Rockstar San Diego confidently transplant the Grand Theft Auto series to the Old West, but the result is a game that is often more enjoyable to watch than to play.
Videogames have long had superb potential for world-building, and while playing Red Dead Redemption I often found myself wondering why the American West had previously been so underrepresented in our medium, especially given the enduring appeal the setting otherwise has. Perhaps it simply couldn't have been done right until now: the long sunsets, brief thunderstorms, and perpetually dwindling vistas of Rockstar's revamped Western title may well have been impossible – or at least less impressive – in previous console generations. But they are here now, and they are astounding. This is a videogame that allows us to traverse its hand-sculpted and perfectly familiar landscape in minutes: we can descend from snow-coated mountain passes to meet rolling prairies, and from there wander among the desolate mesas of a fake Mexico, enamoured with their fidelity to the films and imagination of our youth. This freedom, aided by a fully-realized cycle from day to night, means that Red Dead Redemption is constantly surprising the player with new visual encounters, with new aspects of its world. There is an integrity and honesty to Rockstar's vision of the West almost throughout (and I include here the game's well-tuned musical score) that reassures me of this medium's prospects, of its far-distant horizons. But then this is also the West as it was at the turn of the century, and it is more than fitting that this game is, at least partly, about the tension that existed between the 'wild' promise of the West and the encroaching rigours of established civilization. I'll be blunt: for a game that so often showcases the combinative force of design and technology, Red Dead Redemption as it plays is too often staid and old-fashioned, placing too-familiar demands on anyone acquainted with Rockstar's other titles.
A simple example, to start: in this game, as in the Grand Theft Auto games, you hold down a button to run. This continues to be inexplicable: Rockstar seem determined to ignore the development of the (conventional) console controller, which features two analog sticks the player typically uses to move through, and look around, the environment. The speed of both actions should be variable, providing the player analog control over how fast he moves or looks by virtue of the tiniest movements of his thumbs. The few modern titles that reject this analog control (which are typically 2D) are best played with d-pads or other binary controllers where movement is infallibly on/off and dead zones are irrelevant. But in the vast majority of first- and third-person 3D action games – and overwhelmingly in Western development – the two analog sticks in combination have become the convention. Because the convention works.
What happens when you remove your thumb from the second analog stick to run in Red Dead Redemption, or to hold or match the speed of your horse? You can no longer look around. Let's be really clear about this: in a modern 3D game, making it difficult for the player to direct his view of the space he inhabits for no good reason is as close to a mortal sin as could exist among game designers – who I imagine usually try to minimize the time the player spends with their thumb off the, uh, thumbstick. I can think of only a few recent games that demand I hold down a face button while moving, most of which are imitative of the 'roadie run' popularized by Gears of War. But the roadie run works because it offers a conscious choice between faster, direct movement and immediate awareness: you can scurry forward to the next bit of cover, or you can look up, take in your surroundings, and return fire. This is a genuine gameplay decision the skilled player will regularly make better than the next guy, in the same way they will also more often reload their weapon at opportune moments. Crucially, normal player movement in Gears remains analog; you can slow to a crawl or accelerate to a jog at a whim, while still taking in the environment with the other stick. This is fluid, comfortable, and familiar. Player movement in Red Dead Redemption is none of those things.
Our regular avatar, John Marston, can stand stock still or he can walk: the game in which he appears flatly ignores the fact that the sticks we use to control Marston are capable of degrees of movement between and beyond these two states. If you want Marston to run, you have to hold a face button, and so sacrifice your ability to look around while doing so (unless you adopt something like the 'claw' grip used by some competitive fans of console FPSs). If you want him to run faster – as fast as he can – you have to tap the same button repeatedly. But look, there is no better way to draw the player's attention to the brute interaction between controller and gameworld than to have them repeatedly tap one button. Let me rephrase that: there is no better way to make it clear to players that they are mashing a piece of plastic to control the wires and lights in a box. If they are required to repeatedly tap one button any time they want to move faster than a walk, and every time they are on the back of a horse, or in control of a carriage (and I am being charitable when I say these three situations crop up 'frequently' in a game set in a violent facsimile of the Old West), they are going to be very aware they are mashing a piece of plastic, yes – frequently. Read: all the time.
