Red Dead Redemption

Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope and the marauding outlaws and poisonous snakes range. Welcome to Red Dead Redemption.

We walked away from our time with the Call of Juarez sequel last month saddle sore and weary of shoe-horned and overly clever game mechanics masquerading as innovation. And still, we hold out hope for a good take on the western game, something that brings the frontier alive with either a mouse or a control pad as your trusty make-believe six-shooter.

Red Dead Redemption (gallery here) might just be that game.

Our time with it was limited to hand-held walkthrough of three portions of the game's many missions. And there are a lot of them - the game's essentially Grand Theft Auto with spurs on. In fact, the three areas that make up the game world (the Frontier, the Plains, and Mexico) are much bigger than GTA4's Liberty City.

Introducing John Marston
The player steps into the shoes of reformed criminal and outlaw John Marston, a man who turned his back on violence to find a new life for his family. But, in true dirt opera style, that life is not done with him, and he's called upon by the Bureau of Investigations to return to the west.

Rockstar believe it's far better for the game's story to give you a named and fully fleshed out character to play in their games. It certainly worked for the plucky Nico in GTA, and the sour, somewhat bitter Marston looks to be another great Rockstar creation. Dialogue was not in place in our preview, but even his body language portrays a weary (and wary) outlook on the world.

Throughout the game Marston will get access to new clothing sets, and a range of new weapons, all of which will be represented about his body. In the missions we saw, he had what looked like a Colt revolver on his hip, a lever-action Winchester, a knife, and a lasso. All the weapons are based on real-world counterparts.

We're also guessing - though we didn't get a chance to see it in action - that the lasso will feature heavily in a lot of physics-based gameplay. Just so long as it's not as stilted as Call of Juarez's take, we'll be happy.

Marston can take advantage of much the same targeting system you might be familiar with from GTA4, though there have been definite refinements to match the grittier and more realistic feel of the game. Also present is the Dead Eye mode from the first Red Dead game, where you can either slow down the world around you for detailed action, or stop play for a moment to pinpoint certain targets before blowing them away in a flurry of lead. Dead Eye's a power-up based on how many men you put in the ground - the more you kill in a fight, the more your Dead Eye meter increases, and the more likely you'll be able to drop into this cold killing mode.