How good is Red Dead Redemption?

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

RDR is only $7.50 on PSN right now. The thing is I haven't liked a Rockstar game since Vice City or Midnight Club II (both came out around the same time). I got burned on buying Max Payne 3 for the same price, the shooting sucked along with the story and characters; I think I hate Dan Houser's writing (and he wrote RDR as well). I hate GTA because the missions are so bad, it's just go to a spot and kill a bunch of people with far below par shooting. The point of sandbox gameplay is supposed allow freedom on how to complete missions (like say Dishonored and Mercenaries, and what Watch_Dogs will be). I've heard from people that RDR is I guess "special" and I've been told to try it even though I hate GTA.

 

[The_Scrivener]

Forgive me if you don't end up liking it but....

I've been really cold to everything Rock Star has made. GTAIII was fine while it lasted and while IV had potential it had a lot of narrative dissonance and tedious gameplay decisions that kept me from liking it that much.

With that said...

Red Dead Redemption is one of the most enthralling video games I've ever played. As long as you have an attention span for video gaming and are willing to see John's full arc through to the conclusion, it is an unforgettable title. You may never get better value than you will for $7.50 for RDR.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

From the sounds of things, you won't like it. I found the shooting satisfying, but it has the typical Rockstar-feeling controls. The things that makes it fun are the animation and punchy sound effects, the actual aiming is slow as hell basically forcing you to rely on the ridiculously accurate auto-aim. Seriously, take aim and Marston will immediately aim right at the nearest guy's chest; just a slight nudge of the analogue stick and you're aiming at the head.

I don't remember individual missions being especially open-ended, but there's a lot of optional content that basically is. It's possible to just live in the world and hunt bandits, help strangers, etc. There's some variety to the missions, but a lot of them are still all about the murder.

The story and characters are better than GTA 4 and Max Payne 3, but not as good as they're often claimed to be in my opinion. I still enjoyed the story, but it isn't the second coming.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Red Dead Redemption is one of the most enthralling video games I've ever played. As long as you have an attention span for video gaming and are willing to see John's full arc through to the conclusion, it is an unforgettable title. You may never get better value than you will for $7.50 for RDR.

Yeah, I've read these type of things a lot, which is why I'm considering playing it whereas it's never crossed my mind to play GTA4/5.

From the sounds of things, you won't like it. I found the shooting satisfying, but it has the typical Rockstar-feeling controls. The things that makes it fun are the animation and punchy sound effects, the actual aiming is slow as hell basically forcing you to rely on the ridiculously accurate auto-aim. Seriously, take aim and Marston will immediately aim right at the nearest guy's chest; just a slight nudge of the analogue stick and you're aiming at the head.

I don't remember individual missions being especially open-ended, but there's a lot of optional content that basically is. It's possible to just live in the world and hunt bandits, help strangers, etc. There's some variety to the missions, but a lot of them are still all about the murder.

The story and characters are better than GTA 4 and Max Payne 3, but not as good as they're often claimed to be in my opinion. I still enjoyed the story, but it isn't the second coming.

The slow-mo mechanic seems like it'll help a lot in the shooting department to do some cool things that would be extremely hard even with the smoothest aiming ever (like shooting from horseback).

I don't need the missions to be open-ended as long as they are just good and memorable. GTA was barely like that, most mission just feel like you go to a spot and the game spawns X amount of enemies. There's no care taken to enemy placement and level design (whereas there was with Mercenaries), it's just like Rockstar hopes the missions will be good instead of making them good. Rockstar values quantity and variety over quality in my opinion with missions.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

RDR has a lot of cool bonus content. I think it's the first game I ever played where the mini games actually work and make you want to play them for hours (specifically poker). There're also a whole bunch of inside challenges for fighting, exploring, hunting, collecting, you name it. You can spend a lot of time NOT doing the main missions.

