Maybe a great example of the 7/10 game. Something that you can see it's intention and ambition but weighted down by what may have been a lack of resources or deadlines due to the launch of next gen systems.
A gritty and gore appearance of a story you expect from the prime days of westerns, a modest (though pretty empty) open world that isn't a huge pain to traverse, a simple but fun combat system. It's got the makings of something that could have been fantastic. It's a game that in a pre-Red Dead Redemption world was really cool back in the day, but it's vision did not age as well today.
While it eventually does land at a better spot with it's depiction of native americans and tries to redeem itself within the story (though it definitely takes a bit of a 180 to get there...), it's still filtered through the lens of the 2000s where America was still openly parodying every culture but themselves and it's very... tropey and downright gross at times. I guess not surprising for Neversoft doing their Rockstar impression, but this is no Blood Meridian when it comes to deconstruction of an ugly era full of the worst types of men. You end up stomping all over yourselves when saying you're depicting the time while you have those subjects dressed like they're in Saturday Night Live costumes. Consider me surprised they didn't go even more hard on the chinese characters...
On top of all of that, despite a very good and star studded cast, the game's story doesn't have enough room to breathe. It often feels abridged and there was a point where I wasn't sure if my game was glitched and missing a couple scenes. I looked up a couple long plays on different systems and no, it is just that way. I thought I had just remembered it being full of sudden changes when I was a kid. Characters come and go at odd times but through the writing you're supposed to understand they have some form of bond/history that developed like entirely off camera while I was looking for gold in the open world. So it never truly feels earned as it presentation suggest. But there's definitely some banger lines here and like all of them from Brad Dourif's character.
Uneven and I don't regret revisiting it. I still think it's a pretty good game. It's largely about as jank as I remember it, but through a modern lens it's not deserving of a remaster so much as it deserves some proper preservation and maybe just a way better remake that is... a lot less racist at it's core.
A quick tip if you're playing the PC version, there's a couple mods out there like a widescreen mod and 60fps mod that aren't too difficult to setup. For the most part 60fps won't cause issues, but there was maybe one or two instances where the game logic was definitely tied to it and I had to go back to 30 for that brief moment. It's not a great port but it's probably the best way to play this game today.
A gritty and gore appearance of a story you expect from the prime days of westerns, a modest (though pretty empty) open world that isn't a huge pain to traverse, a simple but fun combat system. It's got the makings of something that could have been fantastic. It's a game that in a pre-Red Dead Redemption world was really cool back in the day, but it's vision did not age as well today.
While it eventually does land at a better spot with it's depiction of native americans and tries to redeem itself within the story (though it definitely takes a bit of a 180 to get there...), it's still filtered through the lens of the 2000s where America was still openly parodying every culture but themselves and it's very... tropey and downright gross at times. I guess not surprising for Neversoft doing their Rockstar impression, but this is no Blood Meridian when it comes to deconstruction of an ugly era full of the worst types of men. You end up stomping all over yourselves when saying you're depicting the time while you have those subjects dressed like they're in Saturday Night Live costumes. Consider me surprised they didn't go even more hard on the chinese characters...
On top of all of that, despite a very good and star studded cast, the game's story doesn't have enough room to breathe. It often feels abridged and there was a point where I wasn't sure if my game was glitched and missing a couple scenes. I looked up a couple long plays on different systems and no, it is just that way. I thought I had just remembered it being full of sudden changes when I was a kid. Characters come and go at odd times but through the writing you're supposed to understand they have some form of bond/history that developed like entirely off camera while I was looking for gold in the open world. So it never truly feels earned as it presentation suggest. But there's definitely some banger lines here and like all of them from Brad Dourif's character.
Uneven and I don't regret revisiting it. I still think it's a pretty good game. It's largely about as jank as I remember it, but through a modern lens it's not deserving of a remaster so much as it deserves some proper preservation and maybe just a way better remake that is... a lot less racist at it's core.
A quick tip if you're playing the PC version, there's a couple mods out there like a widescreen mod and 60fps mod that aren't too difficult to setup. For the most part 60fps won't cause issues, but there was maybe one or two instances where the game logic was definitely tied to it and I had to go back to 30 for that brief moment. It's not a great port but it's probably the best way to play this game today.