Every time I see Red Dead Redemption, I get just a little bit more excited. The most recent hour I spent with Rockstar's open-world Western afforded me the opportunity to get my hands on it for the first time. With a satchel filled with guns and ammunition, a reliable horse, and a knife big enough to skin a deer, I had all of the tools I needed to make my mark on the American West.
If you haven't been paying attention to Red Dead Redemption, you should start right now. The game stars John Marston, a typical outlaw that tried and failed to transform himself into an honorable member of society. Now he's right back in the mix of things and it's up to you to keep him alive. Most people want him dead, so good luck.
Before letting me try out Red Dead, Rockstar insisted on showing an extended battle scene while the controls and mechanics were explained. Here I got to see John Marston working through one of the quests tied to a civil war that's about to break out just south of the Mexican border. The fight began down in a valley with the enemy sitting atop a high plateau ridge. I had the luxury of taking in the scenery -- the red-tinged rock face looked particularly cool -- while a Rockstar employee started picking off targets using a rudimentary sniper rifle. The battle continued along a path that took Marston up to a hideout at the top of the ridge. Along the way I got a look at the cover mechanics, a slew of sweet guns, the Dead Eye mechanic, and some seriously great looking animations.
Weapons and death gameplay video
Rockstar is once again making use of NaturalMotion's euphoria engine (as it did with Grand Theft Auto IV) for animations. It's been dialed up a bit here to make things realistic but with a hint of that over-the-top feeling a lot of Western films have. Still screenshots and moving trailers do a decent job of making Red Dead Redemption look cool, but it isn't until you're in control of the action and start blasting bandits that you realize just how much fun the entire game is going to be.
You get the full effect once the Dead Eye meter has been filled. Activate it and the world will go into slow motion, allowing the player to hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. It'll get you out of a jam, but I had even more fun using it to set up great looking kills. Human targets will overreact to a simple pistol shot, stumbling backwards or to the side depending upon which part of the body you hit. Get up close with a shotgun and they'll go flying through the air. This is when things get fun. After you shoot someone and they start to react, hit the Dead Eye button and you can fire off more shots to send them flying and tumbling this way or that. Or take a potshot at a crate of TNT or a lantern and you'll get an explosion to totally decimate your target.
I found the cover system to be quite fluid and easy to master. It helps that Rockstar has littered every story section I've seen thus far with ample short walls and buildings to duck behind at a moment's notice. The fight up the ridge was quite a long fight, but it took place through the ruins of some old adobe and brick buildings. Another fight even had Marston pushing a mine cart (and riding it when it got enough momentum), which offered some mobile protection.
Hero or outlaw?
My favorite moments, though, were those gunfights that took place out in the open. Nothing says badass cowboy like a guy with no regard for his life or safety. It isn't all that easy to pull off without getting filled with lead, but every now and then you can do a slow walk up to a guy and blast him at close range or take a knife to his throat. You might prefer to use a long range rifle or a Molotov cocktail, but I'd call you a wimp.
Marston isn't the kind of guy to lie down and let others walk all over him, and I think his actions with a gun should match his swagger. Prior to one mission, I was introduced to a drunken Irish guy who had info on a particular machine gun Marston had an interest in. He was getting a bit surly, so Marston told him in no uncertain terms that he'd simply kill him if things didn't go perfectly. That sobered up the sloppy Irish man pretty quickly and it was off for a bit of stealing and killing. The few characters I've seen so far in Red Dead Redemption have all been quite impressive – both in terms of their look and mannerisms as well as their dialogue -- which should come as no surprise given Rockstar's history
More impressive still was what happened once I got on a horse and was given free rein to simply ride around the countryside. The area I galloped through was just a small portion of the entire game, and it was absolutely huge. Those without any imagination will stick to the trails, carved between small towns and trading posts. They'll get a good look at the countryside and the beautiful results of a fully dynamic weather system. They might even stay a bit safer from things like rattlesnakes, but they won't get the full experience. Steer your horse off into the brush and you'll get to see cacti and bushes bend to the side as you forge a new road. Little critters will scurry out of the way, and you're free to hunt them as a mini-game. You can even skin a deer and take its leather pelt to sell in town.
You might even come across some citizens in need of help. Red Dead Redemption is filled with randomly generated small side-quests and I came across a few during my travels. One was a girl that looked to be in the midst of a kidnapping. Another was a prostitute being bullied by a would-be client. And the last was a set of homesteaders under attack by bandits.
The gentlemanly thing to do would have been to help all of these people in need. I certainly had the guns to do it. The fun part about Red Dead Redemption is that good and evil are completely up for interpretation. I ended up siding with the bandits and killed the homesteaders before looting their bodies. The lady of the night ended up getting killed by the bully while I watched, so I blasted him in the face with a shotgun. And that women in the midst of a kidnapping? Well I killed her captor, but then left her tied up. I tossed her on the back of my horse and went for a ride
Clearly, Rockstar is building some impressive environments.
I didn't play long enough to see the full effect of my actions. It is possible to have bounties put out on your head if you're too evil, and just a few renegade actions will begin to tilt your infamy level away from the heroic side of things. It'll be interesting to see how differently the citizens of Red Dead Redemption respond to you once you push that meter to the limits.
It's probably a good thing that I didn't get a bounty put out on my head, since one of the last things I did was enter a town to explore the area. Most places were closed off, so I didn't get to shop for new weapons or see the full economy at work, but I did get to wander into a saloon and try my hand at a knife mini-game. In the saloon, I got drunk and pushed another patron over a railing. In the mini-game, I managed to keep all of my fingers intact as I tapped the controller in a matching rhythm challenge while Marston stabbed the spaces between the digits of his outstretched palm.
There are a lot of great looking games on the horizon in 2010. Some will wind up being hits. Others may end up being duds. Red Dead Redemption is on track to be a hit. It's beautiful. It handles well. It's got that "fun factor" that some have said was missing from GTA IV. It's still going through optimization, bug fixing, and tuning and it already looks like a winner. Mark your calendars for the end of April. You've got a date with the Wild West
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