Rockstar has finely crafted a top notch sandbox game, but poorly constructed a western.
You step into the boots of John Marston, a former outlaw that needs to confront his past in order to start his future just as the world he inhabits needs to deal with the savagery of old in order to progress into a peaceful modernity. This all sounds like a setup for a fine western tale, but its ultimately just a facade. There are two worlds here: the one depicted in the cutscenes and the one that you play in. In the cutscene world, a reckless Mr. Marston gets shot in the side early on and nearly dies. In the gameplay world, he can shake off a bullet wound that would make Sam Peckinpah squeamish if he stops behind cover for a few seconds. The result are cutscenes that merely interupt the gameplay rather than give it meaning or context.
This is even more troubling due to Red Dead Redemption's western aspirations. You will probably notice a color instrument based ennio morricone-esque score, various allusions to the mysterious "man with no name" protagonist, and snickers at pulpy novels and old western films. These are nods to spaghetti western cinema that, with a wink, satirized classic westerns that glorified violence and built up inhuman supermen. However, Rockstar fell into those very same tropes. Cutscenes take a realistic angle to violence, while gameplay throws all that out the door. There are references to a lot of other masterpieces like There Will Be Blood, Unforgiven, The Magnificent Seven, and many more, but don't expect a real exploration of any of those themes either. Its nothing more than name dropping.
However, most of your time will be spent inhabitting the gameplay world rather than rolling your eyes at poor attempts at thematic depth. Thankfully, that gameplay world is a lot of fun. Story missions generally have enough scope to make them visually appealling and enough depth to their individual mechanics to make them rewarding on a regular basis. The Dead Eye system aids combat by slowing down time to account for Marston's reflexes and allowing the player to pick their spots according to their desire to kill, injure, or just plain humiliate their opponent. Unique western themed weapons like the lasso give even more options to player.
Theres more to do than shoot outlaws if your trigger finger gets tired. A variety of gambling options are scattered about with the highlight being poker. Most poker video games fail because there are no solid consequences to losing a hand. If a game is built around gambling, something should be at stake. Read Dead Redemption ups the ante with a mostly balanced in game economy. Any hand you play will risk the money youve earned from hunting, harvesting, or by more shady means that could have been used on property, a new horse, or a more powerful weapon. On top of gambling, you can try solving numerous treasure map puzzles for even more variety.
There is also a multiplayer mode as a nice suppliment to the single player campaign. You select a persistant character to free roam the entire map, clear a hideout, and more with the other players or against them. You can also try more typical shooter oriented modes that dont stack up that well against dedicated third person shooters, but they still have enough personality to stand out among a crowded genre and warrant a few sessions.
Its too bad that Rockstar could not either adapt the western mythos to video game code or tell its own tale particularly well, but open world gamers still have a lot to dig into with Red Dead Redemption.