(spoiler warning)
Rockstar’s second western, a (very loose) sequel of sorts to Red Dead Revolver, follows John Marston, a retired outlaw tasked with tracking down and killing/capturing his former gang members, the government holding his family hostage until the deed is done. Through the course of the 20-30 hour adventure, Marston completes bounties, plays lots of poker, gets involved in the Mexican Revolution, kills hundreds of people, herds cattle, picks flowers, meets a bunch of colorful characters, breaks horses, and more (depending on how much of the side content one chooses to do). It’s a formula that should be familiar to anyone who has played an open world game from the past 10 years, with basic shop, sidequest, money, and hunting systems to flesh out the game’s fairly simplistic gunplay.
Visually, the game often looks stunning, especially at sunset, and the cutscenes are very well framed, showing an understanding of the language of film/video beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It runs like ass on ps3, though, and the fairly zoomed out third-person camera combined with the heavy aliasing made it a bit hard to see stuff in the distance. It’s still quite impressive on the whole, though, especially considering it’s nearly 10 years old.
The writing is mostly pretty good, though Rockstar’s tendency towards satire makes it a bit obnoxious at times. Their cynicism works better when it encapsulates all the characters, I find, but this one goes to great pains to show Marston as the straight man, a contrast to all the crazy weirdos he runs into, and the lack of sincerity in the supporting cast does get a bit grating at times. The sound design is absolutely excellent, though. The booming thunder and crackling lightning of storms is some of the best I’ve heard in a game, and little touches like the voice actors yelling their lines for horseback sequences shows a high level of foresight for the aural experience here.
It seems that, though the story presents John Marstron as an outlaw with a heart of gold (which is also how I tried to play the game), the game design is instead aiming for the freedom to do whatever evil outlaw shenanigans you want, from stealing wagons to murdering random strangers. A lot of the game’s prompts and combat systems are highly contextual and assume things for you, which led to Mr. Marston doing some despicable shit I had no intention of. The game wants you to be able to play it any way you want, but because of its imprecise controls I ended up getting the opposite effect.
A man runs to me, yelling that his friend is about to be hanged by a gang, having done nothing wrong. I climb on my majestic white stallion and follow him to the site. The bandits are seemingly ready for us, and a hail of gunfire greets me before I have time to react. I do the natural thing and draw my rifle, pointing the camera towards the outlaws. I hold down the left trigger and the aiming reticule snaps to the man next to me. I pull the right trigger to fire, almost an unconscious reflex, and the man who brought me there searching for help is dead. Hoping to at least save his friend and complete my objective, I open fire on the bandits, my screen running red with my own blood as my health quickly depletes. During this vastly outnumbered gunfight, text appears in the top left of the screen stating that the innocent man has now been hanged, and is dead. I finish the fight and ride away from a pile of blood and bodies, all the worse for my involvement.
Once, I went to take a ride on caravan, this game’s fast travel system, but since I stood on the driver side and not the passengers’, the “drive” prompt led me to immediately sit down in the same space as the driver, after which the game realised that two people weren’t supposed to occupy the same space and triggered an animation of my throwing the guy out. Shocked, I got out of the caravan and ran after the driver in hopes of making amends, but the game gave me no such option. Then, I holstered all my weapons and walked peacefully over to the sheriff to turn myself in (which is a mechanic in this game). His deputies, whom I’d completed several quests with, showed no such mercy and opened fire. Full of bullet holes, I ran for cover. A deputy snuck up behind me, and a “bribe” prompt appeared. I gave that one guy 10$ and the entire thing was forgotten. This had no impact on any future interactions in the town. I did lose 400 “honor” points, though.
At a certain point I just gave up and went with the mayhem, but it runs somewhat counter to what the narrative tries to say. We’re often reminded that Marston killed lots of people, but you never really see that side of him, pretty much everything he does in this game is at the behest of someone else, in effort to get back to his family and give up the outlaw life. At one point quite late in the game, the antagonist, Dutch, takes a hostage and then Marston lets him go to protect the hostage, even though I got a hostage killed a few minutes earlier in that same mission lol.
Beyond these criminal offenses, I’ve run into a couple other minor annoyances in how the game expects me to play it. For instance, to capture people when on bounties or helping someone get back stolen goods you’re supposed to lasso the target, then get off your horse, hogtie them, and then throw them on your horse and bring them to the quest giver. Now, the first time I ran into one of these quests I didn’t know that, so I just lassoed him and slowly dragged him behind me, being careful not to hurt the poor bastard too much. I then brought him directly in front of the quest giver and stopped. Nothing happened, neither of them reacted, no cutscene was triggered, all because I didn’t deliver them in the order of operations the game expected me to. Eventually I figured it out, but it was a process where my train of thought was ”hmm, how did Rockstar’s designers expect me to complete this task”, rather than engaging with the game’s world.
The biggest surprise for me was the extended 5 act structure of the plot. The game could’ve easily ended on Marston returning to his family, but instead it delves into the relationship with his family, fleshing out his wife and son far beyond anything I expected to see here. They could’ve been just plot devices to set off all the cowboy action, but instead they become fleshed out characters in their own right. It’s by far the most sincere portion of the game, and probably my favourite story section as a result. From God of War to The Last of Us and beyond, video game dads have become a pretty popular trend as of late, but this game did it before it was cool, arguably setting off that trend in the first place, and the epilogue brings the narrative full circle. Red Dead Redemption is a very messy game, but despite all its flaws I did still enjoy my time with it.
