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Red Dead Redemption is one of those open-world games which I just didn’t ‘get’ on its initial release, some time later trying the PS3 version during a trial of Playstation Now, as it was on my PS4, and it just seemed to be a lot of wandering about and with a very slow story.
Fast-forward a few years, and after getting into Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, all from start to finish, I gave Red Dead Redemption 2 a crack, a prequel, with Arthur Morgan as part of a gang, around the end of the 19th century, and it absolutely blew me away, feeling like ‘Westworld: The Game‘. I realised the story-based narrative went at the speed that it needs to, and it slowly gets in your veins, completely hooking me in.
And so we come back to RDR, technically the prequel, but taking place later in time, in 1911 and set during the decline of the American frontier, where you take the role of John Marston, once an outlaw, but after your wife and son have been taken hostage by the government, who want your services as a hired gun, it’s time to bring members of your former gang to justice.
Albeit not quite as big as its later title, this one still houses as many missions as Heinz Tomato Ketchup has varieties: 57, and split over four chapters. By contrast, RDR2 has 109 missions over six chapters plus two epilogues, but that took 8 years to put together, and similarly, it’s a joy to simply take your horse for a gallop, as long as you don’t stress them out too much to the point where they die on you!
If you do that in the middle of nowhere, it’s a LONG walk back! …or you could just reload the last saved game, so make sure you save often!
Coming 14 years after its 2010 release, this is a port rather than a remaster – which I thought it was at first, as Rockstar have this running in 4K 60fps and it looks superb, although similar to when Quantic Dream brought Heavy Rain to PC in 2019, it’s the faces that stand out the most. They just don’t look very… ‘2024’.
Of course, the alternative would’ve been to have a full-blown Remaster or Remake, and then you’d be looking at a full-priced title at £70, but as we have it here, this is a mid-priced title at £40, and contains both the full game, as well as Undead Nightmare, set in a zombified alternate timeline from the main storyline, and runs for just over two hours. I haven’t started it yet, as I haven’t yet finished the main game, but I’ll get there!
Note that in my gameplay videos, there’s a couple which have occasional flashes glitching, like at the start of Obstacles In Our Path. I think that was down to my 7900XTX’s AMD Adrenaline drivers causing that at the time. I’d just ‘upgraded’ to 24.8.1 (the latest, as I type, are 24.10.1), and my usually-fast PC was freezing occasionally. Since there’s no easy ‘rollback’ option, I’d planned to reinstall the previous drivers manually, downloaded the 24.8.1 ones by mistake, but after installing them and coming back to the desktop, everything has been fine since, with no problems, so it must just have been a dicky install, and doing it manually has fixed it!
Quite simply, as John Wayne never said, get on your horse and drink your milk! But then, I see Heinz’s ’57’ figure was just made up, too. Look, just stop reading this, and buy the game!
Also, on the gameplay playlist below, I have more videos still to upload, but am doing so periodically, rather than all at once 🙂
Thanks to our friends at Rockstar Games for the review code for this game.
Red Dead Redemption is out now on PS4, Nintendo Switch, PC/Steam, and Xbox 360.
Important info:
- Developer: Rockstar Games, Double Eleven
- Publisher: Rockstar Games
- Players: single-player
PC specs:
- CPU: AMD RYZEN 9 7950X3D
- Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E CARBON WIFI AMD X670 S AM5 DDR5 PCIe 5.0 4x M.2 2.5GbE AMD EXPO™ ATX
- RAM: 64GB (2x32GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB PC5-44800 (5600Mhz)
- Graphics Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ 24GB GDDR6 Ray-Tracing RDNA3 6144 Streams
- 1st Storage Drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PRO M.2 (2280) PCIe 4.0 (x4) NVMe SSD TLC V-NAND 7450MB/s Read 6900MB/s
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.