I am playing Red Dead Redemption at the moment. What a fantastic game. I did not get into the hype around this game at all. GTA4 was a non event for me and while I acknowledge that Rockstar are a great developer, their style of game never really spoke to my inner being as something vital to my engagement with games-media. For me Rockstar's slide away from the blissful carnage and outright embodiment of the term 'run amok' to the more serious cinematic and deliberatly artful was not as successful as most people make out it to be. But RDR really smashes that conceptual bubble I built around my idea of Rockstar. The voice acting and writing have instantly made me give three or four shits about the main character, as opposed to the usual one or none. No shit giving is not the mindframe I am in right now.
The gunplay is also what makes this very enjoyable. Almost like a elegant lifting and retooling of bullet-time from way back when. At first you have the ability to simply slow down time, aim carefully and blow some poor partner's face off, each shot would be determined by when you levered the trigger on your controller. This would have been well and good all in it's own right but it creatively then allows you, after some time, to simply move your reticule over the enemy which then get's 'tagged' showing you exactly which part of the enemy is in line smooshing. This works into the duelling mechanic too. Which I'm still getting my head around.
There is a lot of stuff to do, hunting, gambling, helping random wanderers and so on. I'm not going to go into that too much. Needless to say, despite the large size of the world it isn't as desolate as histories would have you believe.
My main concern getting this game would that it'd be simply Wild West Auto, or Grand Theft Horse, a anxiety held by a great many people. And to be honest, in the back of my mind I'm constantly seeing if any of my RDR experiences are measuring up to or are indeed mirroring any of my GTA ones. And they are there. The way the characters interact. The cinematic introductions to missions and characters. Indeed the way you interact with them, with each having a big letter on the GTA-esque minimap.
But these are all cosmetic, all in the framework and gilding of the game. The core game itself; the gunplay, the horseriding, the content is indeed markedly different.
Artistically it is also interesting. It goes for realism all the way. The animations are superb, the voice acting and music are inspired. Coming off of the back of Darksiders however shows that realism, no matter how realistic can sometimes leave something to be desired. Perfect realism is nice and all but I can't grant it as being truly artistic. Maybe I'm not being fair because the game is still beatiful.
Anyway, I'm goign to sink my teeth into it a bit more and see how it goes getting further in. Fingers crossed!
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