A design mess, but has some high points.
User Rating: 6.7 | Red Dead Revolver XBOX
Capcom abandoned this game mid-development, and Rockstar stepped in to sweep up the pieces and release it. You can see why both events happened---design-wise, this game runs in a dozen directions and has some fundamental flaws, but the production has so many really compelling elements that you want to like it. The levels where you're doing the things you see in great westerns (jumping effortlessly from a horse to a train and back, defending your ranch against bullyboys sent by an imperial governor) this game is great fun. I watched the intro every time I started the game because it was just awesome, and (up until near the end) I found the plot compelling enough to cowboy up through some of the hard parts. Unfortunately, for every section of the game where you're enthralled, there are two bland segments and one really stupid one that doesn't work. Parts that didn't work: Boss battles with broken AI (it's easy to hang up the bosses on scenery, or just stand in an inaccessible place), places where you get blindsided by a game element and die instantly (see: guys throwing rocks at you the first time you meet them, a few of the bosses), levels where your goal is arbitrary and poorly-explained (see: bar fight, mine "stealth" segment), aimless shopping expeditions in town where there are a dozen stores and nothing you want to buy, and everything about the quickdraw minigame. Also, you have all these cool weapons, but it takes about 10 bullets to kill anyone, which is OK if it's a boss, but after 12 levels, you tired of plugging some anonymous thug in the head 6 times and having him still keep coming. If the battles were any harder, it would be kind of annoying, but as it is it just drags at the versimilitude to have these western heroes shooting one another at point blank range with .45s and having no one die. The quickdraw minigame, though, is where the game shoots itself in the foot, so to speak. First, it's annoying that you get locked into the quickdraw segments. The quickdraw game is like a woozy, hard-to-control version of the regular Max-Payne-style "Deadeye" abiliity that you have during all the other parts of the game, and you keep wishing you'd just get to do a normal gunbattle when you suddenly find yourself forced to quickdraw. Then, how to do it is not explained very well and there's no place to practice it, so when you hit the "Do it perfect or you'll die" quickdraw battle on about level 24 (of 26), you just have to die. Again, again, again. Think like 30 times. You curse the QA department for not standing up and demanding that the difficulty be reduced or there be some way to sidestep it. I liked my avatar, Red, by that time and I was frustrated to watch him die repeatedly with the same annoying animation. I was eventually shouting obscenities at the screen, and when I finally got past it, I died on the next segment and was sent back to do the stupid quickdraw again. (I eventually perservered, but good god, there went 45 minutes of my life I'll never get back.) Can't practice quickdraw, of course, because you can't do previous levels until you complete the game. Since I eventually ran aground on level 25, I couldn't show the best levels to my friends to convince them to buy the game. Great design choice, Angel Studios! I know someplace some designer probably pounded on the whiteboard about how if you don't have quickdraw, you don't have a western, but he must have been referring to a quickraw minigame that, like, didn't suck. I wished they had just cut all the fat from the game. Get the game down to 4 hours of really high-quality action levels and great cutscenes and have Red walk off into the sunset. Then, include the rest of the levels as bonus tracks you could play if you wanted to---would have left me happy and hungry for more. So, if you can put up with a bunch of "blah" elements to get to the really great stuff, you'll have 3-4 hours of fun with this game but come away vaguely annoyed it didn't all hang together.
