Red Dead Redemption is an open-world western action-adventure video game developed and published by Rockstar Games. It was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles in May of 2010. It is the second title in the Red Dead franchise, after 2004’s Red Dead Revolver. Red Dead Redemption was praise for the game’s visuals, dynamically-generated music, voice acting, gameplay, and storyline. It has shipped over 14 million copies, won several major awards and is considered by many as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Pros:

After hearing so much praise about this game, my bar was set pretty high and at the beginning, I was not happy. After a painfully long/boring intro video and ranch roaming tutorial, it was pretty much a wild west Grand Theft Auto. However, after sinking my teeth into it for a bit, I found that the “GTA” formula worked much better in a Western setting. The seemingly lawless feel of the wild west played a bit too well into the system. Soon I found myself immersed and spending an insane amount of time on side missions, fun mini-games, dueling anyone who would challenge me and hunting (and skinning) any animal that was unlucky enough to get randomly generated across my path. The gameplay is fluid, flexible and you have a kind of good-guy/bad-guy option for most of your missions. Though you really can’t stray too far from the storyline or to the “dark-side”. The music is fantastically integrated. It flows in and out as you find yourself in various situations and I really can’t think of a more successful, seamlessly movie score type feel in any other game before it.

Fun fact, the Video Games Live concert at E3 in 2011 did a live performance of the music. The video quality is a bit crappy here, but this happens to be the very concert that I proposed to my wife at… in front of all of those people… nerve-wracking to say the least.

Cons:

As for the cons, well the intro/tutorial section really is painfully long and boring, to say the least. The dialogue and voice acting is good, but there is a lot of it and quite a bit of it is really not necessary for the main storyline. I quickly found myself starting to skip through many side quest cutscenes and soon, out of habit, I mistakenly skipped some of the more important storyline cut scenes. It really does play like a “Grand Theft Horse”, but again that’s actually a plus, as much as recycling the same old system might pull you out of the immersion a bit at the beginning. The storyline IS good and has just enough turns to it to make it not feel like a recycled or predictable wild west cliche, but it’s not THAT good. I might get some flak for this, but seriously there is a good chunk of the game, that is dedicated to running errands on a farm… yay… not only at the start of the game, *spoiler alert (not really), but towards the end of the game too.