I do have some gripes... the game's too fucking easy. The auto-aim let you one-hit kill anyone with pretty much anything, whether you're riding or not. So combat doesn't take a whole lot of skill. Despite all the horse breeds in the game there are only three tiers of stamina, so once you own the deeds to a tier 3 horse - which spawns whenever you whistle - there's no reason to buy or steal any more. Weapons can be purchased, but if you wait long enough they become plot gifts, so what's the point in buying any? So there's no reason to buy anything beyond the ocassional hideout spot. Ammo and stat boosters are pointless, seeing as ammo is ordinary as hell and both life and the amaze-o-meter that lets you freeze reality both regenerate automatically. You'll end up sitting on piles of money and with nothing to spend it on. Like Assassin's Creed II.

The main missions are pretty linear. There's the occasional multi-phased mission that's a lot of fun, gang hideouts to raid anyway you want and the bounty missions let you bring in perps to jail dead or alive. But for the most part they are all pretty linear - lots of riding from A to B, take down a lot of enemies, escort an NPC, you know the drill. It's fun and has a VERY GOOD story with GREAT voice acting (something I don't usually pay much attention to), just a little linear and too easy.

 

[Angelowl]

Easily one of my top three games on the console, alongside Valkyria Chronicles and Killzone 2. Good story, likable characters, fantastic world, decent/good gunplay. It is one of the most relaxing and entertaining games I played in a long time, I have spent hours upon hours just riding around and hunting or exploring interesting areas. Not to mentino playing the minigames, those are really well done. For example, in poker the opponents got separate AIs with different personalities and reacts differently to how you play.

My main complaints are fairly minor. The SAA revolver (Cattleman) is way too weak, running around in mexico gets very frustrating after a while (who the hell designed that road network?!) and that they could have more rewards for exploring. The Undead Nightmare DLC solves the latter issue, a fantastic expansion with a nice twist on the gameplay. Although the zombie-spawning mechanic is bugged so that killing zombies makes more spawn right were you are. And I have spent about 15 hours to trying to find undead bobcats...

Still an absolutely fantastic game with some of the best character writing I have seen in the last few years. In some ways it is a better roleplaying game than most roleplaying games we have now, simply because of the setting and the ability to get completely immersed in it. The epilogue of the game could be the best I ever seen in a game.

 

[White Lightning]

It's a great game, very well written and the graphics and scenery are awesome. The combat is the usual for a Rockstar game and it is kind of easy. If you want a challenge though you can turn the auto aim off and it becomes a bit more interesting.

You also have to try the DLC as well, Zombies in a Western is really cool, and it definitely fills the challenge gap if you take auto aim off.

 

[Zhukov]

Meh.

I liked it well enough to begin with, but it overstayed its welcome something fierce.

The setting is very well realised. Pretty and lively.

The combat is crap or mediocre depending on whether or not you have auto-aim turned on (having it on makes everything laughably simple - just tap aim-fire-aim-fire-aim-fire until they're all dead. Having it off solves that, but then you're just playing a nothing special third person shooter and every now and again it will make you shoot from horseback which is damn near impossible without auto aim.)

A lot of the side content is interesting, but utterly unrelated to anything else, making it feel like a series of non-sequiters. The rest is just boring gathering fetching quests for no reason at all, with the exception of the treasure hunts.

The random encounters are cool and make the world feel more alive, but then they start repeating and end up having the opposite effect.

The story is... well, it's certainly above average for a video game, I'll give it that. Drags on like nobody's business though. Stuffed so full of filler that it's leaking from every orifice. By the end I was so fucking sick of it that I didn't give a shit what was happening or to who. Then it ends. Then it keeps fucking going some more.

 

[Sledgimus]

Just get the Undead Nightmare standalone DLC. Fun gameplay without the abysmal story, cattle-herding missions and unskippable deliberations on freedom vs. government.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

It`s a beautiful open world game and my personal favorite western game. If you`re not into open world or Rockstar games then save the money. Besides the middle part (felt a bit like a filler storywise) in Mexico and collecting flowers there`s nothing to complain about from my side. I`ve played every Call of Juarez, Gun and i remember something called Law of the West on the C64 but this game finally nailed it.

