Red Dead Revolver (PS2)

Before Rockstar Games would bring us perhaps the definitive Wild West video games in the form of the Red Dead Redemption titles, the first cowboy game under their banner would be a much simpler title known as Red Dead Revolver. Rescued from Capcom when they cancelled the title, Red Dead Revolver doesn’t feel much like its successors, but it certainly does feel like a Western.

 

A loving tribute to the old Wild West films, specifically the Spaghetti Westerns like The Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West, Red Dead Revolver right out the bat opens with a preview of the game that looks like a film trailer for a Western, the music matching Ennio Morricone’s style pretty well without feeling like cheap parodies. There are a few songs that almost sound like Star Wars music though, and one of the themes for the city of Brimstone feels a little more like typical video game town music you’d find in an RPG, but these are certainly the exception to an otherwise effective establishment of setting and style. The game begins with a young boy named Red having his life ruined when his parents are killed and house burned down by a gang of gunslingers. Many years later, Red’s grown into a man and a prolific bounty hunter to boot, the cowboy in search of the man who killed his parents and the people who hired him so he can exact his revenge. Along the trail to meeting his old foe, Red accepts bounties for colorful foes and meets some helpful allies, the game ultimately letting you play as six different characters, one even being a villain. The ones you can expect more time as though include the British trick shooter Jack Swift, the rancher Annie Stoakes, and Red’s Native American cousin Shadow Wolf, each of them having their own part to play in Red’s quest to rid the West of the corruption that killed his family all those years ago.

 

Red Dead Revolver’s plot is a strong set-up for a Wild West tale, and the steps along the way take you through many of the expected Western setpieces as well as a few new ones. Having gunfights aboard a train isn’t too much of a surprise, but gunning down a circus full of clowns and performers in an abandoned town gives your opponent’s more variety while providing a more unique experience than just shooting down other cowboys in dust desert towns. There will be plenty of shooting down cowboys in towns though, as well as climbing through rocky canyons, fighting through a mine, and having shootouts out in the wilds or inside a mission or saloon. Red Dead Revolver divides its play into levels mostly based around the idea you’re either tracking down a bounty or facing down with someone related to your quest for vengeance, so the areas tend to focus on providing suitable areas for gun fights that connect quickly into new areas for battle. Most of the game involves just shooting down whoever stands in your path or is causing trouble in that particular area, but some levels will require you to protect people or objects, and these can be a little shaky in design. These will often involve more enemies appearing over time to come in and shoot at what you’re meant to be safeguarding, their numbers making it hard to really keep them under control well enough until you’ve learned to anticipate their arrival and point of entries after a few level failures.

Thankfully, most of the game focuses on just your skill with the revolver, missions sometimes throwing in new concerns like enemies on mounted guns or having to fight from horseback, but it does so without complicating the core controls. Aiming is about as simple as it comes, tilting the stick to point your weapon at your target and firing as you please, ammo and reloading a concern but accuracy being fairly reliable save for registering headshots and other precise targeting. Luckily, despite the name, revolvers aren’t the only thing in your arsenal, so while the revolver gets the job done most of the time, you can also unlock weapons or buy them with money earned through your performances in levels. Among these are things like shotguns good for heavy short range damage, rifles good for long range sniping, and even the option to use two revolvers at once, each gun type having better versions to work towards. You may need to repair them from time to time to keep them at their best, but the cost is low and almost a mechanic not worth mentioning. There is a cover system you can fire from, but it can often be more effective to just run around shooting and then standing behind something to avoid damage rather than pressing against it properly. Enemies will drop health and ammo on defeat too, so running in to grab it can be important, meaning that many battles will be action-packed as you need to weave around safely to lay down fire and keep yourself topped off for the next battle area or wave of foes. While you can only bring two weapons with you into a level, you can pick up more there as well as carry in extra weapons like throwing daggers, dynamite, and poisonous “snake oil” to deal with foes in different ways.

 

Each of the different characters you play as comes with a different style, mostly pertaining to a special ability known as Deadeye. With Red, Deadeye slows down time and lets you assign multiple shots on foes before starting time back up again and firing them all in a burst. You’ll need to build up the energy to pull it off to prevent this from being overpowered, which is especially true of Jack Swift’s Deadeye that just targets every enemy around him instantly and fires off the shots with his dual revolvers. Annie’s rifle is fired like a cannon when she activates Deadeye, and some other characters have extra purposes for their like marking areas for mortar fire. This style of shooting in the game isn’t so focused on accuracy and quick reaction to the point Deadeye is really needed to make up for it, the game feeling more like an action title focused on balancing enemy numbers and moving around right to win fights. This makes the multiplayer mode a bit interesting, as the levels featured in it are often pretty open and chaotic because of the movement and firing mechanics being an effective fit for fast-paced action. The modes on offer for playing with other humans often focus on bounties, that being the cash score given to you for killing other players, although these can be awarded in different ways depending on the mode. More interesting than the points though would have to be the playing cards that pop up when a player is down, other people able to collect them for some strange and useful powerups. Your bullets can end up poisonous, on fire, or even explosive after picking a card up, making an already chaotic mode of running around shooting each other even wilder, making it fine for a bit of fun on the side.

