Grand Theft Auto and I have a love-hate relationship. For nearly every one of their games, I can point out genre-defining features, and still find others that are nearly game breaking. Red Dead Redemption, while not bearing the GTA badge, is still so similar in formula to a Grand Theft Auto game that I’ll treat it as such in this review.  I’ll break my review down by the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of RDR–I know I know, couldn’t help myself. But lets be honest– this is probably the most apt situation to use such an expression, so let’s get started!

The Good

The missions themselves are varied, and in most cases, pretty fun. Early gameplay has you shooting coyotes and wrangling cattle, but in no time you will be storming forts, stealing mine carts, and generally just laying down the law. One amazing improvement is the addition of a mission checkpoint system. Remember the frustration of dying in an especially tough mission in GTA: San Andreas, and having to drive across 3 STATES to get back to the mission start area? All that rigmarole is gone in Red Dead Redemption, although its a little strange that it took Rockstar so long to implement such a no-brainer feature. Yes, many of the missions are of the fetch-and-return persuasion, but they are varied enough that I wasn’t too bothered by them.

Another huge win for the game is the structure, variety, and sheer quantity of side missions and challenges. I am a big sandbox game fan, most recently with titles like Oblivion and Fallout 3. Probably 70-80% of the time I spend playing these involves wandering and collecting, and there is certainly no shortage of this in RDR. While the gambling minigames leave something to be desired, all of the hunting, sharpshooting, etc challenges are a blast.

The world of Red Dead Redemption is vast–easily as big in terms of mileage as Liberty City, yet it somehow manages to feel just as “alive” as its more-urban cousin. With so much open territory to cover, the game does a surprisingly good job keeping the world interesting. You will constantly be distracted from the main story missions, whether it is a stagecoach robbery to thwart, a gang hideout to clear, or a grizzly bear to hunt and skin. Journeying from one end of the world to the other can take quite a long time, and even though fast travel options are available, I found I hardly ever used them. For me anyway, the open environment, rather than the story or individual missions, is what I loved most about RDR.

The Bad

One of the most frequently mentioned issues I’ve seen is how terrible of a job the game does in explaining key gameplay elements. For example, to avert honor penalties, the player can purchase a bandana to hide their identity. But unless you are using a game guide, learning this type of information is achieved through pure chance.

Improvement is least apparent is in the game’s morality system. John Marston, like almost every Rockstar protagonist, is pretty hollow.  The player can choose to be an evil villian or a selfless hero, but it has no bearing on how John acts during the main story, nor does it change the outcome of the main story. It’s a shame Rockstar didn’t attempt to imitate the successful morality systems in games like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and others. Even the extremely black-and-white system in InFAMOUS would have served to make Red Dead feel less “Grand Theft Auto-y’” (Yeah I am making up words here).

While most of my time with the game was spent with the single player content, I did posse up with a few buddies to do a little rustlin’ in multiplayer. RDR wasn’t even on my radar until I saw this video, and anyone whose played with me online knows that I am a big co-op fan. So the free roam mode was certainly enticing to me. Riding around with a few buddies hunting grizzlies and outlaws is definitely a blast, but the novelty wears off pretty fast. That, plus the generic individual game matches that typically end with half the players leaving the session early make the multiplayer of Red Dead one of its weakest link. This is a shame, because nowadays multiplayer modes occupy the majority of replay value in games.

The Ugly

A lot of early discussions of RDR on the various podcasts praised the strong characters and script—two areas which I personally found highly inconsistent. The main characters are likeable, but I wouldn’t call them memorable. The game also seems to churn through the various side-characters pretty quickly.  Irish and Ricketts, for example, play such small roles that they are quickly forgotten.

Just about every sandbox game out there is full of graphical glitches, and RDR is no exception. Characters will vanish during cut scenes, textures will literally explode, and depending on the platform you are on (I was on PS3) you will want to save often- the game will freeze.

Finally-no you can’t swim. Really Rockstar, really? You give us this feature in some games, then take it away in others? It shouldn’t bother me so much, but in a game designed for me to go anywhere and do anything, turning any body of water into hot lava gets a little aggravating.

So there it is. I spent close to 40 hours in a game that I neither loved, nor hated. The game makes some interesting strides, and shows that the developer has started to realize their formula for sandbox titles is looking a little dated, but Red Dead Redemption isn’t much of a step in the right direction.