I suppose it goes without saying that having an affinity for the wild west is mandatory for this game. Red Dead Redemption is, as it has been called before, basically Grand Theft Auto with horses. In true Rockstar fashion, we have a reluctant hero who has been put between a rock and a hard place and now much embark on a quest to bring some men to justice. Along the way you can make yourself a famous hero by living by a moral code, or a dastardly renegade by doing whatever you please.
The story is pretty basic stuff. You arrive in town tasked with finding and bringing some bad guy to justice. You don't do this because you want to, you are being forced into it by some nasty government men who are holding your family's well-being over your head. So with no real alternative you embark on this quest which of course does not go as planned. As for the caliber of the story itself, well I didn’t find it as engaging as GTA IV’s story, but I find it satisfying and that is what matters.
But you will not just be knocking out story missions one right after the other. Like any good open world game, side missions are plenty in Red Dead. You can take odd jobs around town, such as breaking in horses, patrolling the night watch, or taking bounty contracts. Or you can gamble your money in a variety of ways, like blackjack, Texas hold 'em, horshoes, or five finger fillet. On top of that there are strangers to meet who give you different odd requests, challenges that will test your sharpshooting and hunting skills, and random world events that happen as you are just going from one point to another. This last part is critical because if you know your history, the west is pretty barren aside from a town here or there.
That rolls into my first major complaint. There are only a handful of towns that you will be traveling back and forth from and it just takes too long to get from one to the other. Even with the random events along the way, it is just no fun going back and forth from town to town. Probably because, as is true to life, everything was just so slow back then. Even the fastest horse in the game will take you 5 minutes between towns. Like I said it is no knock on the dev team, this is just how it was back then, but it's not very fun.
Aside from that the only other real issue I had with my time working through Red Dead was the fact that aside from story missions, none of the side missions checkpoint. So if you are doing a bounty contract and have traveled almost the length of the world to get this guy, if you die while trying to apprehend him, you will be dumped at the nearest save point and forced to ride back to where you were. That just sucks. Plan and simple. I suppose you don't have to even bother with the side stuff and the main story driven missions do checkpoint, but I did a lot of the side stuff and that issue kept coming up again and again.
But that really is a small problem if you are looking at the big picture and this really is a game that delivers on all of its promises. Leave it to Rockstar to not disappoint and if you are looking for a western game that is actually good, which you will notice there are not very many of them, then this is the best you will find. It has the story as a good backbone, plenty of side stuff to keep you busy, and it even looks good too. Anyone who likes those old western movies will enjoy this game, of that I am sure.