Edge | Red Dead Redemption Review
Silence, broken with a gunshot. It’s the way of things in westerns. Mexican stand-offs, duels at noon, the bandit pursued across the desert; movies teach us that everything ends with a bullet. Rockstar understands this, and certainly understands bullets. Lead in Red Dead Redemption hits hard. It’s a combination of noisy, mechanical guns and, in Euphoria, a physics engine that plays along. Bullets snap heads backwards and rip men from the saddle. GTAIV’s modern weapons spit bullets like angry hornets until a health circle depletes; here, lives end in uncompromising fashion. For the western aficionado, it is viciously accurate; for the fan of wanton sandbox carnage, it is comically frank.
