Red Dead Redemption: First-Hand Preview

Rockstar gives us an early first look at its stunning, open-world wild west adventure, which unlike the Capcom-inherited original, they've built themselves from scratch.

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Besides horses, there are stage coaches, steam trains and other antiquated forms of public transport to ease your passage through Redemption's burnt-out, cricket-chiselled dustscape. You can take naps while aboard to skip the intervening miles, though you'll miss out on the game's incidental attractions if you do.

These range from the sight of the in-game ecology at work - packs of wolves hunting rabbits, or vultures descending to tear at some unfortunate ex-drifter - to classic Wild West scenarios like a stage coach hold-up, a bounty hunter transporting his prize and the odd old fashioned hangin'. Towns are mere hamlets by comparison to the sandbox gaming norm, yellowed arrangements of sticks jutting out of the earth near railway lines and waterholes, but there's still a bundle to see and do. During the demo we passed a stablehand chopping wood, and a man slaughtering chickens - hang around till evening and you might spot them enjoying a shot at the saloon, before turning in for the night. It's not quite up to Fable 2's super-reactive populace, though on the plus side players probably won't be able to get into the knickers of random bystanders by repeatedly giving them a thumbs-up.

Thumbs, indeed, may be notable by their absence if you make a habit of playing Five Finger Fillet, the one mini-game we were shown. Inspired by a real-life diversion popular among Old West frontiermen, it's a button-basher in which you spread Marston's hand on a table and stab a knife into the spaces between fingers as fast as you can. No actual digit loss is incurred by failure, but it's not for the squeamish or lacking in rhythm.

Last but obviously not least, there are some rather gratifying gunfights. Rockstar has never been the fastest draw in console shooting, and the historically consistent roster doesn't have the megadeath potential of the latest handheld artillery, but you shouldn't have tired of Redemption's lovingly crafted carbines, Winchester rifles, sawn-off shotguns and long-barrelled revolvers before the plot winds up.

The gunfights that took place while riding on horseback at high speeds were particularly thrilling - there's something really satisfying about watching enemy pursurers and their horses go flying in the air when you land a hit.

The dynamic cover system and blind fire may be so much old rope, but they incorporate worthwhile lessons from the developer's previous release: much as Niko Bellic could glue himself to the still-rocking wreckage of a napalmed taxicab, so Marston can shelter behind the bronco somebody just blasted down right under him, enabling a free-form approach to cover. Horseback fighting is probably the most exciting proposition, lacking the grace period a virtual motorist enjoys before his engine detonates under fire, but balancing this with greater manoeuvrability. Given the variable skittishness of the game's mounts, aiming from the saddle should be a precarious art indeed when bullets rap the ground nearby.

The build we saw, as the PR bloke put it, "slightly" more complete than GTA4 was when Kikizo first checked out the game in May 2007, with cut scenes and dialogue still to be polished off. The generic dusky electric guitar drone which currently haunts Redemption's canyons will eventually give way to an original score.

Broad questions of mission structure linger - the three missions on show can be summarised as "attack entrenched foe", "on-rails shooting gallery" and "escort the train" - and while we were told you can skin critters for cash, Rockstar's keeping schtum about the rest of the in-game economy. There's also the barrage of question marks that is the multiplayer component. What we do know, however, is that the San Diego team have pegged out yet another jaw-dropping gameplay canvas, tonally redolent of Fallout 3 but with far greater kinesis between character and terrain. A blip Revolver may have been, but if Rockstar can fill in that canvas as masterfully as it has Liberty City, Redemption could usher in the honeymoon of Wild West gaming. -->

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