Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Ugly

Here is where I think RDR falls short. I have two major gripes here that stand out. I separate out these two parts because they are the pieces that I think would have made this a truly great game. I know it has gotten great reviews and sold a ton of copies, but I personally don’t see how it is getting reviews as good as it is. I don’t find it a bad game, as I have said but these are pieces that could have made this an amazing game instead of a good game.

· Storytelling. This only becomes apparent when you reach the supposed culmination of the story that you have been presented with for nearly 20 hours. The makeup of the story feels wrong, and put together weakly. It feels as if they weren’t sure how to tell a story. Instead of the story feeling emotional and attaching you to characters, they throw you into a character they have constructed and assume you’re going to care about your family because Rockstar deems it so.

All this game needed was a rearranging of the pieces of the story and this could have felt totally different. The problem is that this leads you in with 20 hours to no climax, and then forces you into about 2 more hours to reach a final climax. This is an aborted story arc that feels unnatural, and feels poorly told. If you were a freshman in high school and wrote a short story in this method, you would be reprimanded for breaking a tried and true method of telling stories. I wish they would have taken a queue from great RPG’s (read Bioware) in their ability to tell a story.

· Multiplayer. I feel like the free roam was a great direction. What this game needed was to take this ball and roll with it. They needed ways to make this a sort of co op campaign. Instead they chose to try and include all the normal game types for multiplayer that you have played a hundred times. The problem is that this isn’t a shooter and doesn’t control like one. It needed to take its strong points and focus on that, instead of the mess of modes it attempts and doesn’t do very well at. The free roam is fun, but could have been fleshed out to be a standout, it feels like it was tacked on.

Score: FAT.

· Fun at times, problems distracting (FAT)—Rent, avoid buying unless you really dig what they dug.

My Scoring Scale.

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Good

Review: Red Dead Redemption - The Bad

Fun Scale Scoring System.

A comment from a friend (my first yay) made me think about it, and I don’t want to just put a number score. A number rarely is indicitive of the true product, and how would one ever find gems if you only took others numbers into account. I may still place a number score in comparison to other reviews, but I am more interested if a game is fun or not, not only a pure number. The bottom line is that I don't have all day to play games, I don't like to waste my time, so the fun becomes paramount in the experience. This will be a scale of how fun I thought a game was.

A distrust of only a number system is compounded by my own suspicous conspiracy theory loving mind that scores from major sites are ONLY about money. AAA titles that spend a ton on marketing never seem to get reemed when they are deserving and fun games will get horrible scores for problems forgiven by AAA titles. This is partial to nostalgia in which the flashy parts of games were not all you had to go on, but gameplay and story had as much to do with graphics. I like to think that eye candy is not all I am interested in, there are times where I am wowed like anyone else, but I don’t get hung up on graphics.

Fun Scale, or Score for review. This is mostly subjective, but this is mostly about whether I had fun or not. There are plenty of games that get great number reviews that arent fun at all, and many more that swing to the opposite side of he pendulum.

· Fun, Atful or Innovative. (FAoI) –Must Play Game

· Fun, missing some parts, doesn’t get in the way. (FMSP) –Can’t go to far wrong here, find a way to play.

· Fun at times, problems distracting (FAT)—Rent, avoid buying unless you really dig what they dug.

· A Chore to play, Where’s the Fun? (CtP) - Don’t bother, you are not missing much here.

· No F******Fun At All pure work, don’t bother. (NFF) – Avoid at all costs, laugh at friends who buy this.