Red Dead Redemption looks especially beautiful in motion, using Euphoria to generate convincing animation and player movements on the fly. Unfortunately, those same movements feel restrictive and unresponsive when you are the one wrestling with the pad; I often have the sense that I can move and look around the gameworld in spite of my avatar, and not because of him. The (underused) analog sticks feel like matchsticks dipped in tar, and the necessity of tapping a face button leaves me feeling as if I am willing the game on, when I should feel as if I am playing it, or better yet, as if it is simply responding to my thoughts. In a great game, the mechanism of control should become increasingly unapparent to the skilled player. Ask yourself this: have you ever found it difficult to explain to another player which button – or combination of buttons – performs a given action in a game you love, because you've long-since stopped dwelling on the actual button presses involved? Now, can you tell me which buttons spurs on your horse in Red Dead Redemption? Bingo. I do appreciate that making horseback riding a compelling and transparent action in a videogame is a difficult task, but it has been done. Meanwhile, the clumsy on-foot controls of the Grand Theft Auto series have not always taken the flak they deserve because it is usually thrilling to drive cars in those games (and you spend more time driving than walking). When the guy in the shop recommended Red Dead Redemption to me, he described it as "Grand Theft Auto with horses instead of cars". But it turns out the horses aren't fun to drive.
To make things worse, the controls generally seem to suffer from noticeable input latency (probably not helped by the inconsistent framerate, another returning 'feature' from Grand Theft Auto IV), so every action feels belated and awkward. Aiming is also unpleasantly easy, even using the 'Expert' setting, which would be considered 'Standard' in most other third-person shooters. Firing from horseback thus becomes a tedious juggling act of maintaining speed and lining up shots, made all the more boring by the game's slow-motion 'Dead Eye' mechanic, which renders the game progressively simpler as you play it. In compensation, you will fight progressively more enemies. Or many more of the same enemy, I should say. He has a gun. You have more and better guns, meanwhile, and the advantage of autoaim, and you can also bend time. It is not even close to a fair fight, but it is frequent; for Rockstar, this seems to be enough.
The true disappointment is that nothing you do in Red Dead Redemption is superior to the equivalent thing you did in Grand Theft Auto, except perhaps for the minigames, which are demonstrably less irritating in this latest title. (You will note that this is the first and the last mention of said minigames in this review, and so will forgive me for taking this opportunity to point out that if you could play poker without ever having to post a blind when first sitting, and could come and go as you please otherwise – and cheat at will, too – then you would not really be playing 'poker', in fact, but some other, more genteel game perhaps called Give Me All the Money, Because I Am Patient. And that game would be a good way to win all the money you would never actually need in Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption.) When you are not playing the minigames, which include a rather opaque approximation of duelling I am not sure it is possible to lose, you will find yourself following the same mission structure you first encountered in Grand Theft Auto III. The missions are similar, and they go like this: you will first be shown a cutscene introducing the main objective; you will then drive – or 'ride', I guess – to said objective (this is accomplished by either holding or tapping one button on your controller, and on a few occasions by doing nothing at all); and once you get to the objective you will then have to drive somewhere else at speed, or kill a lot of people, or perhaps do both. What variations there exist on this formula are welcome (my favourite, weirdly, is herding cattle), but for the most part also familiar, because we have been doing these things or others like them for almost ten years now, and the Western veneer, beautiful as it is, does not disguise them.
Perhaps I am being unfair, because most games are equally repetitive and similarly reducible. But Red Dead Redemption seems to be a special case, because none of its elements taken individually are A-grade for the industry (returning to Gears of War, we find an example of a game that is almost entirely about shooting from cover, but which is makes shooting from cover about as much fun as it has ever been), and yet it is not clear that the game is much more than the sum of those parts. Red Dead Redemption isn't particularly good at any one thing, and its greatest triumph, its endlessly involving gameworld, is undermined by the few and awkward ways we can actually interact with it. Watching a friend play for a spell, I was struck by how much more immersive the game became when I treated it purely as a visual and aural spectacle, and when we are talking about a videogame – a piece of interactive entertainment – this simply shouldn't be the case. Let's blame cinema, or at least our love of it, because we can't seem to get past that. I do not know how many hours of cutscenes and forced transition dialogue there are in Red Dead Redemption, but I can tell you, without hesitation, that whatever the number may be, it is too high. Few games are as unabashed about their cinematic influences as this one, and few developers are as accomplished as Rockstar at cinematic mimicry, but at its height this is still mimicry; the cracks still show. With the technology we have now, even the best in-engine cutscenes in gaming – even those drawing on a rich cinematic lineage – are as evidently false as plaster casts among real human faces. There is more to see in one impassive glance from Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name than there is in all the length of Red Dead Redemption (or, as Chris Breault will tell you, there is greater cinematic richness in one scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark than in all of Uncharted 2). And if your game is more fun to look at than to play, then the best thing you can hope for, the very best, is that it will be almost as good as the equivalent movie. Developers, pay heed: until we invent the goddamn holodeck, the pursuit of cinema leads down a blind alley. Turn back.