Rockstar’s second western, a (very loose) sequel of sorts to Red Dead Revolver, follows John Marston, a retired outlaw tasked with tracking down and killing/capturing his former gang members, the government holding his family hostage until the deed is done. Through the course of the 20-30 hour adventure, Marston completes bounties, plays lots of poker, gets involved in the Mexican Revolution, kills hundreds of people, herds cattle, picks flowers, meets a bunch of colorful characters, breaks horses, and more (depending on how much of the side content one chooses to do). It’s a formula that should be familiar to anyone who has played an open world game from the past 10 years, with basic shop, sidequest, money, and hunting systems to flesh out the game’s fairly simplistic gunplay.
Visually, the game often looks stunning, especially at sunset, and the cutscenes are very well framed, showing an understanding of the language of film/video beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It runs like ass on ps3, though, and the fairly zoomed out third-person camera combined with the heavy aliasing made it a bit hard to see stuff in the distance. It’s still quite impressive on the whole, though, especially considering it’s nearly 10 years old.
The writing is mostly pretty good, though Rockstar’s tendency towards satire makes it a bit obnoxious at times. Their cynicism works better when it encapsulates all the characters, I find, but this one goes to great pains to show Marston as the straight man, a contrast to all the crazy weirdos he runs into, and the lack of sincerity in the supporting cast does get a bit grating at times. The sound design is absolutely excellent, though. The booming thunder and crackling lightning of storms is some of the best I’ve heard in a game, and little touches like the voice actors yelling their lines for horseback sequences shows a high level of foresight for the aural experience here.
It seems that, though the story presents John Marstron as an outlaw with a heart of gold (which is also how I tried to play the game), the game design is instead aiming for the freedom to do whatever evil outlaw shenanigans you want, from stealing wagons to murdering random strangers. A lot of the game’s prompts and combat systems are highly contextual and assume things for you, which led to Mr. Marston doing some despicable shit I had no intention of. The game wants you to be able to play it any way you want, but because of its imprecise controls I ended up getting the opposite effect.
A man runs to me, yelling that his friend is about to be hanged by a gang, having done nothing wrong. I climb on my majestic white stallion and follow him to the site. The bandits are seemingly ready for us, and a hail of gunfire greets me before I have time to react. I do the natural thing and draw my rifle, pointing the camera towards the outlaws. I hold down the left trigger and the aiming reticule snaps to the man next to me. I pull the right trigger to fire, almost an unconscious reflex, and the man who brought me there searching for help is dead. Hoping to at least save his friend and complete my objective, I open fire on the bandits, my screen running red with my own blood as my health quickly depletes. During this vastly outnumbered gunfight, text appears in the top left of the screen stating that the innocent man has now been hanged, and is dead. I finish the fight and ride away from a pile of blood and bodies, all the worse for my involvement.
Once, I went to take a ride on caravan, this game’s fast travel system, but since I stood on the driver side and not the passengers’, the “drive” prompt led me to immediately sit down in the same space as the driver, after which the game realised that two people weren’t supposed to occupy the same space and triggered an animation of my throwing the guy out. Shocked, I got out of the caravan and ran after the driver in hopes of making amends, but the game gave me no such option. Then, I holstered all my weapons and walked peacefully over to the sheriff to turn myself in (which is a mechanic in this game). His deputies, whom I’d completed several quests with, showed no such mercy and opened fire. Full of bullet holes, I ran for cover. A deputy snuck up behind me, and a “bribe” prompt appeared. I gave that one guy 10$ and the entire thing was forgotten. This had no impact on any future interactions in the town. I did lose 400 “honor” points, though.
At a certain point I just gave up and went with the mayhem, but it runs somewhat counter to what the narrative tries to say. We’re often reminded that Marston killed lots of people, but you never really see that side of him, pretty much everything he does in this game is at the behest of someone else, in effort to get back to his family and give up the outlaw life. At one point quite late in the game, the antagonist, Dutch, takes a hostage and then Marston lets him go to protect the hostage, even though I got a hostage killed a few minutes earlier in that same mission lol.
Beyond these criminal offenses, I’ve run into a couple other minor annoyances in how the game expects me to play it. For instance, to capture people when on bounties or helping someone get back stolen goods you’re supposed to lasso the target, then get off your horse, hogtie them, and then throw them on your horse and bring them to the quest giver. Now, the first time I ran into one of these quests I didn’t know that, so I just lassoed him and slowly dragged him behind me, being careful not to hurt the poor bastard too much. I then brought him directly in front of the quest giver and stopped. Nothing happened, neither of them reacted, no cutscene was triggered, all because I didn’t deliver them in the order of operations the game expected me to. Eventually I figured it out, but it was a process where my train of thought was ”hmm, how did Rockstar’s designers expect me to complete this task”, rather than engaging with the game’s world.
The biggest surprise for me was the extended 5 act structure of the plot. The game could’ve easily ended on Marston returning to his family, but instead it delves into the relationship with his family, fleshing out his wife and son far beyond anything I expected to see here. They could’ve been just plot devices to set off all the cowboy action, but instead they become fleshed out characters in their own right. It’s by far the most sincere portion of the game, and probably my favourite story section as a result. From God of War to The Last of Us and beyond, video game dads have become a pretty popular trend as of late, but this game did it before it was cool, arguably setting off that trend in the first place, and the epilogue brings the narrative full circle. Red Dead Redemption is a very messy game, but despite all its flaws I did still enjoy my time with it.