If you’re under the age of twenty you might not be aware that once upon a time Western’s were the business. In the pre 80's days of machine guns with never ending magazines and cars that exploded with a single shot, an action scene in a western could go for ten minutes and consist entirely of close ups of guys weathered, grizzly faces before a single shot, one bullet, ends the confrontation. Of these the greatest was undoubtedly The Good, The Bad and The Ugly which ended with three guys and two shots! Wow. There is a school of thought that Westerns are stupid and boring (mostly held by a guy called Jarrod I went to school with who I stabbed with a protractor for that reason) but it’s obvious the developers behind Red Dead Redemption didn’t think so, they think, nay, they know, westerns are the business and have decided to prove it by making both the best western game of all time and what is effortlessly one of the year’s best games.

Red Dead Redemption is a spiritual sequel to Red Dead Revolver, which roughly means they have the same first to words in their title. Other than the third person perspective and western setting the games have zero in common. If Redemption is spiritually connected with anything its Grand Theft Auto IV; yes the game could have easily been called Grand Theft Palomino instead, ha ha, hilarious. If you view that as a bad thing then clearly you didn’t play one of the best selling games in history.

The loneliness of the prairie, balanced by the fact there's several hundred hidden animals that want to eat you in this screenshot

The plot borrows liberally from GTA IV in basic structure. You’re a stone cold killer, an ex bandit and gunslinger who’s been roped by the gov’ment to go after your old gang and kill them. Not an easy task, as your former partners are slippery and dangerous as a rattle snake in a grease trap. You’ll need to recruit help by playing nice with the locals and doing jobs for them to get close to your target. Okay, yes, it sounds exactly like GTA IV; but since that game borrowed its plot base of the western genre to begin with we can forgive that. The controls are almost identical between the two, the only noticeable differences being the weapon wheel for selecting guns in RDR, which is very superior to GTA's scroll through method and the fact horses and cars don't control quite the same way. John Marston isn't quite the cold pragmatist Nico was either, he sees his world for what it is, but at heart he feels things can get better, just as he believes he can settle down and become a good family man once this last bit of killing is out of the way.

Make a move bud, and I'll drop you like my pants on Friday night, quick and deadly... no, wait

Again, much like the more recent Grand Theft Auto games, the stand out element of Red Dead Redemption is its world. It is hands down the most perfectly realised creation of the western genre in video game history. Like the best sandbox open world games, the vivacity of the game world gives the impression that things keep on happening while you’re away from the game. So many examples to choose to illustrate this but my favourite would have to be an experience I had while in Mexico in the second third of the game. I’d just lost an arm wrestling competition and was considering shooting the man who bested me and taking my money back, but before I could he screamed in pain, fell to his knees and collapsed dead. At first I thought it was a glitch, but as I approached his body a rattle snake slithered away into the bushes. And, yes, I did loot his body to get my money back. The game is built on experiences like this and like the spinning top of GTA's morality structure you can choose what sort of wanderer you want to be. You can be the good guy, do good work and earn a high honour ranking, bringing down the cost of local goods and services. Or you can rob banks, murder folk for the coin in their pockets and generally be a right bastard, so long as you can out run the sheriffs and bounty hunters that hunt you down. It's very common to see crimes being done to other people as well and you can earn honour and money by being the good guy and reaching for your peace maker (that's your gun by the way) when you see a drunk trying to stab a hooker, or stand and watch with morbid curiosity. To add a delicious layer of temptation you can guy a bandanna early in the game to use as a disguise so you can rob banks without lowering your honour score, as long as you don't get caught. Dastardly.

Elements like this contribute to make Red Dead Redemption a living breathing world in more ways than one. Only about 10 percent of the world is made up of built settlements and the vast majority of the game world is the wild, west, right down to the wild animals. Where ever you travel there’s all sorts of wild life to be wary of, and if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, make money of by hunting and skinning. Of course if you start skinning you need to move on pretty quick as the blood can attract wolves and other larger, more dangerous animals.