The pacing of Red Dead Redemption also flounders in this way. This game wants to be a movie (probably Unforgiven), or perhaps several movies in one (to sketch just a few sampled plots: the bad guy makes good; the betrayed seeks revenge upon his betrayers; the common man must protect his family; the rebel becomes what he once opposed; the Wild West cannot escape civilization, and so is ended by it; the boy cannot escape his father; the wages of sin is death), and yet it never quite convinces us that it has a story to tell, or at least one we haven't been told before, and better. Things are most compelling at the outset – before Rockstar usher on-stage their usual cast of 'humorous' stereotypes, and before they bore us with a very lengthy, very repetitive trudge through Mexico – and at the end. The story here is smaller in focus, bigger in heart, and the missions are leaner and so more pleasing. When it has us quietly herd cattle and hunt deer, Red Dead Redemption startles and beguiles, and its world becomes worth the investment. It is in these moments, and in some of the 'ambient challenges' – which have us venture off the beaten paths that may as well be the streets of Liberty City – that I felt Red Dead Redemption could well have interesting things to say, to play. And then I thought it was a shame that the rest of the game had left John Marston hoarse – hoarse from hurling curses and insults at a legion of indistinguishable enemies; hoarse from bellowing about the all too evident hypocrisies around him; hoarse from contradicting himself, to say nothing of the player, at every turn; and hoarse from talking, and talking, and talking some more.
You will get your money's worth of talking in this game; I am not sure anyone could complain that there "wasn't enough talking" in Red Dead Redemption, just as they could never complain that there "wasn't enough shooting", or even enough occasions when they held down one button to ride to the next waypoint. But such evaluative concerns have always baffled me, because length and breadth are irrelevant to good art; it is depth that should matter. No one – I hope – judges movies by their running time or novels by their weight, and yet to ask "how many hours" a videogame's single-player campaign will yield remains a stock interview question. I am constantly reminded that this medium of ours is immature in such regards, and it is not difficult to agree. For instance, while I have often read that an otherwise good game was "too short", I have rarely, if ever, heard someone remark that an otherwise decent one was overlong. So here it is: Red Dead Redemption is too long; and for all its accomplishment and flair in creating a new world, it offers too little of worth to do there. One to watch, perhaps.
Videogames have long had superb potential for world-building, and while playing Red Dead Redemption I often found myself wondering why the American West had previously been so underrepresented in our medium, especially given the enduring appeal the setting otherwise has. Perhaps it simply couldn't have been done right until now: the long sunsets, brief thunderstorms, and perpetually dwindling vistas of Rockstar's revamped Western title may well have been impossible – or at least less impressive – in previous console generations. But they are here now, and they are astounding. This is a videogame that allows us to traverse its hand-sculpted and perfectly familiar landscape in minutes: we can descend from snow-coated mountain passes to meet rolling prairies, and from there wander among the desolate mesas of a fake Mexico, enamoured with their fidelity to the films and imagination of our youth. This freedom, aided by a fully-realized cycle from day to night, means that Red Dead Redemption is constantly surprising the player with new visual encounters, with new aspects of its world. There is an integrity and honesty to Rockstar's vision of the West almost throughout (and I include here the game's well-tuned musical score) that reassures me of this medium's prospects, of its far-distant horizons. But then this is also the West as it was at the turn of the century, and it is more than fitting that this game is, at least partly, about the tension that existed between the 'wild' promise of the West and the encroaching rigours of established civilization. I'll be blunt: for a game that so often showcases the combinative force of design and technology, Red Dead Redemption as it plays is too often staid and old-fashioned, placing too-familiar demands on anyone acquainted with Rockstar's other titles.
A simple example, to start: in this game, as in the Grand Theft Auto games, you hold down a button to run. This continues to be inexplicable: Rockstar seem determined to ignore the development of the (conventional) console controller, which features two analog sticks the player typically uses to move through, and look around, the environment. The speed of both actions should be variable, providing the player analog control over how fast he moves or looks by virtue of the tiniest movements of his thumbs. The few modern titles that reject this analog control (which are typically 2D) are best played with d-pads or other binary controllers where movement is infallibly on/off and dead zones are irrelevant. But in the vast majority of first- and third-person 3D action games – and overwhelmingly in Western development – the two analog sticks in combination have become the convention. Because the convention works.
