Planet Sillicon

30 hours into RDR

By blog on Jun. 3, 2010.

Red Dead Redemption. 30 hour in, and what a great 30 hours it’s been!

I meant, initially, to do a post to say how I was going every ten hours or so, but as you can see, that didn’t happen. I’ve been playing quite solidly for the last five or so days and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

I’ll start with the only negative to the game, then go through all the positives. I very much dislike the duelling process. Seriously, this is the only game mechanic that feels completely unintuitive and unfairly difficult. There’s never a good in-game tutorial for the process, and it all feels quite arbitrary to be honest, but that’s my only real complaint with the game.

In terms of graphics, the game is beautiful. I’m playing on the 360 and the game runs very smoothly, the load times are short, and the entire world is streamed. There aren’t any loads between indoors or out, and there’s never a hitch to anything. The look of the landscape and animals is really very amazing, though character models could be a little less ugly.

In terms of game mechanics, there’s so much here to appreciate. Riding a horse is amazingly accurate and so is running around on foot. The ‘Dead Eye’ shooting mechanic works very well, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being a crack shot in the wild west of yore.

The story line is also quite good, though being forced to help out the Mexican government for as long as I did, knowing full well they’d betray me any minute, was rather annoying. I did like the slight supernatural inclusion of The Funny Man, who in my opinion was the devil.

The music and ambient sounds of the game are very good, the only exception being the music in Blackwater, which is strangely irritating and too often ominous with no apparent reason save some ambiguous notion of ‘civilisation being bad’ sort of thing. Getting off the train in the game and having that harmonica play, just like so many Western movies was just such an awesome introduction to the game.

Well, I’ve written enough for now, back to the game! I’m into the Tall Trees area, and doing missions around there!