Six years after Rockstar's Red Dead Revolver, a cracking Western shooter slightly let down by some weird boss battles and linear gameplay, comes Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar’s not-really-a-sequel second Western. Set in the year 1911, just as civilisation starts to encroach on the Wild West, the game follows John Marston, a former outlaw trying to go straight as a rancher. As is the way with these things, that doesn’t quite work out as hoped and before long his wife Abigail and son Jack have been kidnapped by Federal Agents who want John to take down his old gang. With his idyllic new lifestyle and his family under threat, John has no choice but to play along. In truth it’s not dissimilar to the plot of every GTA game ever, but Rockstar have polished it to perfection while adding a liberal dose of Spaghetti Western to the recipe. The story is very well told, although it gets off to a fairly slow start. The number of NPCs who string you along for what starts to seem like an endless series of missions without any real plot advancement does get tiresome around the mid-point of the game though. The last couple of acts of the game are particularly well done however, bringing a total change of pace and revealing a whole new side to John Marston before building up to an excellent ending that, whether you love it or hate it, will certainly leave a lasting impression.

The game’s ragdoll physics are really outstanding, combining the Euphoria natural motion and Havoc physics engines to great effect; shot enemies fall from high ledges exactly like in the movies, or topple off wagons, or get dragged by their spurs as they get stuck in the stirrups falling from their horses. People react to gunshots with a real feeling of impact and die in all manner of different ways; sagging to their knees, flopping slowly, or firing their weapons with one last trigger finger spasm, or crawling away mortally wounded, begging for help. You can even shoot their hats off, or disarm them by shooting the weapons from their hands, while shooting an enemy in the leg will make him limp, not just for a second before he starts sprinting again, but until you kill him. It’s not just the humans either; the way animals drop dead in mid-run and then tumble limply is excellent, especially horses with riders on; every death is unique due to the realistic physics and some exceptionally well-rigged models.

The horses are probably the stars of the game and are easily the most realistic in-game horses ever, both in appearance and in their animation and how they feel to ride (sorry, Barbie Horse Adventures!) There are 20 different breeds, each with different stats and recognisable by their different markings. You can find wild horses wandering the land and break them in via a bucking bronco mini-game before claiming them as your own, or buy deeds to new ones in stores; tie one to a hitching post and it becomes your trusty steed and can be summoned by whistling. You steer your horse with the left stick and press the ‘A’ button to spur them on. Holding ‘A’ makes them maintain whatever speed they’re at, while tapping it rhythmically makes them accelerate forward at the cost of replenishing stamina—spur them too hard and they’ll audibly grumble, slow, and eventually buck you off! You can play the game GTA-style and steal a horse or wagon every time you need to get somewhere quickly, it's neither necessary or wise to do so as your own faithful horse is only a whistle away. There are also dozens of other creatures; wild birds ranging from brightly coloured songbirds to the sinister vultures which circle fresh kills, and wild animals, from cute bunny rabbits to bison, all of which can be killed and skinned for cash. There are also a number of top of the food-chain predators to watch out for, including grizzly bears, wolves and cougars. Each animal has unique animations and makes different noises; you soon learn to fear the growl of a nearby cougar or the barks of a roaming wolf pack, especially if you’re on foot.

The majority of the missions are similar to the typical GTA template; ‘go there’, ‘shoot them’, ‘protect her’, ‘run home’ but with a Western spin, which helps make them feel fresh and new, even if they are basically the same thing you’ve done in Rockstar games for years. Although a few missions involve long rides at the start, these are often used to add to the backstory as the characters chat to each other, which serves pretty well to pass the time. Most non-interactive trips (with you riding shotgun on a wagon, for example) can be skipped entirely if you don’t care for hearing the chatter. Some of the missions are very different to other games in the genre however; lassoing and breaking in horses and herding cows are both important parts of life in the West, but have never been done before. It’s actually a shame they weren’t available as constant job options; after all, roundups are what cowboys are all about. The missions are almost all very entertaining and offer a wide variety of experiences, from incredibly hectic gun battles and chases to peaceful cow herding. Naturally a few missions are little more than time wasters and feel like filler, but other than that they’re a great bunch. There are several pastimes to break up the action or even to win money at, including Poker, Blackjack, Liar's Dice, Horseshoes, Arm Wrestling and the painful 'Five Finger Fillet'.