What happens when you remove your thumb from the second analog stick to run in Red Dead Redemption, or to hold or match the speed of your horse? You can no longer look around. Let's be really clear about this: in a modern 3D game, making it difficult for the player to direct his view of the space he inhabits for no good reason is as close to a mortal sin as could exist among game designers – who I imagine usually try to minimize the time the player spends with their thumb off the, uh, thumbstick. I can think of only a few recent games that demand I hold down a face button while moving, most of which are imitative of the 'roadie run' popularized by Gears of War. But the roadie run works because it offers a conscious choice between faster, direct movement and immediate awareness: you can scurry forward to the next bit of cover, or you can look up, take in your surroundings, and return fire. This is a genuine gameplay decision the skilled player will regularly make better than the next guy, in the same way they will also more often reload their weapon at opportune moments. Crucially, normal player movement in Gears remains analog; you can slow to a crawl or accelerate to a jog at a whim, while still taking in the environment with the other stick. This is fluid, comfortable, and familiar. Player movement in Red Dead Redemption is none of those things.
Our regular avatar, John Marston, can stand stock still or he can walk: the game in which he appears flatly ignores the fact that the sticks we use to control Marston are capable of degrees of movement between and beyond these two states. If you want Marston to run, you have to hold a face button, and so sacrifice your ability to look around while doing so (unless you adopt something like the 'claw' grip used by some competitive fans of console FPSs). If you want him to run faster – as fast as he can – you have to tap the same button repeatedly. But look, there is no better way to draw the player's attention to the brute interaction between controller and gameworld than to have them repeatedly tap one button. Let me rephrase that: there is no better way to make it clear to players that they are mashing a piece of plastic to control the wires and lights in a box. If they are required to repeatedly tap one button any time they want to move faster than a walk, and every time they are on the back of a horse, or in control of a carriage (and I am being charitable when I say these three situations crop up 'frequently' in a game set in a violent facsimile of the Old West), they are going to be very aware they are mashing a piece of plastic, yes – frequently. Read: all the time.
Red Dead Redemption looks especially beautiful in motion, using Euphoria to generate convincing animation and player movements on the fly. Unfortunately, those same movements feel restrictive and unresponsive when you are the one wrestling with the pad; I often have the sense that I can move and look around the gameworld in spite of my avatar, and not because of him. The (underused) analog sticks feel like matchsticks dipped in tar, and the necessity of tapping a face button leaves me feeling as if I am willing the game on, when I should feel as if I am playing it, or better yet, as if it is simply responding to my thoughts. In a great game, the mechanism of control should become increasingly unapparent to the skilled player. Ask yourself this: have you ever found it difficult to explain to another player which button – or combination of buttons – performs a given action in a game you love, because you've long-since stopped dwelling on the actual button presses involved? Now, can you tell me which buttons spurs on your horse in Red Dead Redemption? Bingo. I do appreciate that making horseback riding a compelling and transparent action in a videogame is a difficult task, but it has been done. Meanwhile, the clumsy on-foot controls of the Grand Theft Auto series have not always taken the flak they deserve because it is usually thrilling to drive cars in those games (and you spend more time driving than walking). When the guy in the shop recommended Red Dead Redemption to me, he described it as "Grand Theft Auto with horses instead of cars". But it turns out the horses aren't fun to drive.
To make things worse, the controls generally seem to suffer from noticeable input latency (probably not helped by the inconsistent framerate, another returning 'feature' from Grand Theft Auto IV), so every action feels belated and awkward. Aiming is also unpleasantly easy, even using the 'Expert' setting, which would be considered 'Standard' in most other third-person shooters. Firing from horseback thus becomes a tedious juggling act of maintaining speed and lining up shots, made all the more boring by the game's slow-motion 'Dead Eye' mechanic, which renders the game progressively simpler as you play it. In compensation, you will fight progressively more enemies. Or many more of the same enemy, I should say. He has a gun. You have more and better guns, meanwhile, and the advantage of autoaim, and you can also bend time. It is not even close to a fair fight, but it is frequent; for Rockstar, this seems to be enough.
The true disappointment is that nothing you do in Red Dead Redemption is superior to the equivalent thing you did in Grand Theft Auto, except perhaps for the minigames, which are demonstrably less irritating in this latest title. (You will note that this is the first and the last mention of said minigames in this review, and so will forgive me for taking this opportunity to point out that if you could play poker without ever having to post a blind when first sitting, and could come and go as you please otherwise – and cheat at will, too – then you would not really be playing 'poker', in fact, but some other, more genteel game perhaps called Give Me All the Money, Because I Am Patient. And that game would be a good way to win all the money you would never actually need in Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption.) When you are not playing the minigames, which include a rather opaque approximation of duelling I am not sure it is possible to lose, you will find yourself following the same mission structure you first encountered in Grand Theft Auto III. The missions are similar, and they go like this: you will first be shown a cutscene introducing the main objective; you will then drive – or 'ride', I guess – to said objective (this is accomplished by either holding or tapping one button on your controller, and on a few occasions by doing nothing at all); and once you get to the objective you will then have to drive somewhere else at speed, or kill a lot of people, or perhaps do both. What variations there exist on this formula are welcome (my favourite, weirdly, is herding cattle), but for the most part also familiar, because we have been doing these things or others like them for almost ten years now, and the Western veneer, beautiful as it is, does not disguise them.
