Our resident sixty-something gamer, Oldrelic, has been playing Red Dead Redemption for a fair while now and has a thing or two to say about the game.  We invited her back, after her stint on the UFO Gamers Show, for a chat about her new favourite game and she had this to say:

First impressions are that this game is simply awesome.  Beautiful graphics and, if you love horses as I do, you will be in heaven playing this. The feeling of the old west is captured brilliantly and it really does handle quite nicely. I wish John Marston was a bit better-looking but hey, you cant have it all, can you.

There's loads and loads to do and the game reminds me in parts of Oblivion, which isn't any kind of a bad thing is it. All in all so far a very enjoyable romp and i'm having a great time with it. RDR rocks! 

You hunt wild animals and skin them, go bounty hunting, catch and break wild horses, sharpshoot birds, take on jobs to earn money, the list is endless. Trust me, you will not get bored with this, but beware because you die if you fall in the water! 
 

You can't swim, then?

No alas, shades of Assassins Creed 1.

Are there any other game elements that you feel let it down?

Now, let me think.  It's buggy - not excessively buggy, but there are bugs in it, but with a game of that calibre, you expect it not to be buggy.  Then again, all games are buggy; remember I'm a Tomb Raider fan.  The camera is usually good and tight but but sometimes, it can go a bit schizo.  Sometimes, the horse'll get stuck in a fence or a rock or something like that, ordinary sort of bugs.  I had a really funny one the other day, he was climbing a rock and I actually climbed up and fell through nothing and thought, "fuck, that's gonna dump the game" and it didn't, it came back.  It was really weird, I fell into a grey nothingness, you can do that in Tomb Raider Underworld.  So yeah, just normal sort-of bugs.  It does pretty well against Tomb Raider and the way they malign those games, you expect to find absolutely no bugs, but mostly, Red Dead Redemption is bug-free.

How did you get on with the multiplayer?

Well...  I can't really give you much of an opinion.  I went into free-roam for five minutes and hated it, but mainly because I had no idea what I was doing, there was no tutorial that I could see and basically, you just pop your head up for a second and you're dead.  I've never been an online player in my life, so it's not really my thing.  If I play with online with my son, then it might be different, but my initial reaction is YEUCH!  But that may be unfair.  I'm not an competitive person, I'm not going to like multiplayer, I mean, all anyone's going to do is kill you. It's great if you want to go around blowing everyone's head off, because that's what you're meant to do, apparently.

What about the game's looks and sounds?

Sounds and looks are top-class.  Sounds are brilliant, the voice acting is pretty good, I'd say, though I'm not much of a judge, but they're pretty good.  He actually talks in the cutscene.  The Dragon Age: Origins character, I only heard her say one thing, she actually spoke in the end cutscene, but this guy, if you press B when someone's talking to him, he will respond, so it's good, I like the voice acting.  The comments in the skinning the animals cutscenes are pretty cheesy, though.  And quite funny here and there.  "Lie still!" Ha!  It's dead, that's quite funny.  

It looks beautiful as well.  Depending where you go, obviously, like the scrubland we saw on the show, but it is a great-looking game.  It does become, if I can be a tiny bit negative, a touch predictable, but I'm now about 40% in, so I'm quite a way through.  And I've just learned to cheat at poker.  I can't play poker, but I can now cheat.  

The horses are great.  I love horses, the lassoing, breaking them in and riding and stuff like that, it's become a little tougher, but it's still good fun.  I rode through somewhere or other and encountered a big storm.  It was pissing down with rain and there was thunder and lightning like you wouldn't believe, it just looked so real; it was night-time and I was swinging the camera around to just look at it.  Six game hours later, it was still going on.

What do you think about the game as a whole, then.  As an entire package?

Overall...  It's linear if you want it to be, it's got to be one of the biggest games of the year and it's one of the best games so far, of the year.  It's excellent and super good fun and lots of things to do, you can follow the main trail and do other things when you want and pick it back up whenever.  I rode the train yesterday, all the way from Mexico to Texas.  The cutscene went on for ages and I thought I'd done something wrong, but no, it was just a long journey.  It's the same as any other open-world RPG, you can be good or bad as you please and I'm good because I always am.  It gives a nod to both Oblivion and Fable II and rivals and perhaps outstrips them for graphics, which isn't easy to do.  I still don't like that you can't swim, but overall, I'm loving it.