer.
The writing, the wit, the story, the characters, the beauty, the feel of hunting exotic animals or wanted outlaws, the multiplayer, the voice acting, the cutscenes, the EVERYTHING: all of these things were absolutely top notch in the game, which provided me with an experience unlike any other. Having to think about this game now as I embark on my journey as a game developer makes me realize one thing: if I do not make a game as substantial or as valuable as Red Dead Redemption, I will have failed as a game developer/maker.
