To be perfectly truthful, I had exceedingly high expectations for Red Dead Revolver. Finally, I thought, a gunslinger game that promises the feel and sheer coolness factor that made movies like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or Hang ‘em High the cult classics that they are. My heart raced as if I were staring down the barrel of Earp’s famous Peacemaker as I read the jacket: “Experience the untamed West on foot, stagecoaches, horseback and trains”, Rockstar promised me. That phrase brought me glimpses of an expansive, harsh landscape populated by all kinds of ornery ruffians just waiting for me to dispense some red-hot justice.
What I got amounted basically to Dragon’s Lair with six-guns. See, Red Dead Revolver is a third-person shooter set in the heyday of the Old West, when men were men, and women were fiery and had limited career options. There really isn’t much to explore or experience as you make your way through the terribly linear levels which amount simply to dispatching anything and everything in your way. Only two of the levels contain trains – one of which you’re blasting through, the other you’re chasing on horseback; there are only two levels in which you ride horses (for the record, Ocarina of Time did horseback better), and then only briefly. The stagecoaches? There is only one, and you have to blow that up.
In brief, Red Dead Revolver is extremely limited in scope, all but destroying the sense of space and freedom that gives the Old West its allure.
Conceptually speaking, Red Dead Revolver is just shy of an abject failure. Luckily, the technical aspects somewhat make up for this shortcoming.
Each of the levels operates in waves, during which Red inches ever closer to his goal (more often than not, the poor sap who is about to get a lead injection). These waves come in three sorts: The enemies will rush Red, resulting in messy melees in which Red jumps and dodges while repeatedly emptying his weapon of choice; they will use cover and snipe at Red, and Red is expected to do the same; finally, there are the ubiquitous high-noon standoffs.
The standoffs are the “killer app” of the game – what sets Red Dead Revolver apart from, say, Grand Theft Auto 3. You can almost hear the strident whistle from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as Red and his foe face each other down. It pops out of widescreen, and a series of events happens: Pulling back on the right stick brings Red’s hand to his gun grip, pushing forward draws his weapon, and the game goes into slow motion. The right stick is then used to place crosshairs on your opponent. The crosshair cycles between the yellow “poor shot” crosshair, to the dark red “good shot”, to the bright red “critical”. One critical shot to the head will fell any enemy. Fail to do so, and the enemy will plug you good. If you survive, it turns into your average gunfight.
Each playable character (including the five controlled in the main game and the multitude in the multiplayer mode) has a special move executed by clicking the right stick with the character’s weapon drawn. For Red, it is his “Dead Eye” mode. Time once again slows to a crawl as you place crosshairs on your opponent. You can place as many crosshairs as you have bullets in your gun. This works a lot like Max Payne’s bullet time, allowing you to slow the action down and take out multiple enemies at once.
Gameplay is, as always, your basic grab bag. Some levels are genuinely fun, such as blasting your way through wave after wave of outlaws in a ghost town, culminating in an eerie graveyard battle with a chain gun-wielding madman. Some are, to put it bluntly, a pain in the tail, because they are exceedingly drawn-out, repetitive, or overly ambitious in what they are trying to accomplish. The rest are a grey medium – playable, but not memorable. Luckily, the controls are intuitive, well designed, and responsive, which makes up for some of the trouble.
I wasn’t at all impressed with the graphics. Given what I know the Xbox can accomplish (i.e. Crimson Skies), Red Dead Revolver’s characters and environments are roughly on a par with Freedom Fighters or Vice City. The blood effects are also pretty chunky and amateurish, which is odd considering the game’s mature rating, and the fact that Rockstar Games is notorious for not shying away from the sight of blood.
Red Dead Revolver’s voice acting ranges from fairly good to absolutely terrible. The main characters are lively, and put across a decent impression of the old Spaghetti Westerns, while the stock NPC voices are laughably bad. I mean High School compulsory drama bad. The one saving grace is the soundtrack. Everything is backed by an evocative and melancholy soundtrack that fits the settings very well.
Completing the game unlocks a couple of new modes, including a harder level of difficulty and a Bounty Hunter mode, in which each chapter has a certain condition that must be fulfilled, be it “take no damage” or “shoot all enemies only in the head”. If you’re really in for the challenge, or just want to unlock all the multiplayer characters and journal pages (some of which make for an interesting read), Red Dead Revolver stands up to another play-through. The multiplayer mode on its own, however, is nothing special –just characters battling in a variety of tiny arenas.
Lord love ‘em, the varmints at Rockstar San Diego didn’t want to let this poor Capcom castoff die. A video game with the feel and appeal of a classic Western would have been a fantastic achievement and a big seller for those of us who indiscriminately love gunslingers and/or samurai. Unfortunately, what we got was merely an average third-person shooter that happened to take place in snapshots of things I’ve already seen in a hundred Clint Eastwood or John Wayne westerns. So I, disappointed, will ride off like Shane into the sunset and chuck this game away at Boot Hill.
