By: Isaac Basques

The first Red Dead Redemption game was released on May 18th, of 2010. It was released by the game company Rockstar games.

The game is an open world, set in the old west, with a 10 hour long main story, along with a ton of side stories and missions for you to do. It’s a third person shooter but also a game that the player can just ride around and enjoy the scenery or story.

In this game, you play a character by the name of John Marston, a former outlaw, who’s family is held hostage by the government who are forcing him to kill off the remaining members of his old gang who left him for dead in a train heist years back.

John goes through helping tons of people in order to get to his old gang members and finish them off. Everything eventually leads to John killing off, or capturing, his old gang members (since it is a choice in the game). His old gang members names are Javier Esquella and Bill Williamson.

After John finishes them both off, he soon finds out that his old gang leader who taught him to read and was basically a father to him, is still alive. His name is Dutch Van Der Linde. John finds him and watches him end his own life.

After finally doing what John needs to do, he goes home to see his family and soon after gets shot and left for dead by the government, along with a family member of theirs by the name of Uncle. 3 years later, John’s son Jack finds the government man behind his father’s death and finishes him off.

This game, in my opinion, is by far one of the most well written video games. It isn’t necessarily a happy story at all, but it makes you feel like it is, due to its light hearted jokes from time to time and its constant fun with action.

The main character, John Marston, is very well written and you can really feel his struggle with the fact that he really does not want to kill his old gang, despite the fact that they left him for dead. He just wants to live a normal life with his family on his ranch. John his very tough and ready for a fight, I’d like to say he’s not to be messed with, but he honestly gets used one too many times by too many people, and he just kind of lets it slide. Other than that, John Marston is a great character.

The other character in this game that I think they did an amazing job with, is John’s old gang leader, Dutch Van Der Linde. Dutch is a charming, yet evil man, who you can tell lost his mind years ago and hasn’t been the same since. The chemistry between him and John Marston feels very real and it actually feels as if John once saw him as a father figure. His final moment in the game is one of the best parts in the whole game because of the long speech he makes that strongly indicates that what John Marston is going through is not going to end well.

The graphics for this game are beautiful, especially for its time. The sunsets look like actual sunsets and the landscapes are just very nice to look at while you ride on your horse.

The gameplay for this game is overall not the best. The shootouts in the game can be fun but it often gets pretty boring just riding your horse around to area to area for long periods of time. You often spend more time riding your horse around in this game than you do actually playing the story.

Sometimes it makes up for the more boring moments when you come across strangers or small occurrences here and there, but other than that, there isn’t that many exciting things that happen when you’re playing.

It’s often drawn out for far too long, but there’s a lot of elements in this game that make you really have fun with it, such as the soundtrack when you ride your horse for certain missions, or really cool gun fights, and etc.

Which brings me to the soundtrack. The soundtrack is very good in this game and is western type music, but makes it feel a little more modern day and not too country like. They put the music in at a lot of good moments in the game so you can have a strong connection to it. 

Overall, I give this game a solid 9.5/10