WEIGHING OPTIONS: The PS3 version of “Red Dead Redemption” runs at a lower native resolution than on Xbox 360, but also has a system-exclusive bandit hideout.GAME REVIEW”Red Dead Redemption”System: PS3 (reviewed), Xbox 360Graphics: B+Sound: A+Gameplay: A+Replay value: AFinal Grade: A
From “The Lone Ranger” to the novels of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, the Wild West has been an incredibly rich wellspring for American pop culture, but for years, the video game community has all but ignored it.
With “Red Dead Redemption,” however, the video game western is back in a big way.
“Red Dead” uses the same contextual animation system and graphic engines as Rockstar San Diego’s last blockbuster, “Grand Theft Auto IV,” and the similarities don’t end there. The HUD is nearly identical, as are the aiming system. Even the “hail a taxi” button has been reused, only this time, it summons a horse.
Labeling “Red Dead” as “GTA with spurs” wouldn’t be completely inaccurate, but it would be missing the big picture. Everything the “GTA” games do — from assembling a cast of engaging, slightly demented, characters to sand box exploration and inventive missions — has been expanded and improved upon in “Red Dead.”
Whereas “GTA IV” focused the experience on a single metropolis, “Red Dead’s” world can take 20 real-world minutes to cross at a dead gallop and encompasses a range of environments, from snow-capped mountains and sun-baked deserts to rolling plains.
Despite the expanse, the wilderness is far from empty. There’s a thriving natural ecosystem with a wide variety of animals, many of them deadly, as well as random ambient events like catching escaped convicts or stopping a hijacked stagecoach to keep you occupied.
The game also has a series of engaging tiered challenges that test different abilities. You can hunt for the aforementioned predators, accomplish various sharp shooting tasks, track down rare plants and search for treasure.
Every activity is rewarded somehow, whether with money, fame, honor (the currency in “Red Dead’s” moral system) or by unlocking a wide variety of period-appropriate firearms and costumes. I’ve never played a game, including “GTA,” in which it’s so much fun to wander.
During the 20-30 hour campaign, players control John Marston, a former outlaw coerced into hunting down members of his old gang by federal agents trying to wrangle a degree of order out of the wild frontier. Along the way, Marston encounters memorable individuals like a treasure-obsessed grave robber, a misguided pulp journalist, a snake-oil salesman and a retired star gunslinger.
Rockstar’s adventure is rife with the expected iconic western moments like cattle wrangling and shoot-outs, but it also holds a mirror up to many serious modern issues like racism and cultural imperialism. Pretty impressive for a title set in 1911.
Besides the campaign and the secondary challenges, “Red Dead” also features a deep multiplayer component with a persistent, ranked-leveling system. Players can form a posse in free roam or put each other down in a range of competitive modes like grab the bag, deathmatch and team deathmatch.
For all that it does right, “Red Dead” isn’t perfect. The graphics will occasionally become corrupted, animations will hang, terrain textures look muddy up close, skinning and looting sequences are unskippable and horses can be frustratingly difficult to control.
These few flaws are inconsequential, however, in the face of such a monumental achievement in open-world gaming. Even for Rockstar, it’s incredibly rare for a title to be so full of content and to so effectively capture its source material. In ten years, we’ll look back and realize this is how the West was really won, at least as far as video games are concerned.