 

[Reed Spacer]

Just get the Undead Nightmare standalone DLC. Fun gameplay without the abysmal story, cattle-herding missions and unskippable deliberations on freedom vs. government.

Or even better, the GOTA edition which has both.

A rather simplistic description of the game would be 'Grand Theft Auto with horses'

 

[Weaver]

If ever a game has dragged on RDR was it.

Having a very completionist attitude towards games, RDR had so many pointless flower collecting and wolf killing style side objectives the game just went on and on and on. I was fucking bored. The combat was boring, the traveling was boring, the objectives were boring. I admittedly hate westerns, so my bias is obvious. If you can bring yourself to not do these it would be better.

It also suffered from something that bugs me a lot about open world games: 90% of the game is just horseback riding or walking. The random encounters start to just become irritating speedbumps of you trying to get places. You're always just going places instead of doing things. It at least has fast travel.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

The put it simply it is my second favorite game of all time, and I've been gaming since the 80's. The story is emotional and rivetting, the presentation is faultless, the gameplay intuitive and varied, the voice acting is rock solid, with the main character John Marston being particularly well realised. Most of all it has heart, and lots of it. You are John Marston. You'll feel the loneliness of wandering the savannas at night, with the occasional whicker of you horse being the only company, you'll grit your teeth as you wade into another gun fight, you'll feel the sting to your honour when someone spits at your feet and challenges you to a duel and you'll feel the frustration as "the man" seems to string you a long with the promise that if you just do this one thing for them you can see your family again.
Do not skip this game.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I decided to give it and shot, downloading it now. I'll probably stay away from much of the side quest stuff and I didn't get the Undead Nightmare (even though it was just $2.50 more) because I mainly just want to experience the main game and from a few reviews of it I watched, it seemed to be rather repetitive.

Curious, why were you so cold on Max Payne 3? I thought the shooting mechanics was some of the best gameplay I ever played in a TPS

I think I hated everything about Max Payne 3. I knew I was going to hate the presentation as it looked like Kane & Lynch and I did indeed hate that. I tried it for the shooting alone (thinking that would be at least solid) and I was very disappointed. I HATED the writing and the story, I just wanted Max to shut the fuck up. I'd like to say TPSs are my thing before getting into every little thing MP3 did wrong, I played Metal Gear Online for 4 years straight every week against the very best TPS players. The controls of MP3 are bad at many levels. The shoulder swap is implemented poorly, you shouldn't have to take your thumb off the left stick to shoulder swap (so many TPSs fail at something so simple from Uncharted to Tomb Raider to MP3 to even Vanquish). There's no way to quick switch weapons, you have to bring up a damn wheel to switch weapons. Why can't the game just remember what weapon you last used? Then quick tapping the weapon wheel button will switch back to your previous weapon, holding it would bring up the wheel. The crouch button basically doesn't work, you have to hold crouch for about a full second for Max to crouch, and even then it's really useless. The cover system is horrible, you can't even crouch while in cover. There's a section where enemies drop in on you in an office room and you can take cover on the cubicle walls and the walls are destructible (which is cool). However, if the top part of the wall gets destroyed (the part that covers Max's head), Max will stay standing up and you can't even manually press crouch to crouch lower on the cover. And when you shoot dodge (or get knock to last stand) and there's cover in front of you, you can't go from prone to cover, you have to standup like a dumbass and then go to cover. Max's overall movement just feels clunky, it doesn't have that smoothness of say MGS4, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Vanquish, and even Uncharted is smoother. MP3 is obviously trying to be a fast-paced arcade shooter but Max is so sluggish and even more due to the controls that make him feel so mechanical.

The game actually plays pretty decently in small, closed areas like the police station level at the end. But there's so many sections of long range shooting with enemies at you 3 o'clock, 12 o'clock, and 9 o'clock that the game devolves into basically whack-a-mole as you have to wait for them to pop up to shoot them and you can't move around much or you'll get shot and killed rather quickly. What pissed me off so much more is that enemies even actually duck when you use bullet time, it's so fucking ridiculous. At the end of the game, with the shootout in the hanger (with the guy with the grenade launcher) pretty much emphasizes everything wrong with the game; you have enemies at your 3, 12, and 9 while not having any freedom of movement, the game will cutscene kill you if you go too far to your right or left and try to get in an actual good position.

