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Red Dead Revolver Review for PlayStation 2 (PS2)
Posted on Monday, June 07, 2004 @ 01:24:04 pm E.S.TThere hasn’t been a good western-themed video game since, what, Sunset Riders way back in 1991? So it’s safe to say that the video game western is dead, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a handful of developers giving it the occasional defibrillator shock. Rockstar’s Red Dead Revolver is the most notable zap to come along in years, but unfortunately there are a few too many missteps in the execution for it to be the game that brings the western genre back to life. While the lack of western-themed games alone does make Red Dead Revolver stand out from the pack, the lack of polish and refinement in the gameplay keeps it from being a consistently fun experience.
The story of Red Dead Revolver starts out well enough, but isn’t really fleshed out too much. The game starts with Red Harlow as a young lad receiving his first gun from his father. After a bit of shooting practice down by the ol’ creek, the Harlow ranch is raided and Red’s father is killed during the quarrel, despite Red’s attempts to ward off the assaulters. Cut to a few years later and an older, meaner Red, who is now a bounty hunter that has made it his life’s mission to seek revenge on the man who killed his pa. That’s just about the story in a nutshell, although you’ll also switch control to a few different characters throughout the game, such as the foppish trick-shooter Jack Swift, and the firecracker ranch owner Annie Stokes (who is surprisingly adept at bull-riding). It’s too bad that these secondary-character missions interrupt the main story more than they add to it, though, giving them an unnecessary feel.
Red Dead Revolver plays like a mix of elements from Rockstar’s own Max Payne games and Koei’s third-person shooter Winback (released on the N64 in 1999 and PS2 in 2001). The overall aiming and shooting mechanics are reminiscent of those seen in Max Payne; you run around with the left analog stick and aim with the right, and you can dive to either direction to try and avoid enemy fire. Red Dead Revolver even features its own take on Payne’s slo-mo bullet-time power, here called “Dead Eye.” When you activate Dead Eye, the action slows down for a short period of time in which you can use the aiming reticule to paint up to six targets on one enemy or divvy them up on multiple opponents. When the Dead Eye time ends, Red will shoot each painted target in a quick burst of gunfire. The action in the game also heavily favors the use of cover, which will feel familiar to gamers that have played Winback. Like in that game, Red can sidle up against walls or most objects, quickly lean around its edges to fire a few shots, and then lean back behind the wall/object.
Lamentably, Red Dead Revolver doesn’t pull off any of these elements as well as their source games did. The controls feel floaty and a little imprecise overall. Some awkward animation adversely affects the gameplay as well; the long time it takes for characters to hoist themselves onto objects or over ledges makes them sitting ducks, and the evasive roll they do when getting up after being knocked down has a way of accidentally rolling them into more trouble—like off a cliff, to their untimely demise. Dead Eye isn’t all that exciting, either. Essentially, it let’s you shoot six times very fast—not exactly the coolest or most useful special ability ever featured in an action game, and you really won’t be using it that often.
There are a couple of diversions from the otherwise standard run-and-gun gameplay, but these too just aren’t pulled off as well as they should have been. The game has an interesting mechanic for dueling using the right analog stick: push back on the stick to draw your gun, and then quickly press up to take aim. At that point time slows down and you paint targets onto your enemies, just like in Dead Eye. Using the right analog stick to draw and aim your weapon was an inspired idea, but the slow-motion aiming wasn’t. Duels are supposed to be about quick reflexes and slowing time down kills a lot of the tension. Duels probably would have been a lot more exciting if they played out in real-time, simply forcing you to be faster than your opponent to win.
There are also some basic RPG-lite gameplay bits between missions where you can explore a town, checking out the various shops and conversing with the locals. But since none of the locals ever have anything interesting to say and you can buy weapons before each mission begins anyway, the town-exploration feels painfully underdeveloped and ultimately pointless. There’s a multiplayer mode to beef up the replay value too, which supports 4-players (with a multi-tap, of course) but not online play. The lack of online play kind of sucks, but then again, the multiplayer game is pretty forgettable anyway. All the same control issues transfer over, and the modes of play are either dull (variations on deathmatches) or confusing (playing poker…while shooting each other). The multiplayer dueling mode is a fun diversion, but it gets old pretty quick.
The boss battles in Red Dead Revolver are rather weak, too. The amount of damage that your attacks inflict on bosses has an odd habit of fluctuating. You’ll find that some bosses are easily smoked with a few blasts while others seem to take so many shots you’d think Kevlar was invented in the 1800’s, and the logic behind the damage-dealing isn’t always (if ever) clear. Since many of the bosses follow extremely rigid and immediately recognizable movement and attack patterns, one gets the sense that the decreased damage-dealing power only occurs to keep the fights from being too easy. A lot of bosses also come with packs of normal enemy fodder to contend with (some of which actually re-spawn as the boss battle goes on), which seems to be an attempt to artificially ramp up the difficulty as well. The overall experience when playing the game is also hampered by occasional glitches, particularly problems with hit detection. Apparently in the old west, it wasn’t uncommon for gunshots to pass through solid objects undeterred. There are also a couple of more immediately noticeable glitches, such as enemy characters suddenly getting stuck in mid-air.
One thing Red Dead Revolver does have going for it is a nicely realized western motif. The graphics won’t be turning any heads from a technological standpoint, mind you; character models aren’t very detailed, the textures are a bit murky, aliasing is pretty noticeable, and there’s a bit of clipping (most obvious when characters draw guns from holsters). Even still, and despite a couple of decidedly odd moments that break the mood—the most heinous of which being an encounter with a clan of gun-toting midget rodeo clowns—the western vibe is ultimately pulled off well. The textures may be murky and mostly brown-hued, but it actually contributes to the old-west look of the game, as do the worn-film filters used during the cut-scenes. Furthermore, there’s a lot of variety in the mission settings that not only keeps the action from getting too stale, but injects a good deal of western bravado as well. You’ll be acting out just about every stereotypical western setting there is, including shootouts with bounty-heads in abandoned towns, protecting a moving train from robbers, brawling in saloon battle royals, defending a ranch from raiders as you desperately try to save livestock from the burning barn, and of course, dueling at high noon.
The game also has some high-quality audio. Some of the music was actually composed by the same person that did the music in all of Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western films (“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” etc.), and not surprisingly it fits the western theme perfectly. The key is that it doesn’t just sound like music you’d expect to hear in a western, but it sounds like the cheesy, 60’s-70’s era music you’d hear in those old spaghetti westerns. The voice acting is pretty good as well, which is something that one has come to expect from a Rockstar game.
Red Dead Revolver gives the western video game genre a good shot in the arm, but under the veil of a nice western-themed presentation lays a flawed third-person shooter. All the necessary ingredients are here for a splendid arcade-y shoot-em-up, but it feels like everything in the game either lacks refinement or is just too underdeveloped. Perhaps Red Dead Revolver could have really been something with more focus and a couple extra coats of polish, but as it stands, it’s not much more than a potential rental. Review By: Kris Pigna - 1521 Reads
Red Dead Revolver Review Scores for PS2 :
| Gameplay |
| 6.0 |
| Graphics |
| 7.0 |
| Sound |
| 8.0 |
| Replay |
| 5.0 |
| Overall |
| 6 |
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