This is the wild west, you are John Marston on a mission to get your family back. The mission is simple, kill your “friends.” However in hunting your friends you get shot and then forced to go down a path of horse breaking, political war and flower picking. You get to see the sights of New Austin and Mexico. Oh and I forgot to mention, you cannot swim.
So the question that needs to be answered… is Red Dead Redemption a good game? The short answer is, YES, but not so much. This game SUFFERS from a terribly slow story, and even more so a turtles speed crawl through it. It takes several hours of mundane ranch work, and learning of the controls to even scratch the REAL story of this game. This game is great, I loved its good parts but they were few and far between.
From this point on I am no longer giving kudos to a game just because it looks and sounds good, and this game those two areas it shines. The controls are an issue, you sometimes need to navigate 3 buttons to shoot a target, the duel system is pathetic and the horse controls are maddening. Rockstar took GTA 4 and applied a wild west theme to it. The missions/tasks are quite repetitive, go kill the baddies, save the person, go investigate some far off point on the map. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Yet Rockstar filled the game with so much side-questing that at times I get lost in the amount of things to do in the game. Its like they knew the story was utter trash so they threw in some Poker, Dueling, and Night Watch quests to distract you from the main story.
The game has one amazing part and that is the horse ride as you enter Mexico, thats about it. I bought into the hype of this game, thinking something completely different. I thought I was going to be playing through a story like Tombstone or 3:10 to Yuma but nope, I was playing through outfit changes and leveling up my “marksman” abilities. At least with GTA they put in just enough side notes and quests to provide a well needed time out from the story, with RDR Rockstar loaded up the Side “Stuff” and went lean on the the story.
Did I have fun when there was action? Hell yes, I loved the Dead Eye multi-targeting system of killing multiple enemies, albeit could have been simpler to control. I loved just riding on my horse through some of the best looking landscaping I have seen in a game. I loved the dialogue at times and going out to a small corner of the map and putting a bullet into a guy for no reason other than to collect some cash. However, these simple enjoyments cannot cancel out the wrong with this game.
I have no problem recommending this as a great rental, but I am hard pressed to recommend it as a purchase. I purchased this title, and in all honesty I am regretting it a bit.
AOS Rated: 
Disclamer: I did not try multiplayer as my PS3 has been going through internet/connection issues.
