Red Dead Revolver

"Another quick, fun shoot-em-up by Rockstar"

After completing Max Payne 2 and GTA Vice City I went out and rented Red Dead Revolver, hoping to be dazzled by Rockstar again. I was. Red Dead Revolver is a fun, but somewhat easy third person shooter set in the wild west.
Well, here is my review.

Graphics 7/10 C+

Nothing spectacular, but not bad either. The occasional lighting effect is nice though. Rockstar did a good job on the making the cutscenes and menus look old-school with film scratches, tumbleweeds and scorpions crawling in the background. The gore looks stupid though. With huge chunks of flesh spewing out of the enemies. Professor Perry has the same kind of constipated face as Max Payne if anyone noticed.

Story 8/10 B

A 27 chapter revenge story. A man comes and kills your family right after your father strikes gold in a mountain and the future looks bright. Several years later you go out searching for this man. You become sidetracked by your new bounty hunter occupation and go out to kill some colourful characters like a 500 pound circus psycho with too much dynamite. You eventually get a lead on the one-armed man (Colonel Darren) and his superior "General Diego". You shoot a lot of people and everyone lives happily ever after (dont wannna ruin the plot for ya). Every few levels you get a chance to roleplay as another person in a side mission such as Jack Swift, the british trickshot master, or even General Diego in a flashback.

Sound 9/10 A

Grrrrrrreat! The perfect recreation of classic spaghetti western music really gets you in the mood. The gun sounds are good and the voice acting is awesome. Im humming the intro music right now. I never have much to say about sound.

Gameplay 9/10 A

Best game i've played in a while. The strange controls are surprisingly easy to get used to. You just feel cool when you kick ass in a shootout. The game has a nice selection of guns to buy with the money you recieve from killing enemies and bosses. You are scored in four areas Time, Damage taken, Accuracy and Shooting combos. There are rankings on each level to unlock characters/levels for multiplayer or weapon/health/deadeye upgrades. Deadeye is a bullettime ripoff with a twist. You auto aim 6 spots on an enemy then unload on him. BAM! Another one of the games features are slowmotion showdown duels which are amusing but will make you rip your hair out when fighting Mr Kelly or Govenor Griffon. The multiplayer is fun and you can play 3 on 1 single player in it.

Replayability 8/10 B

Most of the missions are actually fun to play over again. There are three extra difficulty settings to unlock. A Bounty Hunter mode is avaliable after you complete story mode once. This provides extra objectives like "Get a combo for 300$" or "Shoot all the enemies only in the head". You can unlock a few cheats but mostly multiplayer levels or characters. This is a similar situation as Rocky if youve played it. There are loads of multiplayer characters to play as but there are only about 5 or 6 that you actually want. Who wants to be a nameless cowboy hooligan like "Sissy" Fess, "Ugly" Chris or the great "Bloody" Tom. At certain points in the game you can purchase Journal Pages which are mostly character bios avaliable in the main menu.

Overall 8/10 A

I cruised through this game on a one week rental and I am contemplating buying it. Rent it to try it out, the midget clowns with pistols and impressive music should satisfy your taste for a wetern shoot em up.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/04