Red Dead Redemption 2 is probably one of the best-written games ever made. It is the culmination of Rockstar's structured narrative beats combined with an intricate, well-constructed world that makes you want to linger with these characters well beyond the credits rolling. The story of Arthur Morgan is arguably one of the best revisionist westerns ever made, and rightfully makes it one of the most acclaimed games of all time.
It is kind of impressive that Rockstar San Diego was able to get there with the Red Dead series, considering the more forgettable origins of the franchise. 2004's Red Dead Revolver was Rockstar's first foray into the world of westerns, and it is truly a game of its time. Much of it is a disjointed, incoherent mishmash of ideas that trades substance for style.
The story of Red Dead Revolver is basically a classic spaghetti western, a simple tale of revenge as Red Harlow becomes a mini-man with no name, collecting bounties on colorful criminals while searching for the man who ordered the death of his parents, an act Red witnesses as a young teen. The player gets to experience that moment in-game as a tutorial, crafting a somber and almost cinematic quality that the game hints at, but never fully embraces before throwing itself into a more arcade-style shooting gallery.
The gameplay of Red Dead Revolver has you play Red, along with a few allies, across more arcade-style shooting galleries filled with outlaws, native americans, cowboy clowns, and even a man riding a buffalo. You have teleporting alchemists, a Gatling-gun-toting man with a coffin on his back, and the rejected cast of the film The Quick and the Dead all to contend with on your quest for vengeance, all the while battling slightly sluggish controls and a grab bag of mechanics that just never truly feel fleshed out.
The name of the game is combat, and Red and his allies can use a myriad of revolvers, rifles, bows, dynamite, and other guns to shoot their way through hordes of enemies. Aiming with an analog stick is not too bad, but a bit sluggish. The game compensates with a soft lock-on where you fixate on an area if your crosshairs are close enough to it, compensating for movement somewhat. There is also hit detection for different body parts, which do come up infrequently as a mechanic; an early game boss fight, for example, has you shoot the feet of an enemy as he is using someone as a human shield.
Little bits like this are good game design, but this one boss fight utilizes the area hit detection, and that's it. In fact, most of the bosses really just follow a similar pattern of 'shoot them enough,' and they will die. Bosses and even some mini-bosses act like bullet sponges, where the only way to inflict massive damage would be through deadeye mode. Like many games of its era, deadeye mode is a bullet-time mechanic that allows for more precise aiming and fast shooting. It is also the best mechanic in Red Dead Revolver, allowing for a quick fan of gunfire across multiple enemies if you're skilled enough. While it works differently for each playable character, deadeye mode is one of the few mechanics that works throughout the game, providing some actual fun through the spotty control scheme.
The other major mechanic is the dueling mode, where some fights, even bosses, have Red and other characters in a typical quick-draw duel. Shooting here is almost a pseudo-quick time event, where you need to both draw your gun and time your shots to achieve maximum damage. Headshots are the goal for a duel, which take down almost any character, but they are incredibly hard to pull off as you often have a small window to shoot, or in other cases, shooting two to three enemies at a time. Most of the duels can end without you automatically failing and reloading; you just enter normal combat with lower health, but that is a small compensation for what is actively a difficult mechanic to master.
Most of the mechanics in Red Dead Revolver are pretty much thinly used to justify gameplay reasons. You can ride horses on a few levels, but they make aiming incredibly difficult to use. You can use cover and even create cover by kicking over tables, for example, but the game is built around movement and run-and-gun gameplay vs cover-based shooting. There are stealth-based missions that basically become pointless once you're introduced to a louder arsenal like a shotgun or pistol midway through, a bar-room brawl with terrible melee mechanics, and a few on-rails shooting galleries that often feel like filler.
Truthfully, most of Red Dead Revolver feels like filler, as if it is the greatest hits of the type of mechanics a western game can have. It plays into all of the more cartoonish stereotypes of western mythology, feeling a bit more on the fantastical side tonally than anything else, like a pulpy western built on big ideas versus saying anything significant. There are five levels in the game where you play as side-characters that feel incredibly throwaway, with threadbare reasons to include them in the plot. There are missions in the game that just feel like they are added because it's a trope off a checklist; the aforementioned barroom brawl is the most egregious example. Even the game's multiplayer, which unlocks bits and pieces for high scores in Red Dead Revolver, feels tacked on and kind of pointless, doing very little to stand out, save for maybe the number of characters you can unlock.
