After seeing the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, I thought of playing a Wild West style video game but didn’t really see anything interesting (if any existed at all in the past 3 years). Red Dead Redemption had advertising but it didn’t really latch onto me until this week (laughably, the week it’s released).

It is instantly a favorite/hate game. The graphics are wonderful, the interactions pretty neat. While combat is kinda fun, the stuff that bugs me are the controls and the reaction of Marston, the protagonist. I haven’t looked at the settings, but I’m sure I can rearrange the controls. The default PS3 controls have aim and fire on the second left trigger and second right trigger respectively. To “enter cover” you press the first right trigger. To enter bullet time mode, or Dead-Eye as its called, you have to be aiming (2nd left trigger) and click down on the right analog stick. It’s all a little cumbersome. With fire being on the second right trigger, it’s easy to fire but also easy to accidentally fire. While bullets seem plentiful enough, I hate wasting them nonetheless.

Dead-Eye is neat even if I haven’t reached the ability to paint targets yet. When you paint targets, you plot in a succession of shots to be executed once you leave Dead-Eye state. This enables a punishment of shots to one target or the awesome show of taking down multiple targets in seconds. What I hate about this mechanic is the Dead-Eye gauge does not retain its state in saves. When you die and reload it’s empty, which is good. But say I make a mistake on some task and want to reload, I lose what amount I accrued. This pisses me off because it’s very easy to make a mistake in this game.

Mistakes I’ve made in the game that resulted in frustration:

• Riding off the edge of a cliff because in order to stop the horse, you have to hold down the first right trigger rather than pulling back on the left analog stick.
• Assaulting the poor stagecoach driver (a fast travel option in towns and settlements) because the infinitesimal gap between hopping in as a rider or mugging the driver and stealing the coach.
• Wanting to wound and incapacitate an enemy by shooting him in the arm but end up registering as killing him.
• Killing livestock or even people who are too stupid to get out of the way of a galloping horse (even the first Assassin’s Creed didn’t have this problem).

All of that with only a few hours into the game. Much of that time restarting from old saves. If it weren’t for the retarded “general” AI (which I shouldn’t be surprised, this is Rockstar Games, their GTA series also has horrible AI), clunky control scheme, laggy/idiotic character reaction (when I push the left analog stick to move Marston to the left, I mean for him to move left, not run a few steps forward then left or spin around to his right then run left; same thing goes for horse riding), I’d be in Western heaven. When I’m not fumbling with the controls, gun combat is fun. Duels, the poker mini-game, herding cattle and wrangling horses have been fun. There should be a single button press to view the world map, but it’s minor. I don’t like the way outfits are obtained in this game as I’d rather be able to buy at least some bits and put them on. In safe houses, I’d like to be able to save without moving the time forward six hours (yes, I don’t trust the auto-save checkpoints).

With more time clocked in to it, I hope Red Dead Redemption elevates higher to favorite than sink down to hate.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:13 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.