Be careful not to fall for the classic old west "Come out here so I can kill you" trick

It’s possible to quick travel to locations but completionists, and fans of good games, will be more than happy to ride their horse from place to place. Stopping of to hunt wildlife and help people in need who wave you down. These random encounters are a highlight of the game, someone might ask you to help catch their horse, get their wife back from kidnappers, or be the subtle lure themselves for an ambush by bandits. Sometimes it might just be a crazy hick who bets cash he can shoot more birds out of the sky than you. There are dozens of different random encounters and they’re all entertaining. There are also games and jobs that can be done in settlements including poker and dice games, night watch duty and bounty’s you can return dead or alive to the local Sheriff. Then there’s the more cowboy based stuff like herding cattle and breaking in horses, simple mini games that nicely add to the overall picture. On top of earning money there are four challenges with several tiers that can be completed to unlock unique weapons and outfits. They include simple stuff like shooting a hat of a guys head to more advanced challenges like killing three wolves with your knife without getting killed, or disarming six bad guys with six bullets without reloading and... picking flowers. I imagine I’m not the only one who could do without the flower picking, which is required for a whole side quest in addition to a challenge quest. No idea why they decided to add a flower picking mechanic into the game but it’s there all the same.

Multiplayer is, as expected, a bucket of fun. You can choose to jump straight into one of the more conventional games, deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag type experiences, but the real game lies in firing up the free roam with a bunch of friends and forming a posse, then riding out to fight bandits and complete team challenges across the entire game world, not to mention hassling other posses of online players along the way. The multiplayer involves a ranking system, earning experience and completing challenges unlocks more player skills, better weapons and better mounts. Amusingly you begin multiplayer riding a donkey which is pretty damn good motivation to level up.

They were the Magnificent Seven! (magnificent  6 and 7 AFK, BRB rofl)

In terms of problems you can, unfortunately, expect all the same issues you had with Grand Theft Auto IV both design and technical wise. Design wise the game is almost faultless but the required travelling around can sometimes become pretty tiresome and repetitive. While the conversations that fill time while riding from the mission start location to the action location are usually amusing a few of them are just dull and don’t add anything to the plot or characters. Technical problems occasionally interrupt your suspension of disbelief in the form of disappearing horses and characters, although watching a shotgun float through town can be pretty entertaining. It’s always very weird when a cut scene ends and a few wild animals fall from the sky as well. I found myself getting stuck in the scenery more times than I would have liked and had to restart from my last checkpoint a few times; once sliding down a slope trapped John Marsten in a permanent sliding animation, again requiring a checkpoint reload. These are small bugs and there’s a good chance you can play the game from start to finish without seeing any weird graphical sorcery, but they are the same bugs that have been plaguing Rockstar games for years and it’s long past time they fixed them up.

It's actually a law that you can't have a western game without at least one John Wayne homage, pardner (a no prize to anyone who can tell me what film this is from!)

Western games have been pretty few and far between, and when I say western games I don’t just mean a shooter with six gallon hats and revolvers, I mean a western game that feels like a western. Red Dead Redemption might not be the first, but it’s a genre defining title without a doubt. On top of that it’s a title that turns ordinary folk into gamers, I know friends who have run out and bought a console after playing Red Dead Redemption at my place. It’s not any one part of the game that’s sold them, they couldn’t care less about shooting mechanics or graphics, they see a game where you can be a cowboy and thats an instant sale to them. There's a mystery and majesty to the old west, albeit largely Hollywood generated of course, that captures the imagination and Rockstar knows this and caters to it with skill. Wisely leaving out some of the more realistic and less romantic elements of the old west, you can't die half mad from syphilis, or screaming in gangrene pain from an infection from your numerous bullet wounds. But you can go on cattle drives, hunt outlaws, fight duels in the dusty streets and rescue whores from knife wielding toothless nut jobs. Like the song says, everyone wants to be a cowboy. Red Dead Redemption is a game that makes you feel like one.