It’s hard to make a fun game set in the Wild West. The guns are inaccurate, there’s no body armor and your method of transportation needs to be fed and groomed. Luckily for us, Red Dead Redemption is a Western in motif only, sporting pinpoint accurate guns, enemies of scaling toughness and super horses.

This is the company that made the Manhunt series and Grand Theft Auto. When did Rockstar suddenly grow a conscience?

That’s not a criticism; I can only imagine how terrible this game would be if I had to euthanize my horse every time it ran over a wayward gopher hole. The old west is a terrible place full of disease, hardship and no plumbing. Rockstar did a good job of focusing on the fun, romantic aspects of the gunslinger experience.

You’re a former gang member, John Marston, who turned a new leaf and is now being forced to hunt down your old gang by the government in a contract which I assume is the early form of a plea bargain but is still known in this time as blackmail. You accomplish this by making friends with the locals doing ranching jobs and making enemies with the crooks by shooting them. You can reverse that if you like but I don’t recommend it as all the law men appear to have secretly invented Kevlar.

The process of shooting bad guys involves eyeballing them toward the center of your screen, hitting the aim and fire buttons and letting the auto-aim do the rest. Rest assured you’ll always hit everything up to and including a moving sparrow a quarter mile away because the auto-aim is as forgiving as a Canadian therapist. In the event that you’re riding your horse and can’t get behind cover, you can just use Dead-Eye, the new name for the bullet time mode which is now officially the second most common feature in shooters after guns.

The auto-aim does tend to make fights boring after a while, but oddly it simulates actual shooting better than most console shooter mechanics. In reality you don’t have a crosshair in the middle of your eye or a lot of time to line up your shot, so the process involves eyeballing a target, then pointing your gun and firing. So despite every fight being insultingly easy, it manages to stay immersive.

However, the apparently instantaneous ability of Wild West weapons to reload and cock themselves takes away most of the reasons to upgrade your weapons. Having cared only about damage and clip size, I never found any reason to spend money at a store for new guns when the plotline missions provide you with everything you’ll ever need.

Riding from place to place is as boring as any other sandbox shooter, as is doing repetitive side quests. The NPCs even seem to be a little annoyed by how far apart the cities are as whenever one of them is riding along with you for a quest they talk about every meaningless topic which crosses their mind. While the voice actors do their best, the writing tends to stretch when the rides frequently pass the five minute mark. John Marston even uses the time to make a lot of broad insightful political statements like “there won’t be any peace so long as there’s guns and gold.” Excuse me; this is the company that made the Manhunt series and Grand Theft Auto. When did Rockstar suddenly grow a conscience? I guess that’s where the “redemption” part comes in.

Wandering around in the wilderness might not be exciting at all if it weren’t for the constant threat of cougars. Cougars in this context are sort of a reverse Schrödinger’s cat. John Marston’s state of being either alive or dead is a probability function whose outcome is determined upon being observed by a cougar.

The plotline meanders, or should I say moseys, around more than a drunken horse. What starts as a pretty clear manhunt turns into saving a con artist, a grave robber and a drunk from every scrap of trouble they get into, without ever making a ‘salesman, a drunk and a grave robber walk into a saloon’ joke. Eventually you’ll be fighting a revolution in Mexico, followed by some good old fashioned cowboys versus Indians which somehow involves a sequence wherein you ride a tank through what looks like a Civil War reenactment.

When the entire gamut of Wild West stereotypes has been filled and you’ve saved your loved ones and killed all the bad guys, the game doesn’t even have the good sense to end. There’s a reason stories tend to say “happily ever after” rather than saying “wait, wait, but you won’t fully appreciate the hero’s struggle if I don’t go on for five hours about how idyllic his life is afterward.” Literally, this section entails you going through all the tutorials you did in the beginning of the game as the teacher, instead of the student, for your wife and son. Yeah the action eventually picks back up again and the hero must save the day once more, but that’s what’s supposed to be known in the writers department as “the sequel.”

The graphics are better than any other sandbox game, which is quite a statement for Rockstar. It helps that the atmospheric dry heat of the western setting lets you insert blur effects on every draw distance over twenty feet. As usual for Rockstar, the voice acting is terrific. Unusually for Rockstar, so is the lip syncing.

If you want to roam around doing whatever you please, sort of the definition of a sandbox game, the online multiplayer is a welcome addition. You create a new character and ride around with friends or strangers robbing bandits or businessmen and doing whatever your black little heart desires free of limitations like plotlines and long term consequences.

The game encourages you to do its side quests by making most of the story line inaccessible at night. Ways to pass the time involve camping, hunting or playing games of gambling against the computer. Let me just say that if you have a gambling problem, specifically with Poker or Liar’s Dice, and your family has asked you to end your addiction, by all means play this game. Nothing kills the fun in a bluffing game faster than trying to read the poker face of a computer with no face and no eyes.

I can’t say enough good things about Red Dead Redemption. No seriously, I can’t; I want to call it good and justify all the fun I had playing it, but I’m not sure where the fun came from. Other than good acting and graphics it really didn’t have much to offer. But somehow the gun battles and characters keep the plotline interesting for the thirty hours or so it takes to beat it and I guess that’s what counts. Well, the first two thirds are interesting, anyway, when you’re not playing Farmville with your wife.

Survivor 4/5