Describing Rockstar San Diego's Red Dead Redemption as "Grant Theft Auto: Wild West" is both completely accurate and completely off the mark. Redemption definitely borrows some basic features from its modern-era sister franchise, yet it also completely embraces its Wild West setting and carves out a niche of its own, becoming arguably a more complete and higher quality experience than Grand Theft Auto IV. There is a reason we haven't seen a GTA V yet: Rockstar is determined to branch out beyond its ubiquitous franchise, and Red Dead Redemption represents not only the most successful step in that direction but also the best game the company has put out to date.
Redemption brings over from GTA the skeletal features of the interface, including the mini-map, mission structure, save system, and most of the controls (in other words, all the basic "gaming" tools). However, the world is obviously much more wide open and spread out, with bustling streets of cars replaced by a wide variety of lifelike horses and carriages, and burroughs of a single city replaced by distinct Western towns in 3 counties, 2 countries, and a whole lot of variety among them. Redemption fully embraces its setting and lassos together just about everything you could possibly want in a Western game. Shootouts? Check. Train robberies? Check. Early cars, Mexican revolutionaries, and disheartened Native Americans? Check, check, and check. Enough cannot be said about the variety of settings you experience in this game, from ranches to pueblos to the frontier to a fully-developed town to even snow-covered mountains teaming with grizzly bears.
The production values of the game are absolutely through the roof. The voice actors are simply phenomenal and nail all their accents and dialects with ease, complimented by swaths of witty one-liners. Redemption follows the classic storytelling model of interactive gameplay interspersed by triggered cutscenes, but Rockstar's writers also inject flavor into the sometimes repetitive horseriding sequences by introducing pre-mission dialogue amongst the riders that are present; better yet, these dialogue sequences are fully up to snuff with those found in the cutscenes, and in fact are just as integral to the overall plot as anything you sit through watching.
The world is also filled with a myriad of very distinct and amusing characters (a Rockstar staple) that each change the tone of the game and add their own element. The story itself goes through some predictable ups and downs, but it really comes together once you reach the game's climax, which does not come at the end. That's right, you get about 2 hours of resolution in the final act, although technically it does build up to yet another, very fulfilling high point. The end of the game is handled incredibly well--something very rare in any form of entertainment, but especially games. There is even an epilogue of sorts to close out the story even more fully, and you can always continue on to finish all the little sidequests when you've finished the story.
Redemption is not flawless, however, as no game really is. Getting around the world can be a real pain in the ass at times as you usually have to rely on horseback; fast-travel points are too spread out to be relied on about half the time, and there were multiple occasions where the game glitched and the fast-travel carriages were absent altogether. Some segments of the story also drag on way too long, and the game is already so long that there really is no reason for this inflation of game time to exist. The protagonist John Marston is a fully-realized and believable character, but quite frankly, it's sometimes hard to buy that this hard-nosed cowboy doesn't just punch some people in the face for their ignorance, taunting, or just plain screwing him over.
But these are all minor drops in an ocean of wonderful experiences, and at the end of the day Redemption is well-designed, well-written, and totally fresh in the canvas of games that is currently dominated by iterative first-person shooters. Furthermore it represents a practice that I would like to see more of, which is applying aspects of succesful games (GTA) to whole new settings (the Old West) to create entirely new experiences. Redemption is so complete in its execution of an Old West videogame that it's hard to imagine how Rockstar could do a follow-up, other than maybe a parallel story or (more likely) one that goes back further in time. But in honesty, Rockstar probably isn't even thinking about a sequel and instead is looking for a transition similar to the one between GTA and RDR, an idea that marks a great and innovative studio, as well as a great trend that the games industry needs to take note of.
OVERALL GRADE: A
No comments:
Post a Comment