Spel17
2 reviews liked by Spel17
Red Dead Redemption
2010
Great story and graphics, but repetitive missions
Red Dead Redemption
2010
This review contains spoilers
This game feels. so. long.
Red Dead Redemption looks incredible considering its release year. Genuinely incredible tech on this game. The character animations and voice acting is top notch. Nothing particularly surprising from Rockstar, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. The soundtrack of the game is also decent, with some standout tracks.
However, much of the game is a waste of time. The lack of quality of life really contributes to this feeling. The tie between saving and passing time is genuinely unforgivable - I wouldn't be surprised if I lost maybe 10-15 minutes of my life in this relatively short game to just saving to pass the time, or passing the time to save. This honestly wouldn't be such a big deal if certain missions didn't have a time requirement. Or, better yet, if you could just move to the time of day by approaching the needed mission. This lack of QoL is baffling.
Much of this game is riding on my horse. The horse controls in this game are by no means bad, in fact I was pretty impressed. However, getting most of the character dialogue in this game from just holding X for a few minutes is. bad. Genuinely, just have the horse follow the road. Or have the dialogue be presented in an actually interesting manner.
The combat in this game is fun, but very very simple. Deadeye simplifies things even further. Relatively, there isn't much combat in the game (which rightfully sets a decent tone of how serious shooting can be in this time). However, the encounters within the game feel fairly uninspired. None of the locals look very interesting, and they don't play out anymore complicated than running between cover and shooting. The cover barely even works in this game, so you really don't even have to do the first part. Especially if you have deadeye on deck.
The default controls in this game are also abysmal for riding a horse and shooting. Most of the time I was claw gripping the A button to ride, and shooting with my other fingers. Very uncomfortable.
Additionally, the actual open world feels utterly useless and needless. There is no reason to fast travel using camps, which wastes more time. The side quests in this game are not interesting, save for the ones that continue throughout the game. The Wanted system in this game is useless for how much money you get. The honor and fame systems give nearly useless boons by the end of the game. Normally, I'd be prone to explore more and take my time and figure out scenarios in which I would use some of these little buffs they give John, but there isn't much to explore in the samey looking world of Red Dead. I got one near the end of the game that said that I could not face repercussions for stealing horses, and it's like, why? Why would I take someone else's horse anyways? It really tries to shoehorn GTA mechanics into a game that doesn't need them.
But, honestly, the worst part of this game is the story. It's just plain boring. It doesn't even function as a character study of John Marston, who is so blinded by being a wife guy that he doesn't understand the plot he's in. In that sense, it fails as a tragedy as well. The actually interesting part of the game falls within the last 2 hours, after I had lost much of my interest. The first couple of parts (minus Bonnie and Ricketts) are completely devoid of any gripping content, and mostly consists of doing substories for Old West caricatures, which culminate in a very anticlimactic mission that completely fails anyways, leaving me feeling like I completely wasted my time. The game's questionable politics concerning the rebels in Mexico left me fairly downtrodden, and the third part of the game left me confounded as it expected me to have any emotion about John's past with Dutch. I just. don't understand. This is a bad game, and I don't understand the hype.
Red Dead Redemption looks incredible considering its release year. Genuinely incredible tech on this game. The character animations and voice acting is top notch. Nothing particularly surprising from Rockstar, but still worth mentioning nonetheless. The soundtrack of the game is also decent, with some standout tracks.
However, much of the game is a waste of time. The lack of quality of life really contributes to this feeling. The tie between saving and passing time is genuinely unforgivable - I wouldn't be surprised if I lost maybe 10-15 minutes of my life in this relatively short game to just saving to pass the time, or passing the time to save. This honestly wouldn't be such a big deal if certain missions didn't have a time requirement. Or, better yet, if you could just move to the time of day by approaching the needed mission. This lack of QoL is baffling.
Much of this game is riding on my horse. The horse controls in this game are by no means bad, in fact I was pretty impressed. However, getting most of the character dialogue in this game from just holding X for a few minutes is. bad. Genuinely, just have the horse follow the road. Or have the dialogue be presented in an actually interesting manner.
The combat in this game is fun, but very very simple. Deadeye simplifies things even further. Relatively, there isn't much combat in the game (which rightfully sets a decent tone of how serious shooting can be in this time). However, the encounters within the game feel fairly uninspired. None of the locals look very interesting, and they don't play out anymore complicated than running between cover and shooting. The cover barely even works in this game, so you really don't even have to do the first part. Especially if you have deadeye on deck.
The default controls in this game are also abysmal for riding a horse and shooting. Most of the time I was claw gripping the A button to ride, and shooting with my other fingers. Very uncomfortable.
Additionally, the actual open world feels utterly useless and needless. There is no reason to fast travel using camps, which wastes more time. The side quests in this game are not interesting, save for the ones that continue throughout the game. The Wanted system in this game is useless for how much money you get. The honor and fame systems give nearly useless boons by the end of the game. Normally, I'd be prone to explore more and take my time and figure out scenarios in which I would use some of these little buffs they give John, but there isn't much to explore in the samey looking world of Red Dead. I got one near the end of the game that said that I could not face repercussions for stealing horses, and it's like, why? Why would I take someone else's horse anyways? It really tries to shoehorn GTA mechanics into a game that doesn't need them.
But, honestly, the worst part of this game is the story. It's just plain boring. It doesn't even function as a character study of John Marston, who is so blinded by being a wife guy that he doesn't understand the plot he's in. In that sense, it fails as a tragedy as well. The actually interesting part of the game falls within the last 2 hours, after I had lost much of my interest. The first couple of parts (minus Bonnie and Ricketts) are completely devoid of any gripping content, and mostly consists of doing substories for Old West caricatures, which culminate in a very anticlimactic mission that completely fails anyways, leaving me feeling like I completely wasted my time. The game's questionable politics concerning the rebels in Mexico left me fairly downtrodden, and the third part of the game left me confounded as it expected me to have any emotion about John's past with Dutch. I just. don't understand. This is a bad game, and I don't understand the hype.