Red Dead Revolver (PlayStation 2 & Xbox)

Red Dead Revolver

Developer(s) – Rockstar San Diego

Publisher(s) – Rockstar Games

Designer – Josh Needleman

PEGI – 16

The precursor to the 2010 game of the year, Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Revolver was Rockstar’s take on the spaghetti western genre. Something that has been an unusual rarity in video games. But after playing it, I could see why Rockstar would want to improve on the overall concept as they eventually did. How the official PlayStation magazine rated this game 9/10, I’ll most likely never understand.

Graphics – 5/10

The best thing I can say about this game in terms of visuals is that it does capture the scenery and style of the old American West well enough. But that’s about the only positive I can attribute to it. Other than the town of Tarnation, there’s not much else that stands out. The scenery can get extremely repetitive after a while. And not much is done to switch it up throughout the course of the game.

Gameplay – 3/10

The gameplay is even more repetitious than the visuals, unfortunately. It plays out almost like an arcade game. Whereby the objective is to simply rack up the highest score possible by getting the most accurate shots on people. At that point, it would have also felt more like the industry may have been going back on itself than what it may feel like now with many of the games released on the PlayStation Network. Because new gameplay ideas would be established in the seventh and were still being experimented with during the sixth. And arcade games may have simply been seen as a concept long dead.

Controls – 6/10

As what was more or less an arcade game, precision shooting was something that one would think the developers would surely have to get right. As the concept had been around for a particularly long time. But you’d be wrong. The crosshair sensitivity, no matter how the player may alter it in the options menu, will cause some serious problems. In many ways, it ruined the gameplay for me, because although it gets most of everything else right, the developers failed to get right the element that mattered most in an arcade third-person shooter; precision shooting.

Lifespan – 2/10

On top of all my previous complaints, it even barely has a lifespan better than an arcade game. The game can be completed within 5 hours, which for a late sixth-generation game, is awful. Considering there were so many more longer-lasting games around at the time and even more to come the following year.

Storyline – 5/10

The story of Red Dead Revolver follows the titular character, Red, a bounty hunter who is caught up in a quest to avenge the death of his father. Again, just like Watch Dogs, and also many other spaghetti western films such as The Quick and the Dead, it’s pretty typical for its genre. Plus, the voice acting is particularly off at times, and it made it too hard for me to take it seriously, in all honesty.

Originality – 2/10

In terms of either visuals, story, or gameplay, this game is one of the most generic I’ve ever played and certainly stands out to me as being one of Rockstar’s weaker efforts, making it original, but in a much more negative way. Nothing suggested to me that this game was worth playing for any extended amount of time, and nothing suggests to me that I should ever play it again, quite frankly.

Angrii

In summation, Red Dead Revolver was definitely a question of trial and error, and the only positive way I could attribute to it overall is the fact that it instigated the creation of a much better title.

Score

23/60

3.5/10 (Very Poor)

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