Perhaps I am being unfair, because most games are equally repetitive and similarly reducible. But Red Dead Redemption seems to be a special case, because none of its elements taken individually are A-grade for the industry (returning to Gears of War, we find an example of a game that is almost entirely about shooting from cover, but which is makes shooting from cover about as much fun as it has ever been), and yet it is not clear that the game is much more than the sum of those parts. Red Dead Redemption isn't particularly good at any one thing, and its greatest triumph, its endlessly involving gameworld, is undermined by the few and awkward ways we can actually interact with it. Watching a friend play for a spell, I was struck by how much more immersive the game became when I treated it purely as a visual and aural spectacle, and when we are talking about a videogame – a piece of interactive entertainment – this simply shouldn't be the case. Let's blame cinema, or at least our love of it, because we can't seem to get past that. I do not know how many hours of cutscenes and forced transition dialogue there are in Red Dead Redemption, but I can tell you, without hesitation, that whatever the number may be, it is too high. Few games are as unabashed about their cinematic influences as this one, and few developers are as accomplished as Rockstar at cinematic mimicry, but at its height this is still mimicry; the cracks still show. With the technology we have now, even the best in-engine cutscenes in gaming – even those drawing on a rich cinematic lineage – are as evidently false as plaster casts among real human faces. There is more to see in one impassive glance from Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name than there is in all the length of Red Dead Redemption (or, as Chris Breault will tell you, there is greater cinematic richness in one scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark than in all of Uncharted 2). And if your game is more fun to look at than to play, then the best thing you can hope for, the very best, is that it will be almost as good as the equivalent movie. Developers, pay heed: until we invent the goddamn holodeck, the pursuit of cinema leads down a blind alley. Turn back.
The pacing of Red Dead Redemption also flounders in this way. This game wants to be a movie (probably Unforgiven), or perhaps several movies in one (to sketch just a few sampled plots: the bad guy makes good; the betrayed seeks revenge upon his betrayers; the common man must protect his family; the rebel becomes what he once opposed; the Wild West cannot escape civilization, and so is ended by it; the boy cannot escape his father; the wages of sin is death), and yet it never quite convinces us that it has a story to tell, or at least one we haven't been told before, and better. Things are most compelling at the outset – before Rockstar usher on-stage their usual cast of 'humorous' stereotypes, and before they bore us with a very lengthy, very repetitive trudge through Mexico – and at the end. The story here is smaller in focus, bigger in heart, and the missions are leaner and so more pleasing. When it has us quietly herd cattle and hunt deer, Red Dead Redemption startles and beguiles, and its world becomes worth the investment. It is in these moments, and in some of the 'ambient challenges' – which have us venture off the beaten paths that may as well be the streets of Liberty City – that I felt Red Dead Redemption could well have interesting things to say, to play. And then I thought it was a shame that the rest of the game had left John Marston hoarse – hoarse from hurling curses and insults at a legion of indistinguishable enemies; hoarse from bellowing about the all too evident hypocrisies around him; hoarse from contradicting himself, to say nothing of the player, at every turn; and hoarse from talking, and talking, and talking some more.
You will get your money's worth of talking in this game; I am not sure anyone could complain that there "wasn't enough talking" in Red Dead Redemption, just as they could never complain that there "wasn't enough shooting", or even enough occasions when they held down one button to ride to the next waypoint. But such evaluative concerns have always baffled me, because length and breadth are irrelevant to good art; it is depth that should matter. No one – I hope – judges movies by their running time or novels by their weight, and yet to ask "how many hours" a videogame's single-player campaign will yield remains a stock interview question. I am constantly reminded that this medium of ours is immature in such regards, and it is not difficult to agree. For instance, while I have often read that an otherwise good game was "too short", I have rarely, if ever, heard someone remark that an otherwise decent one was overlong. So here it is: Red Dead Redemption is too long; and for all its accomplishment and flair in creating a new world, it offers too little of worth to do there. One to watch, perhaps.
this is a good review
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