Video Game Review: Red Dead Redemption

I was finally able to finish Thief a few weeks ago and got around to picking a new game to play. Yesterday I found myself with a bit of downtime in the office and so I went to our video game library and picked out Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption to play on the PlayStation 3. I had heard a lot of good things about the game and thought I would give it a try.

I put the disk in my PS3 on my sailboat and made a chicken salad while the game installed on my hard drive. The game was ready before my dinner and so I patiently watched all of the opening credits while I finished things in the galley. When I sat down to start playing, I had a lot of fun.

The game starts with you entering a town on a train. You figure out the mechanics of the controller by walking to a saloon, meeting a guide, and riding a horse. The whole time you have constant helps directing you what buttons to push and where to go. Everything was new to me and it took a bit to figure out how to make the horse do what I wanted. After a while the controls started to feel more natural and I enjoyed the game. One thing that is different about this game is that it is much more of a free world than games I have played in the past. While Battlefield 3 claimed to be free world, it had you running through a maze and still felt very controlling. With Red Dead Redemption you really can go anywhere and are not prompted to do specific missions. If you want to go into town, you can. If you want to go back to the ranch and take a nap, you can. There are a number of places you can go to get new tasks but if you don't feel like doing them, you don't have to. It took me a while to get used to that but I have to admit that I enjoyed not being forced to do anything.

I played the game for 4 hours and had to call it a night. I could have kept playing but after having woken up at 3:40am to catch my flight to the Bay Area, I was pretty tired. The only downside to the game is that I find myself wanting to leave work early today to go play the game.

Red Dead Redemption is an older game available for the previous generation of consoles and so you can find it for $20 new or $6 used at all of the usual outlets. For that price, it is well worth picking up. Now if you will excuse me I think I feel a cough coming on and probably need to head back to the boat so I don't get my coworkers sick.