These were my gripes with GTA4:
- Open world not big enough. Certainly no room to get any speed up or really coast around enjoying the scenery.
- Open world not colourful. Boo!
- Open world highly atmospheric, but it was the atmosphere of sweaty, rainy, rat-infested Liberty City.
Read Dead Redemption is GTA4 in the Wild West. Just take a look at that gameplay vid, and you can tell it already oozes quality. It’s beautiful, smooth, and it looks like the amazing euphoria engine is present and correct. It has horses. It has cacti. It has the first ever morality system in a game I’m actually looking forward to. (Obviously I will be an evil, ruthless, mercenary)
My sole annoyance is that the special slow-mo shooting system is directly and shamelessly pinched from Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, the soon-to-be second-best western series ever committed to console. I only hope that the inevitable success of this game can propel the Juarez games into the limelight they deserve.
Oh, and you can shoot bears.
(The third-best western series is Lucky Luke on the gameboy.)
