Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar; PS3, Xbox 360; rated mature)

I was sure Red Dead Redemption would work. I just wasn’t sure how, and wondered if developer Rockstar Games (of Grand Theft Auto fame) and the Western genre could really rock together as a cohesive unit.

The Wild Bunch and No Country for Old Men notwithstanding, beneath the violence, Westerns usually possess a moral sensibility and even a certain “niceness”. Western heroes are iconic, almost mythologic. But Grand Theft Auto IV had no heroes, and was morally ambiguous, not to mention splashed liberally with dark humour. As ridiculous as Westerns can be, they’re not funny.

And mostly, I just wasn’t sure I’d be able to get behind a Wild West protagonist who jacked (recently invented) cars. Robbed trains, maybe. But definitely not one who killed prostitutes.

But anyway, I suppose I worried that RDR might end up being “GTA with horses” after all, and I was afraid the facade would fall off, and I’d lose interest halfway through.

Then the first sequence faded in: 1911. The tail end of the Old West. John Marston steps off a boat, and walks past a paperboy, who shouts the game’s first dialogue: “Extra, extra! Health benefits of smoking!”

Over the course of the next five minutes, I met a guide in a brothel, rode a horse to an ambush, was mocked for using the word “implore”, and got shot by my former best friend. My heart lifted.

Of course Red Dead Redemption works. Sure, it’s sincere enough to work as a Western story (and there is a lot of story; the script was reportedly 1,500 pages), depicting tough people in tough circumstances, whom we genuinely want to root for. But it’s also self-aware, witty, and kind of messed up, as you’d expect from a Rockstar release, and yes, all of these elements harmonize.

And of course, graphically speaking, the game is stunning. As in, I was—and continue to be—stunned at how good it looks. And how alive it feels. Sure, the wildlife (horses, coyotes, grizzled prospectors) and the outstanding soundtrack contribute, but the art and tech definitely do their part.

At one point I was sitting idly, and looking off in the distance, at the sharpness and richness of the colour of the hills and plateaus and sagebrush and dusty trails, and I remember thinking, “In any other game, or even in a movie, that stuff back there would be a matte painting, just a backdrop. But I bet you they’re real objects.” And they were. I checked—every shrub and cactus.

In my first five seconds as John Marston, I reflected that it felt exactly like GTA IV, in how I moved, jumped, and oriented to the yellow dot on the mini-map. But the graphical detail in RDR is decidedly a generation better. To me, it’s as dramatic an improvement as the jump from regular to HD TV.

Chris Vandergaag is a Vancouver-based freelancer. When he's not gaming, writing, or forwarding links of questionable moral repute, he's asleep.