A welcome change from Rockstar’s normal ethos and an improvement even on GTA IV’s system are the regular checkpoints within missions rather than the usual “epic fail” which often saw you having to repeat a boring 5 minute journey back to the start of the actual action after getting killed. You can also retry any completed mission from the main menu this time, another first for a Rockstar sandbox game. Also a first for a Rockstar game is automatically recovering health; no more having to search for a hotdog stand before you can start a mission, as just avoiding damage for a time will replenish health. The portable campsite not only allows you to fast travel without looking for a taxi, it also lets you save anywhere in the wilderness, cutting out on pointless journeys to and from your safehouses. Redemption really does let you see the long or the short of it.

Instead of GTA’s Wanted star levels, there’s a bounty-based mechanic more in keeping with the game’s theme. Each crime you commit adds to the bounty on your head, with higher bounties attracting more dangerous and determined pursuit, culminating in posses of Marshalls chasing you down every time you’re recognised. You can choose to either pay off your own bounty or use a pardon letter to reset the level. You can even kill witnesses to stop them alerting lawmen, with both line of sight and distance taken into account when determining who saw your crimes. As well as your bounty level, the game also tracks your current Fame and Honor levels; completing missions and various collection and combat based Challenges increases your fame, while saving innocents and not stealing or murdering (more than you have to) increases your Honor. A higher Fame level means people are more likely to turn a blind eye to your crimes, whereas your Honor level affects how NPCs react to you.

You can simply treat the posse as a Free Roam team if you want, but the real point of it is to keep your group together when you enter the competitive multiplayer modes. You can start up a competitive game at any time in Free Roam, either free-for-all or team based (which will automatically bring the rest of your posse with you). The team games, which include a couple of ‘Capture the Bag’ variants and several Deathmatch style scenarios, work really well for the most part. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to select a specific one of the competitive modes, with the only choice being between preset playlists of free-for-all or team based games which cycle through all the types, which is a bit odd, but should be easily patchable in the future. Although players can vote to skip unpopular game types in the cycle, that’s not much comfort if you only want to play the last one and everyone else wants to play all the others, then skip your favourite… The game also puts high-level players and compulsive campers (how is that even fun?) in with total n00bs, which is a shame and a little disheartening, although someone will probably take you under their wing and invite you to make up the numbers in their posse soon enough. Teaming up in a posse is great fun, and they’ve thought about ways to keep you together, with the option to spawn on the posse leader and quick travel across the massive play area, or just by piling six of you into a stagecoach. Although you can have up to eight members in a posse, the ideal size for the free roam missions is probably more like four or five if you actually want clearing a gang hideout to last more than a minute. Perhaps with that in mind, the forthcoming free DLC co-op missions are all designed for 2-4 players. There are 50 levels of character progression in the multiplayer, with regular rewards for levelling up, ranging from more powerful free roam weapons, to new character models and mounts, from the lowly donkey to the mighty buffalo. On reaching Level 50, you are given the choice to ‘pass into Legend’, which acts much like the Prestige mode in CoD: Modern Warfare, resetting your rank but giving you a new title and allowing you to unlock Legendary characters and mounts as you move back up the levels, culminating in the chance to ride a Zebra!

Red Dead Redemption references dozens of Westerns in one way or another; the station from the start of the game looks very like the one from the beginning of ‘Once Upon A Time in The West’; Marston’s outfits are obviously influenced by Clint’s wardrobe as the Man with No Name from the Dollars Trilogy, and there are similarities with The Outlaw Josey Wales in John’s peaceful life gone wrong and the dodgy Miracle Cure salesman. It’s not just the widely recognised classics though; the Mexican Revolutionary leader and several of the Mexican missions are familiar from Franco Nero’s Il Mercenario and there’s even a brief reference to Cuchillo, the expert Mexican knifeman played by Tomas Milian in Run, Man, Run and La Resa dei Conti, a movie so obscure it’s currently only available on DVD in Germany. It’s clear from the care they’ve taken in every aspect of the game world that Rockstar staff don’t just watch these great movies, they understand and love them. That’s the real beauty of the game; it’s not necessarily the ultimate realistic simulation of life in the Wild West, but it is the perfect Spaghetti Western simulator.