Well everyone I’d first like you to welcome Kent Lundblad to StarSlay3r.com! Kent will be writing game reviews for the site and is one bad ass gamer! Please shoot him a welcome message and follow him on twitter @IamKent and check out his first game review of Red Dead Redemption. Hopefully this will help you decide if this game is up your alley. -StarSlay3r

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GAME: Red Dead Redemption
DEVELOPER: Rockstar North Rockstar San Diego
PUBLISHER: Rockstar Games
GENRE: Sandbox, third-person shooter, action-adventure
RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2010
PLATFORMS: XBox 360, Playstation 3
GAME MODE(S): Single Player, Multi-Player

Red Dead Redemption is big, it’s beautiful, and it’s probably the standard for well designed sandbox games on this generation of consoles. It has that same Rockstar flair that you may be used to from games like Grand Theft Auto 4, it even starts out the same, with getting off a boat, but it has so much more to offer than just GTA in the old west.


You play as John Marston, a man who’s past reckless past has come back to haunt him. Marston’s family has been taken captive by twisted government agents, and he’s been tasked with taking out members of the gang he used to ride with in his youth. Your adventure will take you all across a Texas like state called “New Austin” and down into Mexico, as well as a snow covered forest in the north. As your journey progresses you’ll meet more than your fair share of insane characters, each one crazier than the last, but all of them helping you towards your end goal.

The story is impeccably well written, and the voice actors are a joy to listen to. Marston alone sells you on his character with a gruff honesty, far less comical than GTA’s Niko. Some characters are over the top but fit in a world where they’ve clearly been twisted by the environment they’re living in. The west is not a kind place.

Red Dead Redemption is one of the most gorgeous games I have ever played. It’s day/night system is absolutely breathtaking. The same environment can look totally different but still be gorgeous, depending on the time of day you arrive there. The night sky is so impressive that it’s a shame most of the missions take place in the day. The character animation is just flawless, and the lip synching is some of the best I’ve ever seen. Each character is unique and fits the environment very well. Little touches like kicking up dust on the unpaved roads, or the way your character will tip his hat at certain people just make the game feel more alive.



It takes around twenty or so hours to get through the main mission, but there’s no way anyone who picks up the controller won’t be side tracked by all the amazing moments that come with it. Simply riding from point A to B can be an adventure with over turned wagons on the side of the road being a hiding place for bandits and raiders, getting to a town can quickly be followed by a gang rolling through on horses shooting everything they see, or a random man will tell you some one’s stolen something from his store and it’s up to you to capture or kill the criminal. Moments like this break up the game into interesting moments that you’ll remember long after you play, and they’re just the random moments you have no control over.

There’s also hunting, gambling, bounties you can take on, night jobs, cattle rustling, breaking in horses, and of course they’re goofing off and shooting everything that moves. Normally there’s no real consequence to being a jerk in a game made by Rockstar. In GTA 4 you can go on a rampage killing and maiming everything that moves until you die or get arrested. But after that you get let free and the world doesn’t really change for your character. In Red Dead Redemption, if you go on a killing spree you lose honor and carry a reputation with you, that is unless you have a bandanna. If you put on a bandanna you can do all the killing and murdering you want and you’ll strike up a bounty, but will never lose honor for your reputation. Amazing how a piece of cloth can do that for you.



Moving around in Red Dead’s world is just fun. The controls are spot on accurate, and while riding a horse and shooting at the same time can be a little difficult at first, it quickly becomes natural. The dead-eye feature is what really shines during combat. Clicking down on one of the thumb sticks takes you into a slow motion world where you can mark your targets and blow them away quickly. It’s as if the Matrix and Unforgiven had a love child.

The weapon selection is well rounded and interesting. Everything from handguns, to sniper rifles, to shotguns, to throwing knives, the game has a large assortment of weaponry. It’s up to you to find what works best. Each gun allows you to tackle situations the way you want, allowing each player to take on the same task a different way.



The single player game is fun, and if that’s all there was to it, I’d say it’s definitely worth a full price buy, but there’s so much more to the game. The multiplayer alone is one of the best online experiences anyone can have.

Red Dead Redemption has your regular online battle modes involving variants on Capture the Flag and King of the Hill, and they’re really fun to play, but where the game gets incredible is Free Roam. Free Roam is a feature that puts you in an open world version of the map from single player, along with several strangers, or smartly it’ll put you in a room with all your friends already playing (if there’s room). It’s here that you can take on gang hide outs with your friends, go hunting, ride around causing chaos in the world as a posse, or even find other posses to battle in multiplayer modes.



It has everything you’d want from the single player campaign, minus the story, but with a persistent leveling up system like Call of Duty. The more gang hide outs you take out, the more bad guys you gun down, the bigger the bounty you rack up causing chaos, all contribute to XP that levels your character up. There are also challenges involving hunting, gathering plants, getting so many head shots and the like that also give you XP. Leveling up isn’t without it’s rewards. You’ll get new characters, horses or mounts to ride on, and new weapons. Like Call of Duty there’s a prestige system that allows you to go back to square one after you reach the cap of level 50. Once there your character flips back to zero, but you keep all the titles you’ve earned, and get legendary characters and mounts and gold weapons for each time you do it.

Red Dead Redemption has this and a whole lot more to it. It’s a gigantic game, and even with being over 100 hours into it I haven’t experienced everything, and with free Co-op missions coming soon the game is only going to get better. This is a nearly perfect game. There are still glitches in multi-player allowing people to fall through walls, but in a game this big it’s almost expected, and doesn’t really hinder the experience.

With how gorgeous the game is, how well it plays, and for all the features it has, Red Dead Redemption is the new gold standard for sandbox games. It deserves as much credit as it’s getting. I give it a 9.8 out of 10.