Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Good

This will be my first review and it will be a game still fresh in my memory as i just finished it on Tue. Red Dead Redemption. I am going to try and do my own thing a bit on reviews, and do this in three separate parts, and I think I will theme this after the old western, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I am sure someone else does this and this will be similar to how Kotaku runs their reviews.

I will preface this review by saying that i believe that my age, or patience, or simply my sanity, have outstripped the game play provided by these Rockstar sandbox games. For reference I only made it through about 5 hours of GTAIV before I deemed it un-fun, and moved on. I left it on the shelf thinking i would someday take up this monumental endeavor again, which i tried about a month ago, to which was a failure on my second mission. But I digress, this is supposed to be about RDR, not previous games, I simply wanted to state that I am 100% non-objective to this game, though I will try my best to keep this game in perspective to other games.

Part 1 - The good.

1. The Graphics. The graphics of this game look pretty amazing. The sky looks believeable. the scenery and draw distance are great, and there is very little "pop-in" of textures. This is of course aided by the lack of details needed, but nonetheless it is pretty.

2. Fast Travel. Thank (Insert Deity of your choice). I swore that if i loaded this game up and they gave me no way to fast travel that i would instantly send this back to whence it came, Gamefly. They did get this part right, and allow you to, with an upgrade to an advanced campsite, fast travel to a way point on the map. This means gone are the days of needing to drive 15 mins just to get a mission, in which you again drive for 10 minutes. God forbid you were to die in previous games, as you would then need to re-drive all that time. Major Kudos for finally realizing that traveling is not what people pay $60 to do.

3. Characters. This will make an appearance in another portion as well, but the good side of characters. Rockstar inserts their normal sense of humor into the characters you meet, and there are constantly hidden gems in the dialog. This is of course if you keep yourself paying attention as there is a ton of dialog. But there are some amusing characters you will meet, among them a grave-robbing outcast into bestiality, a drug fiend intellectual, a lecherous freedom fighter, and many others.

4. Things to do. This is another topic that will be in more than one area. There is a ton of things to do that don't pertain to the story directly. I wont list them all here, but there are a lot, hunting horseshoes, poker, skinning, gathering, side quests, bounty collections, and the list goes on. If you like doing extraneous activities, or achievement hunting, there is ton to do here. Personally this is not my cup of tea, this felt like MMO quests in which they are time wasters, or grinding missions. In this I mean they don's further you into the story unfolding, they are just things to do.

5. Multi-Player Free Roam. Only the free roam in my opinion makes it here. the free roam gives you all the single player side items to do, minus the story, with the addition of other random players, or with your friends. this leads to unpredictable games, but were pretty fun. There is plenty to do here as well with levels MMO style, challenges and hunting etc.

6. Western Feel. The game does a pretty good job of setting the tone as a western and combined with the story doesnt feel unlike a western movie. The story is nothing revolutionary but does hold up well enough.