2.5/5 ★ – CyRevenant's review of Red Dead Redemption.

This is more of a record of my thoughts on the game in a rambling mess. Music. Music is fine. Some pieces sound suitably westerney, and they come in at nice times. But none of it memorable. World design and layout. I honestly found the map confusing and exhausting. Again, I can see that a lot of effort was put in, but so much of it just felt impossible to navigate to me. A lot of it just looked the same. It feels like a game designed to navigate by pointer and map, because I didn't much learn how to navigate naturally beyond some broad strokes. Cholla Springs. Especially. All of it looks the same. Horses. The horses feel disposable. You can't name them. They just appear when you whistle. Get a deed to a good one and you can just spawn it forever. I didn't form attachments to any of the horses. Also so many missions (GTA style) you run out of a building and an NPC shouts "Here's horses I had prepared for us" just like in GTA when a mission provides a car for you. But I'm playing it post "Compliments of the House" DLC so I can just whistle and spawn a better horse. Which I did. Constantly. It struck me at some point, that so many of the NPCs are named, and go about their days. I bumped into a man by the horseshows on McFarlane Ranch and he said his own name while complaining I was starting something. Despite that, the NPCs feel less charming or real than the much less detailed and cartoonish NPCs of other games, such as Breath of the Wild. Less believable. Is this the Uncanny Valley effect? Would a more impressionist approach to character yield a more immersive world? Side games. The side games were an absolute pain. I spent ages playing Poker, Blackjack, Horseshoes, Perudo (called Liar's Dice here), and it all felt like a waste of my time. The pacing was slow, which makes sense considering how immersive they're trying to make it. But it just all feels like a pointless waste of time. Not really any benefit to it, there's one moment where for story purposes you have to play Poker and you just automatically win. Also, John Marston throws misogynist jeers at the other men at the table and I could really have done without that. Traversing the world. Was boring. It felt boring. It takes so damn long to get from place to place and it's not interesting. Occasionally a random side quest is thrown up, but I'm galloping at full speed and kind of zoning out from all this identical savannah so I half the time end up running over a randomer on the road, or riding right through a holdup or execution and getting shot. The Gang dens are equally odd and a little jarring. You're out riding, and suddenly a marker appears and the game says "GO TALK TO THE SHERRIF." And I just think "Why?" But you do and shoot some bandits I guess and maybe get a small reward. Stats. So many stats. The game is tracking people shot, each kind of person shot, animals skinned, animals shot, what kind of animals shot and skinned. It seems to be encouraging me to get titles but again, it didn't offer me any compelling reason why so I just ignored it. The side missions all feel kind of weirdly detached. A lot of them don't give any closure, conclusion, or afters. They just kind of... End. I think of the old woman looking for her husband. You find he's dead and that's... It. No going back to the woman. There's a cannibal in the hills, and it's strung out over several people looking for lost family. Each time you discover their family is dead and you don't do anything with that information. Then you find out there's a cannibal and that's kind of it. Tie him up or kill him, it just ends. A lot of the missions feel dangling and pointless like this. Additionally, you need to do the missions at the pace set out by the game. If you make a conclusion too early based on evidence and act on it before the game is ready for you to; mission failed. People occasionally give you missions. And then as soon as the dialogue finishes they start jeering at you for standing around. Chill out, I haven't called my horse yet. Story. What's to say about the story. I can't say I enjoyed it much. It kind of starts in media res, and you're only given the backstory in fits and starts. It's a while before John Marston fills even me, the player, in on why he's here. What the stakes are. And who's putting him up to it. But as the player I'm just expected to go along for the ride. John's character is not well developed and inconsistent. There's a lot of emphasis in side quests and random encounters to end missions in either non violent or violent ways, depending on how you feel. Marston's reputation and honour will shift in response to this. Generally there's a sense as you go along that you're defining who John Marston is. Is he the kind of person who shoots a horse thief dead, or lassos him and later let's him go or turns him over to the law. Except that's not the case. Because during cutscenes John Marston will do his own thing. Lose his temper and shoot people in the back, help the Mexican army kidnap women for sexual slavery, burn down the houses of bystanders, etc. The culmination of the third chapter is the slaughter of an entire tribe with the help of the US army. As you progress, you're chasing three different characters. Bill Williamson in chapter one, who receives almost no development and is more or less a non-entity until you catch him and he dies at the end of chapter two. Javier Esquela in chapter two, a complete ghost who you know only by name and his shared history with the protagonist. He at least receives some development, with a mid length cutscene and some dialogue in the scene where you finally catch up with him and catch or kill him. And Dutch Van Der Linde in chapter three. The former leader of your old gang until he, as John puts it, went crazy. Dutch is scarcely mentioned before chapter three, but receives a fair amount of time in that chapter. An early close shave, an escape over rooftops from, and a close encounter in a bank where he jeers you and insults your wife and child (who until this point were possibly nameless?) This at least provides something of a build up until your showdown with him, which has a little bit of boss arena reek off it, but is mostly a fine encounter. If a little underwhelming. Also features Dutch nursing gunshot wounds from you whether you shot him or not so that's something. Throughout all three of these chapters, John is concerned with getting back to his wife and child. Something that feels like an abstract goal that the player isn't given much reason to invest themselves in. At least, I didn't feel particularly driven by it. Mostly I felt like a passenger along for the ride, albeit one holding down X to ride the horse and pulling the trigger when bad guys appear. In the third chapter, when the wife and child were fleshed out a bit more, John finally started to seem to actually want to get them back a bit more. It helped give the chapter some momentum. The final chapter to the inevitable conclusion of the game. This generally raised the game in my estimation a good deal. It was fun to do random farm chores. Though John's constant belligerence towards his Uncle grated, the vignettes with his wife and child were fun. Although the discordant notes of the game's soundtrack continued to hang over the entire chapter until the final ridiculous conclusion of the army attack and the fatal shootout. I actually enjoyed this. Post game, the final mission might be the best. Albeit I didn't know to look for it and had to be sent back to the game. This entire piece felt like a real western story. Of the young gun leaving the ranch and riding out to the west to track down his father's killer for revenge. And finally finds him retired, at the side of a river hunting, after meeting all of the man's family and looking into the eyes of everyone he'd be bereaving. Maybe the game's highpoint? Though Jack Marston comes off as kind of cruel in general. In general, a lot of what I didn't enjoy about this game came down to the GTA ness of it. The initials on the map indicating story missions you could go and pick up. The vignettes at the start and end of those stories where you'd briefly see characters interacting before it became time for you to ride somewhere or shoot something or win a race. Often times those characters would preach their beliefs at the protagonist, for the player's benefit. And often times those people would come off as nasty and cruel. Usually also either an ultimately honourable or strong willed sort, or something of an idiot. People who care about things and are honest are often made out to be fools in the end, whereas the horrible people you help either come to power and do more horrible things, or end up dead by your hand. In general it feels like it has the moral depth of South Park. As John Marston sees the horrific actions of people on both side of conflicts, he sits back and makes sarcastic remarks. It doesn't help that the story strongly telegraphs every twist and turn well in advance, to the point that you know what's coming long before the game reaches it. Despite all of this, I had an alright time playing this game. I'm not sure I could recommend it but it passed the time and I walked around the house for a week talking like a cowboy.