The Corrente Review Of Games: Volume I, Number 9 (English Edition)

Masthead
The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:
Aeryl, BDBlue and danps.
Please contact any of us with submission ideas or feedback.

Review: Red Dead Redemption

Masthead
The Corrente Review Of Games is published on the first Saturday of the month.
Posting is done in rotation by the following contributors:
Aeryl, BDBlue and danps.
Please contact any of us with submission ideas or feedback.

Review: Red Dead Redemption

Red Dead Redemption (RDR) comes from Rock Star games, most famous for its Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series. In an email exchange with BDBlue I wrote that one of the main reasons I've stayed away from GTA is that it gives off a "juvenile masquerading as edgy" vibe that I really don't dig. The whole "have sex with a hooker! Then kill her if you want and take the money back!" scenario is I guess supposed to be the mark of some kind of hip, knowing, amoral, libertarian sophistication - but to me it comes across more as sweaty, adolescent and panting. The same goes for the goal of rising to mob boss - isn't it dangerous and thrilling to be the antihero, etc.

Funny enough, the most infamous bit of GTA gameplay - the Hot Coffee mod - required a software hack to unlock and depicted an adult couple engaged in consensual sex. The fact that that was what got the most people up in arms reveals something unfortunate about our culture.

(Parental side note: My oldest child will become a teenager this year and I won't have a problem with bringing home a similarly hidden minigame buried in a PS3 or Xbox 360 game. If he had enough initiative to find out about the hack and figure out a way to unlock it, so be it. Same with the parental controls and restrictions I put on the kids' internet usage. I can't protect them from everything, but I put obstacles in front of the things I don't want them to get to. If they get around them, so be it. It's the way of the world: my parents made it clear I wasn't allowed to look at Playboys but I somehow managed to find a few. Subverting your parents' intentions is an important part of growing up.)

RDR has gotten reviewed as being more about creating a compelling environment with a good story than titillation, so I got it with fairly high expectations; so far (I'm about a quarter through it) it's met them. I'll start with some quibbles.

First, the buttons are not responsive enough for menu screens. The "Select" button for inventory and "Start" button for game-level options both take about half a second to respond, and when you're in the middle of a tight jam that can be a killer. If your character (John Marston) is about to die, you hit the button to bring up the medicine screen, it doesn't show up right away, and so you hit it again in case you didn't press down hard enough the first time, do you know what happens? It calls up and dismisses the screen! Which puts you right back in the game, where your antagonist puts in the bullet that kills him.

Help is a problem. Game makers are getting away from printed help, which isn't necessarily a problem and is probably more environmentally friendly. Fine. But if you do that, make sure you have in-game help available from a variety of sources - context sensitive, a comprehensive electronic manual, etc. RDR's printed manual is pretty thin, and there isn't enough electronic help to fill in the gaps. At one point I was in a fist fight and had to go online to figure out the controls. Not helpful. (Maybe game makers consider the proliferation of amateur sites with walkthroughs as an excuse to skimp on their own help.)

Two other problems that BDBlue identified are the lack of character customization and the absence of leveling. If you like to spend a lot of time tweaking the appearance of your character and modifying it as the game goes on, RDR will disappoint you. It offers a series of costumes that can be assembled as you complete challenges, but otherwise what you see is what you get. I never spend much time on that, so it wasn't even a speed bump for me, but if you're like BDBlue you might not like it.

Same with leveling. I actually like having to pick a class, decide what to specialize in, allocate new powers and abilities as the game progresses, and so on. A good game will show you a full menu of awesomeness and force you to make the sometimes difficult decisions on which kinds of awesomeness you want and which kind you have to pass on. There's none of that in RDR. Skills do seem to improve as time goes on, but you don't get to pick out what goes where. If that's important to your enjoyment of a game, be warned.

Those are minor things though, because overall RDR is a ton of fun. I love when a game maker opens up an environment to just wander around in if you like, that that's what Rock Star has done with its Old West milieu here. I popped the game in, got the intro, started the main thread for an hour or so, and then just started galloping around the wide open spaces to see what I could see. RDR rewards that. There are hunting achievements available for taking down different critters, survivalist achievements for gathering different flora, assorted side quests involving, um, eccentric characters, and so on. The menuing system, aside from being slow, is easy to navigate and makes keeping track of all that easy.

The game lets you decide how good or bad you want to be, and has two separate scales (fame and honor) to measure both how well known and how well regarded you are. Sometimes the game play is forced, like when a cut scene forces you to assist a huckster in his deception. Interaction with NPC's is surprisingly limited: your interaction with merchants is limited to buying and selling. Still, there are enough decisions to let you make Marston heroic or villainous.

To this point it gives some options with how to move through the main quest. It looks like you can do supplementary quests that will affect the main one. (The difference is between having allies with you for the final showdown or being a lone wolf.) These appear to be available in parallel with the main one, though that isn't clear. It has lots of minigames - several different kinds of gambling, horse breaking, night shift for the Marshal's office, and so on. If you wanted you could just spend your days perfecting your horseshoes toss.

Overall RDR is tons of fun. It's got me into the mode where if I have fifteen spare minutes I'll squeeze in a little play, if only to work on my poker cheating. That kind of "do I have time to play?" eagerness is my sure sign that I'm really into a game, and I definitely am with this one. I suspect it will end up on some "Year's Best" lists in December, and it will deserve it. Highly recommended.