While the basics of Red Dead Revolver feel pretty solid, when it breaks away from the simple stuff, it tends to fall flat on its face. The first place this comes up is the duels. Every now and then when facing down an important enemy, the action comes to an immediate halt as you have a standoff with them. While the duel to pull out your gun first and shoot them down before they hit you is a classic of Western cinema, the implementation here is dull. Once you’ve pulled your gun out of its holster, times slows like in Red’s Deadeye, after which you aim your cursor at your foes body, wait to see the targeting cursor turn red, and click to set a shot for that area. You can do this multiple times before the shots are fired, and multiple foes do mean sometimes you have to lock in more than a few shots, but whether you figure out how easy it is to land lethal shots or not, the showdown is rarely interesting or tense. You can set weak shots if you’re nervous about being too slow, but those don’t help much so waiting on the red target is pretty much the best option and not all that challenging. Losing the duel is what makes them particularly unnecessary. Some foes won’t kill you if they win, so you just fight them regularly after and it is much easier. Other times, you will die, and the game reloads to the start of the duel and you just try again. While these are often used for the dramatic confrontations, they’re not really interesting interactivity and don’t test your reflexes or your aim much.

 

Bosses are probably just as weak as the showdowns, but they at least tend to stick to the regular gun play. The problem is, bosses here function more like enemies from other genres rather than a shooter, meaning that even if you empty your best weapons into these guys, you won’t really scrape them until you figure out which specific attack you’re meant to be doing. Targeting a certain spot on the enemy’s body is the most common way bosses take damage, and while the aiming being a little finicky elsewhere is tolerable, here it just makes bosses frustrating. A few do fight you just like stronger versions of regular enemies with some unique weapons to make them tougher, but the boss enemies that do require figuring out how to even hurt them or the ones that take tons of ammo to put down are usually dull and feel a poor fit for play that usually focuses on quick action. Much like the gun duels, the more annoying foes aren’t frequent enough to sink the experience, but since both will crop up to interrupt you from time to time, it makes it harder to enjoy the decent shooting on show.

THE VERDICT: Red Dead Revolver roots its identity in old Wild West cinema and does a pretty good job of pulling that theme off, the settings and music selling it while the action feels a good fit for the larger than life characters and gunfights that would take place in the old Spaghetti Westerns. When it’s keeping its focus on the quick action, the gun play is a good fit for battles focused on handling many enemies from all angles and for multiplayer madness, but when it breaks away to try and do something different, Red Dead Revolver gets a bit weaker. The quick draw duels are pass/fail tests without much to consider in overcoming them and a few of the boss battles are made tough by taking a long time to beat or having a weird condition to overcome them rather than skill being the deciding factor. With those little weights hanging on its design, Red Dead Revolver can’t keep it pace going well enough to become much more than a passable but lovingly crafted Western shooter.

 

And so, I give Red Dead Revolver for PlayStation 2…

An OKAY rating. Even putting aside things like the duels and the boss battles, protection missions and other small niggling points with the basic shooting like the headshot detection would likely mean Red Dead Revolver would still be a lot more about its style than the strength of its play. Still, pushing past the interruptions to play will at least leave you with a game that’s on the whole solid enough to keep your interest and keeps things moving through new setups and settings. Red Dead Revolver didn’t really need to indulge in its moments of gimmickry, as those are often what drags down the experience. The stealth section in the mines overestimates the hit detection and the barfight has a clumsy fist fighting system, but since the bulk of the game is mostly just setpieces for the basic shooting, the weaker parts don’t doom the whole experience, and the multiplayer silliness is actually the kind of right step to make the core shooting more fun without overburdening it. Since much of the experience will still be about you engaging with the basic gun play, you’ll still walk away with a mostly fine time, the game even keeping it relatively fresh with slight variations on gunfights such as fighting from horseback that don’t falter like the bigger departures of puzzle bosses and duels.

 

Red Dead Revolver gets a lot of the incidental elements down for making a game feel like a Western film, but the gameplay mechanics aren’t quite there for making it a good Western game. While it’s still got some enjoyment to be found, ultimately it has the trappings of movies like A Fistful of Dollars but not quite the same level of quality.