Red Dead Redemption Nintendo Switch Review (2023)
Summary: Step into the well worn boots of John Marsten and experience the Wild West in all its Glory!
4.3
Good times.
Giddyup buckaroos and get ready to ride on in to the Wild West! Red Dead Redemption is now available for the Nintendo Switch, and it’s one heck of a ride!
Well partners. I’ve been gaming for sometime now, and I was around for the first incarnation of this game . For those of you who may not be familiar with it, imagine a Grand Theft Auto game, but in the Wild West with horses, guns, wenches, and whiskey. You are John Marston, a man on a mission that will be achieved by any means necessary.
So, this game has been round for some time, and of course we shall delve into that, but let’s pretend this game never existed until now. What do you get? Well, you get a massive open world adventure set back in ye olde days that is a great deal of fun. Characters that live and breathe, clever dialogue, and great graphics. The game runs at about 30 frames per second and performs solidly throughout. The graphics look good and the audio quality and amazing soundtrack will drag you in to this fantastic world both in portable and docked mode. It’s still a great time after all these years.
John Marston is a likeable character, solid and dependable, and of course how you play the game will shape the way the game treats you. Be a bad guy and the townsfolk will fear you, the Law will want you, and some services may be closed to you. There’s an honour system that you can see move as you achieve certain things within the game which I admit was both fun and anxiety inducing. I like playing the good guy so it was fun to see how high I could push the title. I do recall at one stage, I accidentally knocked over one of the townspeople, and to my detriment, the little honour bar slumped backwards, there was a witness to my misdeed, and before I knew it, I had a posse chasing me out of town. Literally.
Good times.
This game is massive, and certainly great value for money. Remember I’m pretending that I’ve never played this game before. This is a full price game up there with the other triple a titles which some people might find a little bit hard to swallow, considering this game came out around 2010 from memory. To be perfectly honest, I actually have no issue with this price. I’m sure that quite an amount of work needs to take place in order to get something like this to run on a more modern console like the Switch and Red Dead Redemption plays perfectly. It’s an honest to goodness good game that totally holds up against modern releases in terms of story, and even the graphics.
The way they package this title is similar to the Game of the Year edition that came out for the PlayStation 3 years ago, and is bundled with Undead Nightmare, which saw John Marston pitted against zombie hordes. It’s good fun, and quite engrossing to say the very least. Yes, I have played this game in its entirety way back when it did come out but even now for this review I have finished the campaign and I’m still running around performing good deeds and riding horses, which you can capture out in the wild and tame them.
This is a living and breathing world which is quite captivating and I think that most players will receive this extremely well. John Marston is a nuanced character with depth, and the voice actors throughout the game along with the amazing writing make you feel as though you actually have some skin in the game. He is a man who is complex with real motivation who needs to do things he would not normally do in order to save his family. This will involve interactions with the untrustworthy government as well as his former gang members.
The title controls well. I played it with both the pro controller (which I prefer) as well as the JoyCon controls when in portable mode. Some of the graphics can look a little dated, however, I honestly don’t care and you should not either. It is crisp and clean, despite the age of some of the character models. The Switch handles everything well, and I believe from a graphic perspective holds up against the PlayStation 4 version, for those of you who are running a PlayStation 5, good for you, we are not reviewing the game on that console. :-)
The game is generous with its aiming and gunfights are a lot of fun. They have not added motion control to this aiming which, frankly, I don’t miss or need. This game does not contain any multiplayer, which I must admit would’ve been kind of neat.
Throughout the entire time I played this game, it never faulted or cause me to restart. Which of course, should be how it is with every game, but sadly is not always the case. It’s interesting to play your way through a fairly realistic rendition of the times and crimes of the old Wild West with the only imbalance really taking place when John was asked to fight for one faction and then it’s opposing faction in the very next mission depending on how you approach the game. The story however, is compelling and possibly is not eclipsed by anything out there, other than its sequel, which is as it should be.
Rockstar have always made sure their games are very full and fleshed out affairs, and this is no exception. Side missions will keep you busy and a plethora of entertaining and amusing characters in the game world will keep you both engrossed and invested. It’s a weird old time in the west just as the industrial age is truly starting to take over, John Marston exists in a world of gunfights and horse play, and the game reflects the conflict and change in the world quite admirably.
The game is adult oriented, so if you are checking out this review to see if your younger players should have a go at it, of course they should not. There you go, I have done my duty in protecting your children. But, any gamer 15+ will have an utter ball And I do thoroughly recommend this title. There is nothing quite like it on the Switch and it is so massive and so well thought out you’ll be playing it for ages. The main title is so huge that Undead Nightmare was fun but just a small blip on this amazing games radar.
Make sure you get Red Dead Redemption for the Switch, you are guaranteed a darn good time. Don’t let the price tag put you off; this is value for money whether you have been to this world before or not.
Yeehaw!
Tory Favro.
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