Red Dead Redemption - Maybe A Little Too Much

I haven’t finished Dynasty Warriors 7 yet. I’m still working on Conquest mode but I only play that with my wife so it will take a little bit. In the meantime I’ve jumped back to Red Dead Redemption. I know Dynasty Warriors 7 interrupted Red Dead in the first place, but I’m not abandoning it. I’ll probably talk about Dynasty Warriors again at some point in the future.

The game is finally starting to grow on me. After that insanely boring and long opening I finally got to do stuff and boy is there a lot to do in this game. Maybe too much. I don’t see the point of herding cattle or roping horses. They just seem like time killers. Heck, most of the game is a massive time killer. I’ve played for two hours before and have accomplished nothing story wise. I’ve killed numerous animals, ran over nuns, watched a cartoon, captured bounties, shot sheriffs, raided gang hideouts, tried to slice my fingers off, and rescued countless civilians. There’s just that much to do.

But I find that I can’t pass up these opportunities. If I kill an animal I have to stop and skin it (why does it show blood splattering on my screen?). If I find a random encounter I have to help ( I find it funny that the sheriff will shoot prisoners who have escaped if you bring them back alive).  That’s just the way this game goes. I don’t like playing cards or dice though, but I’ve never been big into that kind of thing. It’s not like I really need the money, I always seem to have enough for my needs.

I don’t find myself using a lot of the weapons in this game. I’ll use a rifle on a regular basis. Pistol is mainly used for disarming enemies. I use the rope on the occasion as well, but not much else. I always have enough ammo and I get that from the people that I kill. The Dead Eye ability is getting trickier to use as well. It started off fairly simple. You press in on R3 and things slow down. You can then carefully place shots on your target. Then it started placing x’s on my targets. This allowed me to hit a target quickly with multiple shots, problem was I couldn’t control where the x would go. I’ve started shooting civilians at this point and it’s not on purpose.

This game is probably the best use of the Euphoria engine that I’ve ever seen. Granted the last game I remember using this engine was the Force Unleashed and that had some hilariously bad results. I once had two stormtroopers running at me. The second one clipped the first stormtroopers shoulder. The first stormtrooper then fell over a box and proceeded to convulse endlessly until he died. Since his feet couldn’t touch the ground the engine didn’t  know how to stand the poor guy back up. Thankfully Read Dead Redemption doesn’t have that problem. Characters are pretty good about finding their footing again, then they proceed to attack me. Normally because I’m the guy who knocked them down and normally I did with my horse. I them proceed to kill them and take a loss to my honor.

There’s one thing about games like Red Dead Redemption with the whole moral choice meter, I tend to play the good guy. It’s really easy to be jerk. When I did my second playthrough on Fable I decided to be a bad guy. I think it took 4 hours to be as evil as possible, I had horns, my eyes glowed red, there were flies buzzing around me. Sure I could kill everyone, but there was not challenge in it. Red Dead Redemption is the same way, being a good guy takes effort, being bad is easy. So I take the more challenging road. Plus, it seems to fit the character better.

John Marston seems like a guy with morals. I don’t get the impression that he would just because he can. He needs a reason, sure it might be a petty reason, but that’s the impression that I get.