Red Dead Redemption

What I found most memorable about Red Dead Redemption ("RDR") is the irresistible charm the game heaps upon the eclectic bunch of characters whose interactions underlie the majority of its missions. At the centre of this experience stands tall a certain John Marston, a product of the harsh circumstance of being raised an orphan to later joining banditry terrorizing the West, recently reformed and not above cutting deals with government goons to gain admittance to civilization and even a sliver of happiness...

Mostly acting as a comic foil to the foibles and posturing of its myriad of misfits, John Marston becomes an everyman's hero whose every retort becomes searing shards of wisdom that only years of misappropriated youth and quiet but burning desperation forged in an unforgiving West can dredge up...Voiced so naturally and with confidence, the myriad of characters play against each other dishing out all the zings gleaned from the Big Compendium of Western clichés; its superb execution should be reminded for all posterity as an ideal extension of the cinematic flow of the cutscenes worthy of carrying a narrative driven game. It is certainly a milestone for the maturation of open world sandbox gameplay in the vein of the GTA series, and while RDR certainly improves on the aspects of the inherent features that were especial to these games, the drawbacks also identifiable with the type of gameplay become evident.

While it sounds like damning with faint praise, but RDR is beautiful in its unapologetic ugliness; the player takes a proverbial journey into that unmistakable uncanny valley populated with some ugly models with ghastly hues of gaunt sunburnt skin and glazed, dead eyes (pun not intended). The graphics fidelity merely serves as a consistent base to hold the rest of the elements together, albeit a large portion of it being spent at staring at the backside of a galloping horse. When employed to full effect, RDR taps into that stylized and cinematic flair with aplomb...

Imagine the widescreen vistas radiating heat in the distance as the magenta glow of the last embers of the desert sun slipping leisurely into an encroaching star specked night, heralding a desolate sense of nocturne no less teeming with life; RDR provides for these great visual exclamation points taken straight out of some of John Ford's most memorable cinematography and makes the journey worthwhile. The DNA of the GTA series is quite prevalent here and paid an equal part reverence and advancement.

Also imagine bumbling ungracefully mired in rotary weapon select menu as sticky cover mechanic hurtles you from one overturned barrels to another; all the while frantically negotiating the contextual subtlety of pressing the right analog stick that serves dual purpose of dead-eye slo-mo targeting system and uprooting your camera 180 degrees. This is less than ideal, to say the least. Again, the inadequacy of  complicated controls, partially owing to the third person camera that is unwieldy in certain spots, reminds you are playing a Rockstar game.

The exceptional seems to bring out the mediocre in bas relief, and the contrast could not be any sharper in RDR through its admittedly great gameplay ideas and their less than ideal implementation. For example, where there are freakishly foreboding rainstorms whipped up to maelstrom of thunder and lightning, as if to prolong their effect of sheer terror, the game slows down considerably. Be the rightful master of the sprawling wildlife of the badlands, tame the mother nature, but be slave to the endless monotonous and drawn out cutscenes of skinning them. The sprawling desert landscape that at first seems daunting to even survey across as it stretches into the horizon, is belied by being portioned into sections cordoned off with impassable tributaries and conveniently placed obstructions under obscured pretexts. And so on and on...

The trend of spotting these gems of ambitious game design, nestled amidst the thorns of usability issues that extenuate their impact, almost becomes a sport all to itself. Over the course of the main storyline, Marston comes across a myriad of weapons that provide trigger happy mayhem for all occasions. The integration of these weapons, however, is confounding to say the least and hampers the ease of employing these instruments at your disposal. Outmoded weapons are not replaced outright with better performing variants of the same class, nor can they be sold; they simply remain superfluous in the inventory to be scrolled over and over as you fight the controls during what seems to be the worst situations.

