I’m not one of the people who like the “GTA-like”, sandbox open worlds, I’ll write about the reasoning some other time. And I’m not a fan of westerns. So, I suppose this isn’t much of a “review” as much as an “opinion” on a really cool, but flawed Red Dead Redemption.
The game’s receiving the highest praise and it deserves that praise. It is definitely the best “GTA-like” open world and all the funny glitches you can find on the internet don’t make it worse. It’s just that Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven isn’t a sandbox, and it was developed before GTAIII, and its existence puts things into a different perspective.
Thing is, Rockstar seem to still be “afraid” to use the elements that would fit their games and have been in use in other genres and titles for years. And instead, are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. In RDRedemption you finally get a quest journal where you can replay missions, sidequests are waiting for the player… It’s great. But it’s not a “wow, this is a new high for open world games!” It’s a “wow, they’ve finally implemented stuff that has been in RPGs for 15 years”. Which is the way anyone who understands that game genres are not developing in isolation should be thinking. So if your new game is very action-RPG-like, use the ideas that have been used in action-RPGs.
Another evolved element of RDRedemption is the story. As I started playing the game it felt as if Rockstar has finally made a truly amazing story with memorable characters. Turns out, it’s both correct and incorrect at the same time. It starts like that, has plenty of cool memorable characters, some of which are annoying, but still good. And then you get to Act 2. Mexico and the entire storyline is thrown out of the window. There’s just one interesting character in that entire huge section (who sounds like Ironside). But the rest of the act feels like pointless stuff made to pad out the game and the story gets good again only by the third act. Rockstar are essentially repeating their mistakes and instead of quality focus on quantity. A bunch of cool characters from the first act just disappear for half the game and instead you get some forgettable boring ones. And when the cool characters and storylines return in Act 3, you can barely remember what the hell was even happening there. And you stop caring.
Third part has a cool twist (rather boring mechanically though) and you start caring about the characters again. And the ending and the epilogue of the game are definitely up there with the already mentioned Mafia. And the concept of getting the “final final ending” in the epilogue as a side quest is just brilliant. Yet, this is where the sandbox nature of the game gets in the way too. Why do people like the flow of Mafia? Because it plays as a linear game, each next mission unlocking right away and putting you where you need to be. So why can’t you skip directly to the next mission in this game? Make the “open world” an option when the mission ends, not force you into it? And if the mission needs to start at a specific time I still need to find something to do instead of the game just forwarding the time to what it should be, really? Sure, RPGs with open world, which is what RDRedemprion is copying, also have moments like that where you must consider the time and the schedules of other characters. But you also usually get the option to “wait” until the time you need. In RDRedemption it’s just the game forcing you to go see open world just because “we tried to hard, please check it out”, even if you might be interested in just the story.
And the game is full of these annoyances which detract from the best elements of the game. There are races, because it’s a Rockstar game so of course there are races. The character animation and physics which are pretty cool visually, sure, are annoying in practice as they make controlling the characters a chore, since you must fight with the character to make them go where you need to go or get in the cover the way you need. And it’s sad, since Red Dead Redemption is one of the best open world games and is definitely one of the very best Rockstar titles. I just hope that they will learn from this and will start implementing more quality of life ideas from other genres more freely in the future. And hope that this is just the first of their games with a good story and good characters. RDRedemption is the first step at taking open world action titles to the next level. And this game clearly shows that for that you can just borrow from the best, not try to invent the wheel again.