The most baffling decision, however, is your narrative tissue being all over the place. You have tonal whiplash between the game's strong opening and the more goofy aspects of its design, making the whole experience feel like multiple ideas stitched together to form an arcade-styled experience at best. The arcade-style works and can be a fun time, but the main plot of the game, your tale of vengeance, is taken way too seriously when you need to fight a man with a cannon for an arm. Rockstar San Diego maybe knew this too, because you technically get your revenge for the death of your family two-thirds of the way through to the end, and still have a whole two to three hours of levels worth going through afterwards, hitting on more pulp-western cliches like a quick-draw competition, destroying an armored train, and raiding a governor's mansion.
So, why is Red Dead Revolver like this? Two major aspects of the game's development do need to be addressed. The first is that the game was in development since 2000, by a team called Angel Studios. They are perhaps best known for the excellent port of Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64. At the time, Capcom was providing them with funding to pursue an action-shooting game following the success of the Resident Evil 2 port, with Yoshiki Okamoto as the primary champion for the game until he left Capcom in 2003.
It is known that Red Dead Revolver had some trouble in development due to a culture clash between Angel Studios and Capcom, and after Okamoto left the studio, the game was then cancelled. However, around the same time, Angel Studios was being acquired, and Rockstar secured the studio around 2002, rebranding it as Rockstar San Diego and selecting Red Dead Revolver as one of the games with major potential for release. Rockstar purchased the rights from Capcom and pushed Red Dead Revolver for a swift release by 2004, leading the unfinished and reportedly unplayable game to go through crunch time before release.
That crunch, along with the turmoil of the long development, shows in the finalized product. Then, consider that Rockstar Games was not looking for much internal competition in 2004, as in October of that year, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas would be released by Rockstar North. San Andreas was released in October of 2004, while Red Dead Revolver was released in May of 2004. This ultimately gave Rockstar North a year to complete Red Dead Revolver for release, in a way that satisfied Rockstar and then gave them breathing room for something new, which led to the engine found in Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis.
When putting everything into perspective, you can see why Red Dead Revolver is a disjointed mess, but it's frankly a miracle that it even exists at all. So much feels half-baked that it's hard to really pick apart what was an old idea or a new direction for the dev team. Ultimately, only one real mechanic works well, and that is Red's version of deadeye mode, while the rest of the game is incredibly spotty throughout with nothing but situational mechanics that serve little purpose.
The long development cycle also hinders other aspects of its visual design. Character models look good but suffer from stretched textures, and environments are incredibly small. Atmosphere is a bit better; the game feels like a western more often than not, despite not containing any sprawling vistas or strong visual cues. One touch that works is the addition of a film grain texture to make the game feel like an old western movie. This does enhance the experience and makes it, visually, appealing despite severe limitations on the level design.
The soundtrack is a standout too, because it is mostly re-recordings or masters of actual spaghetti western soundtracks. Red Dead Revolver contains no original music, save for a few songs rearranged on piano. We are talking about lesser-known films here too, like Django Shoots First, A Stranger in Town, and The Forgotten Pistolero, which makes me wonder how or why they decided to bring all of these music cues into the game. Perhaps it is an audio clue to the spaghetti western ambitions of its design, but outside of the soundtrack, you have hilariously subpar voice acting and weak sound effects. Main characters sound so goofy when they speak; it's kind of hard not to roll your eyes at it. Red, in particular, is trying to mimic the cadence of Clint Eastwood but comes across as a parody instead.
It is forgivable that the game went through so many issues, but at the end of the day, Red Dead Revolver, despite its existence being a minor miracle after cancellation, is just a weak game overall that serves as a setup for future greatness. If anything, Red Dead Revolver is probably better for its relative obscurity, the nascent baby steps of ambition to the more coherent Red Dead Redemption. It works as a glorified tech demo for what the future may hold, but as it stands, it is a playable mess that is just barely passable.