Red Dead Revolver Review

Let me start this off by saying I'm not a big fan of Rockstar games, however with that said, I do have a major soft spot for Red Dead Revolver. I consider it one of their better if not their best game and all though it does have some of their trappings, I do think Revolver has enough going to be consistently enjoyable where their other titles just annoy me.

Revolver just oozes with charm when I load it up. The load screens are really stylish especially with the way Red twirls his revolver and I loved how the end of the load screen is timed perfectly to when he holsters it. The story is nothing to write how about but it's fine, I tend to prefer games with excuse plots where you spend most your time playing. Red Harlow is out for revenge meets some friends along the way and he's generally a pure no sense straight to the point cowboy.

One nice thing I do enjoy about the game is that there are occasional levels where you don't play as Red and you follow the friends Red meets as well as some villains and it has the Sly Cooper and Fear Effect storytelling where you get to play out and follow their perspective before they meet Red again instead of doing the usual video game thing of where it only follows Red and what the other characters experience is pretty much left to the imagination. I appreciate that Revolver did this at all. On top of this, each the characters have their own special attack making them feel somewhat different.

The gameplay and moment to moment combat is where Red Dead Revolver shines, esstentially if you boil it down to it, Revolver is a much more scripted and Wild West version of Max Payne. The bullets are projectile and not hitscan which is pretty surprising since now you aren't a tank, you can reliably avoid damage and it's not you just hiding behind a piece of cover like the Redemption games or the later Grand Theft Autos. Unlike Max Payne 3, enemies generally drop health upon death and you don't need to die at a checkpoint multiple times in order to have more heath packs.

Another big point to Revolver's favor is that it's one of the few Rockstar 6th generation games along with the Warriors where there are actual level checkpoints meaning that for the most part you don't have to a lot of content upon death.

You can also dodge roll while aiming down sights too which is the kind of movement the Redemption games don't even have. One big difference that seals the deal when putting this game above the Redemption is how Dead Eye is handled. In the Redemption games, all the enemies esstentially die in one or two bullets making Dead Eye an instant "win" button. In Revolver, enemies take much more damage, come in larger numbers and there will always be a mini boss around meaning that by the end of the game, Dead Eye has to be used or else it's going to be much harder to get anywhere.

There are some issues with the game with all that said, the dueling system isn't that great, there are some major difficulty spikes and due to the nature of the Wild West setting, the aresenal of guns can feel limited.

Dueling at times can feel like a game of luck, where it feels like I have to flick the analog stick back and hope I manage to score enough red marks in time to kill the enemies.

The level where you play as Diego and the bar fight being two big examples. With Diego, you have to deal with an enemy wave and then mark canons where they can shoot you deplete large parts of your health on top of eventually marking cannons with enemies shooting at you with not even one checkpoint inbetween. Then you have to protect two soldiers planting dynamites. Any level that involves protecting npcs are really annoying since I feel like a babysitter and it's not because of me being incompetent is why I'm failing.

The bar fight can be insufferable since the game isn't a melee brawler and you have to deal with stiff hand to hand controls, protect npcs and also deal with scripted grabbing animations if you aren't lucky enough to avoid it and these grabbing animations can be pretty lengthy.