Grand Theft Auto IV continued Rockstar’s run of world-beating success, but in the costly new era of HD game development they weren’t going to be able to follow up that success as rapidly as with Grand Theft Auto III. (Grand Theft Auto V would eventually take five years; in the equivalent time after GTA III‘s 2001 release they had made another four Grand Theft Auto games). Instead, they looked to fill the gap by having their various acquired studios produce their own twists on the formula.
Rockstar San Diego — previously Angel Studios, and responsible for the Midnight Club series and the moderately well-received action game Red Dead Revolver — took on one such project. To call revised sequel Red Dead Redemption a Wild West take on Grand Theft Auto is if anything an understatement. It has the same kind of missions, the same kind of activities, the same kind of gleeful transgression. It is structured identically, to the point of individual mission-givers being marked on the map with capital letters. The level of familiarity can feel like playing things very safe.
There are a few bits of reinvention in its gameplay. Taking a more specialised shooter and working its mechanics into the formula pays off, with the precise shooting and bullet time mechanic making its plentiful shootouts more enjoyable. There is an honest-to-goodness minecart level, which is embracing cliché with style. The assortment of horse-based activities, from wagon-racing to horse-breaking to herding cows, are pulled off well with just enough depth to keep them from just being novelties. Trying to keep some cows from running off a cliff in a thunderstorm feels as much of a high-stakes drama as anything in previous games.
That it feels that way is down to the best thing about Red Dead Redemption, which is successfully using its setting as a way to embrace the more serious narrative heft of Grand Theft Auto IV. It shares narrative beats as well as gameplay ones. A man with a violent past tries to make good in a new place but grapples with the fact that killing is what he’s good at and drawn back into. There is much discussion of immigration and America, with main character John Marston talking about the old country (in his case, at one generation’s remove, Scotland) and left over memories and feelings (hating the English).
Red Dead Redemption is not all serious-minded. Its first act has you teaming up with a drunken Irishman, a quick-talking snake oil salesman and an unhinged grave robber, and brings all the trademark Rockstar juvenile humour you might expect from that. In the setting, though, that works to sit alongside the less outsized characters, just as the way you kill so many people along the way fits better into the narrative than it ever has in Grand Theft Auto. “Getting an outlaw to do the work of a law man, that’s madness” observes another character at one point. “Ain’t much difference between the two, as far as I can tell” replies Marston with some truth.
There are a lot of conversations like that, generally along long horse rides. Marston is a bit more reserved than most people he comes across, but it doesn’t take long to get him waxing philosophical. The game is not shy when it comes to florid conversations, romanticising the times with an edge lent by the inevitable end and decay of it all. They’re thoughtful, insightful and engaging. The only stumbles tend to be in the slightly jarring way many characters, Marston especially, are progressive to a fault, and it’s hard to want the alternative there. Seeing Bonnie MacFarlane, the woman who rescued John at the start of the game, struggle to get by as her ranch is beset by problems is saddening, and his conversations with her, each feeling out the other, are some of the best bits. Their life and its place in the world feels very much built on popular culture images of the time as much as any reality, but that was always the GTA approach to modern America too.
Most of all, the game works because it has the confidence to leave space and silence for the action and conversation to resonate in, something which even the eerily still bullet time adds to. The place looks gorgeous, wilderness and towns alike. There’s the famous bit where you ride into Mexico to the hushed sounds of José González, and it works really well but it works even better when it ends and you’re still out there alone. I got an even bigger version of the same thing after one particularly tense mission in the aptly-named Tumbleweed, just through taking a quiet moment to pause afterwards. The stillness was palpable.
Red Dead Redemption would go on to spend five weeks as UK #1. See what was top of other charts during that time after the page break.