Hear me out is a monthly article dedicated to playing devil’s advocate for the current “it” game. It’s in no way meant to offend the game, the reviewers, fans or developers of said game.
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I’d like to start off by saying that I have been a huge fan of Rockstar since GTA 3, and am still a fan of them with their latest offering Red Dead Redemption. They have always been able to craft an amazing open world environment to play in, and I believe that they deserve all the praise they get as developers… but there are a few nits I’d like to pick with their latest offering.
As of this writing, RDR has an overall 95/100 on Metacritic.com. Whether I believe its deserving of that score won’t be discussed here, as this isn’t a review, rather I would like to point out a few things I thought were quite big detriments to what is otherwise an amazing game.
First off, this is quite a long game, and with length comes difficulty in crafting a story that can keep players intrigued. I know that sometimes even in a two hour film I can get a bit bored if the pace is off, and that’s exactly what seems to happen here. Not only does Rockstar seem to introduce new characters (and then promptly remove them) every couple of missions, the overall pace of the game just seems off. Countless (and I literally mean countless) times the main protagonist seems to ask where to find a certain person or people, only to be shut down and told that later he will receive the information. Countless times he says he doesn’t want to get involved with somebody else’s issues, only to inevitably help. It felt as if my time was being wasted in these cutscenes, as I knew exactly how they would play out; would it of been so hard for Marston to go Jack Bauer on some of these people?
Second, it seems that game critics love to rate games on either one side of the spectrum, or the other. In film, most of the top movies at the box office never breach 75/100, so why is it that gaming is different? People will bitch and moan all day about a game receiving a 7/10, when in actuality that is a good solid score? Are we to quick to toss good games a near perfect score of 9/10, or even give great games 10/10? While nobody would argue that RDR is an amazing experience, is it not a rehashed and remasterd one? Do games even need to give you a fresh experience to be considered for the highest honor? These are all questions I continually asked myself as I played this game. While it seemed like I had “been there and done that” the entire way through, I couldn’t blame Rockstar for essentially copy and pasting their well known formula (just as you can’t blame Romantic Comedy #38 coming out this year) if the fans and critics were going to applaud it at every corner.
In closing, I loved Red Dead Redemption and I believe that it is contender for best Action game this year, but I think the Game of the Year award should go to something that innovates more, or pushes the video game medium forward in a way that hasn’t been done before.