Lastly, MP3 had the single most sexist thing I've ever seen in a game. It's probably not the worst sexism in a game ever but it was literally the first time while playing a game that I actually had to stop for a second and say to myself "that's just so wrong." It was the bus scene where you escort the pregnant chick around. Fine, she's useless during the shootouts and stuff, I get that. But when Max needs her to just drive a bus, she can't even drive straight, she's literally hits things. The scene wasn't played as a joke or anything like that either.

 

[Not Lord Atkin]

I'll sum it up for you:
Gameplay-wise, it's passable. Slightly awkward to control but the shooting feels alright and riding horses around is cool. not great but I didn't hate it.

As a sandbox, it's kind of meh. There's enough stuff to do but no real incentive to do any of it.

You want to play it for the characters and writing. I rarely ever like a protagonist as much as I liked John Marston. After a while I just gave up on sandboxing it altogether and just breezed through the story missions. It's incredibly well-written and engaging as a whole.

I say, get it. It's worth the 7.50.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Its good until they shove an unnecessary chapter on the end where you do the sort of boring bullshit any other game would have at the start to show you how to play and it goes on way too long.

The combat is auto aim and shoot but still just about good enough to not be boring. The main character is very good but the story they put him in is so pointless and stretched out I started skipping all the cutscenes. The side activities, some of which they force you to do (but only a few times) in the main story are a pain in the ass. The horse catching and cow herding are some of the most annoying things in a game ever.
Also it has the Rockstar thing where if you do anything even the tinyest bit different than the designers intended you fail the mission.

Overall its one of those games that is still pretty dam good despite having a hell of a lot of flaws.

 

[TristanBelmont]

It is the best game Rockstar has made to date. Even with Max Payne in an extremely close second place, Red Dead is a great game that deserves all of the praise and hype it receives.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I'm definitely in the minority, but I was honestly bored to death with the game.

I found it way too easy, mostly because "Red Dead" mode is so overpowered it's almost funny, but for some reason when you're not using it, John moves like he's wearing a full diaper, and aims with all the speed of man whose arms are coated in honey.

The story was the other issue I had; it just never seemed to go anywhere. I think I realized right around the 15 hour mark that the plot literally hadn't moved one inch, it just seemed to be a random string of missions with various characters that never amounted to anything. I could live with something like that if the game had a skill system or leveling system or something along those lines, then you'd be constantly feeling like you're making progress, but all you're doing is getting better gear.

On the plus side, the game had great voice-acting and the characters were excellent, and I liked that the horses actually controlled somewhat like horses (ie. the can't turn on a dime, they can't stop instantly, etc.), but something about the game never really clicked with me.

 

[white_wolf]

Its a really good game if you like free roam. The plot is very simple the government sends an ex-badguy (you)to kill his former buddies (the other badguys) its the inbetween bits that make this game fun mini games liars dice, 5 finger, and poker, you can hold up a town, exploring, hunting, treasure hunting with maps and you really have to find the loot there are no markers, you do meet unique characters both on the main quest and the sidequest (which I suggest you do sidequests)memorable missions and events like I found a woman who killed herself right infront of me while she mourned her man just killed.

The plot spans a long time you spend half the time in the states and the other half in mexico I hated mexico but I made up for it with holding up their towns, hunting, and ranking up my bounty generally making my own chaos. This game some say is the west done right.

I had no issues with the horse mechanics and could approach bounty kills in several different ways but the scenarios can get alittle too similar like once I raided the same darn cavern 5 times for several missions but unique personalities like California or the mystery man helped balance those types of missions out, sometimes you also have no choice but to ride and talk your way to the next mission so if you aren't interested in the particulars you can find this boring or drawn out but I only had one ride I thought was dull mainly they provide info on who your going to kill and why. Also if you like this game you should also pick up GUN that one was good too and I don't like western things so both of these games were a surprise.