The animation of characters, motion captured or not, subtle yet full of subtexts, adds more immersion to the already convincing proceedings. However, outside the main cast of characters, the digital 'stand-ins' that populate the rest of the game are rather poor facsimiles of each other, blending into the ambient background of pleasantries as easily as they assert themselves in the most inopportune of times.

These are the generic tasks that spontaneously and at a fairly good frequency become manifest and exhort the player to participate; it runs the bevy of escorting stranded damsels, assaulting gang hideouts, collecting bounties, preventing a robbery in the act, etc. No two events seem to happen at once nor is there any repeat of a particular encounter; the algorithm that manages their occurrences mete out these instances sensibly but there is a point where the game reaches the end of the events playlist and begin to resort to repetitions, especially apparent across the US-Mexico divide. If these events weren't immersive enough for you to repress the urge to spit tobacco at the first unassuming pot you see, the mini-games, which also comprise gambling such as poker and blackjack, are  spread across the encampments and further enhance the verisimilitude. One issue I had, if it could be addressed that way, was how some of the descriptions and instructions could have been more robust in service of some of the mechanics involved, especially when it came to using a lasso.

Higher up in the tier of optional tasks are more story driven stranger quests; these often transcend the mere function of samples of 'flavour' of taming the feral Waste. They provide an ample opportunity to experience that often tawdry and ironic underbelly of American West lore via a series of marked locations, and a few even require spur of the moment role-playing decisions that affect the environment and your status in interesting ways. More often than not, however, they serve to invoke the bleak and depraved mirage of oppression from which your character, John Marston, appears oddly disengaged. These strangers may have fulfilled its expressed and transparent purpose of leaving you disturbed and consummate in that sense of bitter emptiness, juxtaposed against the empty barren wasteland no less. Some potent stuff, but too unforgiving and blunt in spots for me.

As good as RDR's rendition of its denizens are through their witty albeit clichéd banters, their treatment of the overall plot ultimately seems to fall short. One glaring problem is how each mission seems episodic in nature, pitting you against some procedural and formulaic escalation before kicking you back to where you started with nary a change acknowledged outside that stream of mission progress. And while the game keeps the number of missions available at any one time to a minimum, they seem rather disjointed and oddly mutually exclusive, as in one mission briefing might divulge information derived from another mission not yet attempted. Therefore, the pace of the main plot never takes proper inertia and seems to stagger; it does no small disservice to expounding upon the overarching theme of the alienation of the West due to modernization and the dichotomy of civilized and savage states, etc. A character, whose existence in RDR is more or less confined to missions that further contribute to a sense of discord between the world and its missions, is unceremoniously killed off, only to be replaced with another larger than life walking cliché. And there comes a particular moment in the plot wherein a drastic event takes place, which in turn introduces a series of missions that are simple in its expressed purpose of advancing the narrative forward to an inevitable denouement. These missions I found unnecessarily overwrought and ersatz, ready to spring a dreadful trap of a predictable twist, within a span of a single mission no less, that seems arbitrarily imposed mainly for shock value.   I may be among a few who considers the endgame in RDR could have been more deftly handled, but it was definitely the point where my identification with the character John Marston was blatantly severed.

In the end, the way RDR combines all these disparate elements, warts and all, together in a compelling showcase of the Wild West in its last throes of relevancy against a wave of modernization, and reveals the sum of its final product being greater than the parts. This is no more evident in how Rockstar crafted the achievements and online interaction around its mechanics, compelling gamers to make full use of the game's features and unlocking the potential of its open world gameplay. The level of support extends all the way to its internet based social club, where many of the stats and history log that retrace your adventures and current status are accessible. Regardless of your play style, RDR provides moments of sheer exhilaration and satisfaction in its sweeping and uncompromising interpretation of the Wild West setting and its trappings. The extraordinary amount of content within and how they serve to weave a very personal adventure of your sympathetic alter ego overall exonerates some of the teething issues that are more or less inherent in the intricate gameplay style adherent to the sandbox formula. A redemption, indeed.