REVIEW – Nearly a decade and a half after its original release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption is finally coming to PC. It was released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch last August, and now the Rockstar/Take-Two duo has finally come up with the idea of bringing their western adventure to PC. The only question now is whether it’s worth it, or if it’s better to emulate the PS3 version (if you have the disc, no one can say anything…)

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The game has finally been released on PC, and with that you can forget the “it would be too complicated to port elsewhere” excuse from the past, because yes, Rockstar has done it before.

PC = pricing cruelty

The game itself will not be discussed much. It will be about the remaster and its execution. (And the rating will be the average of the game and the remaster, as with all remasters…) Rockstar simply has a lousy history with remasters of their games (the three PS2 Grand Theft Auto’s recently got an update, first released on MOBILES last year… and that trilogy came out in lousy shape). The following can be said about Red Dead Redemption on PlayStation 4 and Switch: the map resolution is low, the user interface as well, and therefore, it’s ridiculously ugly, the frame rate is 30 FPS max (which would be understandable on Switch, but not on PS4!), there were no bug fixes or quality of life improvements, and the multiplayer mode was a bit lacking. The PC port has a small flaw: some things can be tweaked graphically, and it can go beyond what we’ve seen on previous consoles in terms of resolution, but it’s simply not enough to invest in a story where John Marston is forced to hunt down the remaining members of the Van der Linde gang.

Forced because he has nothing left to lose and only wants to protect his family. Part of the package is an add-on called Undead Nightmare, where John has to face a zombie invasion. Of course, this is not part of the canonical story. There are elements in Red Dead Redemption that are timeless, as the art style, the soundtrack, the voice acting all bring something that can stand the test of time (Rob Wiethoff as John Marston is simply fantastic…). But if these were the only things that mattered, there would be no problem, but in terms of visuals, the way the textures look, the way the models look, the way the animations look, for example, it feels very 2010. On an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 at the time, it was top of the line, but since then we’ve gone through two console generation changes. A remake would certainly be too much for Rockstar, because right now they’re probably pushing everyone into crunch to get Grand Theft Auto VI out by the fall of 2025, because they want to release it on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series within a year, and since they can’t really get a lot of money with this game, they’ve treated a port as an afterthought.

Double Eleven didn’t completely mess things up…

Aiming with the mouse and keyboard just feels natural, you can completely customize the buttons. So when the Dead Eye slow-down-time comes in, it’s much more dynamic aiming because you don’t really have the aiming assist like you do on the console. But why is the port not that bad? It can reach up to 144 FPS, supports HDR and up to 16x anisotropic filtering, you can fine tune the quality and softness of shadows, geometry, environment, trees, foliage and vegetation. There’s also FXAA, not to mention two upscalers (AMD FSR 3, Nvidia DLSS 3). There’s also frame generation technology on the “greens” (plus Reflex is supported), native 4K is achievable, and support for wide and ultra-wide displays. Compare that to what we saw on the console. On PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC, the game looks like it’s 2019 on a 4K TV.

Back then, we looked at what the visuals on our Xbox 360 disc would look like on what was then a half-generation console upgrade, the Xbox One X. The 4K and HDR backwards compatibility (beyond 30 FPS) looked graphically about the same on the console as this remaster (?) on PC. That’s the problem. And the title wasn’t a coincidence either: although Red Dead Redemption was released 14.5 years ago, it still costs 50 dollars. The same as on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It’s just a ridiculously high price. He doesn’t deserve that much! It’s cheaper to get a PS3 disc. The Game of the Year Edition from Ireland, postage included, not to mention the VAT, can be obtained for about 40% of that. On the RPCS3 emulator, we can pull up the graphics on a sufficiently powerful machine that can outperform the PC port…

Only for pennies!

Red Dead Redemption is a great game, 9/10. The quality of the remaster is 6/10, and that’s reduced by one point by the price, 5/10. Let’s take an average: 7/10. If you could buy it at a cheaper price, it could be a recommended purchase. But not at this price!

-V-

Publisher: Take-Two
Developer: Rockstar Games San Diego (original) / Double Eleven (remaster)
Style: Western action-adventure
Release date: May 18, 2010 (PS3/X360) / October 29, 2024 (PC)