#561: Red Dead Revolver
Before Redemption, must come death — or a mediocre game, same diff
Initial release: May 4, 2004
Platform: PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox
Developer: Rockstar San Diego
For a while there it seemed like Rockstar Games were the darling of the western console gaming scene. Grand Theft Auto III — and later Vice City and San Andreas — were defining moments for the PlayStation 2 library, while also courting controversy with their violence and sexual content. Manhunt and especially its sequel would push the envelope even further. And it wasn’t just the games developed by their flagship studio, Rockstar North; they also published quite a few games as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, some of which courted controversy of their own, like State of Emergency. Somewhere in the shuffle of the flurry of games published by Rockstar throughout the early to mid 2000s is a title that may seem half familiar to fans of their more recent work: Red Dead Revolver.
But don’t get it twisted. Red Dead Revolver is nothing like its successor title. Far from being a cowboy Grand Theft Auto, Revolver is much more in line with the likes of Japanese action games that were being cranked out for the platform in the early 2000s — Way of the Samurai and its spinoffs, Dynasty Warriors and its spinoffs, and so on. So how did an American game by an American developer come off like a cowboy version of these games? To find the answer to that we need to go back through the game’s troubled development.
The story begins in the 1980s. 1985 saw the release of Capcom’s Gun.Smoke, a Western-themed Commando clone that saw a medium amount of popularity, especially once it hit the NES. (Though I did prefer the NES version, I didn’t particularly like either.) Capcom, like Konami, loves to be extremely self-referential, often making shoutouts to old titles in its back catalogue when not dragging them out for a new generation outright. Fast forward fifteen years. Angel Studios, the one-time miracle workers that brought Resident Evil 2 to the Nintendo 64 (considered a major technical feat at the time) have been given a bunch of money to build a game for Capcom. The initial idea, suggested by erstwhile Gun.Smoke project lead Yoshiki Okamoto, was a police-themed game titled S.W.A.T. (not to be confused with the police-themed game titled S.W.A.T.) but was changed after Okamoto saw a western and I guess he got the cowboy bug in him all over again. So S.W.A.T. came to mean “Spaghetti Western Action Team” (I know, I laughed too) and Capcom sent over an artist to do the character design. Akira Yasuda — the one-time Chun-Li designer who would also do character and mech designs for anime like Gundam and Code Geass — is why Red Dead Revolver has such a curiously anime-esque sensibility in its character design, especially in the likes of its main character, Red the bounty hunter. Combine that with Capcom’s stewardship of the project and it’s clear why the game feels more Japanese than American.
Nevertheless, the San Diego-based Angel Studios were unprepared for the cultural differences between them and the Japanese Capcom, and the conflicting ideas and workflow hampered development. Though Capcom would announce the game in spring of 2002, it was nowhere near a playable state, and when Okamoto left Capcom in 2003 the game was quietly canceled. But along game Rockstar Studios. After all the trouble with Capcom, Angel Studios’ founder, Diego Angel, was thinking about selling the company. Angel Studios had already been doing games for Rockstar like Midnight Club, and Rockstar’s founders, brothers Sam and Dan Houser, made an offer. They bought Angel Studios, renamed it Rockstar San Diego, and revived the Red Dead Revolver project, finally putting it out in 2004.
So with that haphazard development history, you’d probably imagine the game to be something of a mess, right? Well… yeah.
Red Dead Revolver is a game built on ideas that it just can’t deliver on. The core of the game is built on arena battles of sorts — a small, open area in which you shoot it out with hordes of goons. You get a wide variety of weapons, though they’ll all fit into one of three categories: handguns, long arms, and thrown. Scoring headshots will usually bring down enemies in a hurry, but the actual hit detection is a bit finicky. Most playable characters have a special move that you can activate, but to unleash it you have to fill up a bar by shooting and killing enemies (which also nets you money you can spend.) Some enemies have a boss health bar, and will often bring their own dangerous gameplay mechanics to the fight. Occasionally the levels eschew the arena design and go for something more linear, but the combat otherwise remains the same. The AI is anemic at best; far from being a cover shooter, the game feels more like playing a Quake 3 Arena clone with bots as enemies will run all over the map; in the moments when they do take cover, they’ll often stay there and just take potshots forever.
The game gets slightly more interesting with the duel mechanic. Though it’s only a thing that happens in scripted moments, it works out like your typical cowboy western duel scene: two characters staring each other down, and whoever’s got the faster draw is the winner. You pull your gun and then you guide the reticle over the other guy’s body and try to land some hits. Some enemies are much faster than others — and sometimes you’ll want to score some criticals (determined by the shape of the reticle) to make sure they go down for good.
Now, on paper this all sounds good enough. But in practice the game just isn’t good enough. Awkward controls, awkward shooting, awkward everything — nothing about this game feels smooth or easy. It is the epitome of PS2-era jank. The erratic AI and finicky hit detection, combined with their own irritatingly high accuracy, make for often infuriating gameplay, made worse by uneven checkpoint placement and sharp spikes in difficulty. Most people won’t get past chapter 13, “The Traitor,” a flashback in which you must defend a bridge from invaders, but the constant gunfire and swarms of enemies, plus a complete dearth of checkpoints, means you will die over and over and over again and have to start from the beginning every time.
Not helping any of this is the plot, a potboiler western cliche storm about an evil governor, a renegade Mexican general, and a desecrated mountain full of gold, all opposed by a scrappy young bounty hunter with a grudge, a disgraced British trick shooter, and a destitute rancher’s daughter. The main character, Red, is at least somewhat interesting in his character design, but like everyone else in this game he’s a walking stereotype. So is Jack Swift, the British trick shooter, who looks and sounds basically like the sugar thief in that Simpsons episode about Lisa’s school rival. Or how about Shadow Wolf, Red’s native cousin and one big walking stereotype who just dies randomly? Or Buffalo Soldier, the African-American cavalry trooper who doesn’t even get a fucking name?
If there’s a thing about this game that works best, it’s the presentation. It’s a great looking game for the mid to late PlayStation 2 era; the loading screens are unquestionably my favorite thing about this game. The anime-esque aesthetic also I think helps keeps the visuals livelier and more cartoony at a time when games were starting to lean into a more “serious” (read: brown) tone. The music is also pretty good, including a title theme lifted straight from 1971’s His Name was King (and one that Quentin Tarantino would shamelessly also use for Django Unchained.) If absolutely nothing else, Angel Studios understood how a western should look; actually playing it is another matter entirely.
Honestly? Rockstar treats the story of Red Dead Revolver as a sort of legend in Red Dead Redemption; you’re better off doing the same.
