Grand Theft Auto IV vs Red Dead Redemption

Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption are third person both sandbox style action video games, developed by Rockstar North. GTA IV was released on the 29th of April, 2008 and Red Dead Redemption was released in May 2010. Chances are you have heard of the Grand Theft Auto series since there have been many other titles in the series. The story-lines are not connected though so don't feel you need to have played any of the previous games. Red Dead Redemption is the spiritual successor of Red Dead Revolver, a 2004 title. This review will compare the two games and see whether or not Rockstar is moving in the right direction.

Before I talk about my opinions of the games, take a quick look at scores given by various review sites for both games, shown in the table on the right and check out the trailers shown below. As you can see from the table, while both games score very highly, GTA is slightly ahead.

The first point of comparison will be the plot, as this is the strongest point of both games. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you play as Niko Bellic, a Serbian war veteran who moves to Liberty City to escape his past and start a new life in America. He arrives with nothing but the clothes on his back and has only one friend in the city: his annoying cousin, Roman, who owns a cab depot. At first, you help with the family business, but soon get mixed up with the wrong sort of people and, well...then the killing begins. GTA 4 is set in 2008 in a city similar to New York.

Red Dead Redemption follows the story of John Marston, a former outlaw, who left his gang after they left him for dead, to lead a simple life as a ranch owner. However, he is called out of retirement by the government to hunt down and kill the members of his old gang. The motivation: his family will be killed if he doesn't do what he is told. The game is set in 1911 in the Old West.

I won't go into any more detail for fear of giving away too much of the plot, but I can assure you that they are both very good and are, in my opinion, the best feature of both games. They are both quite long, complex and with a few twists here and there. GTA has quite a lot of comedy mixed in with the seriousness. RDR also has its funny moments, but not to the same extent as GTA. I will give the point to GTA IV though because the story is longer, more complex and with has more twists. There are also several choices scattered throughout the game, including multiple endings, although the consequences don't change the course of the game much, other than the ending choice.

Firstly, the main characters. Both Niko, from GTA and John from RDR have many similarities with each other. One a former soldier, the other a former outlaw, both seek to forget their earlier life and start a fresh one, devoid of killing, where they can live the rest of their days in peace. However, they are used to killing and are now at the point where they think nothing of it. You look at them the wrong way and chances are you'll be found a few days later in a river with a bullet in your head. Despite this, both are very likable characters and the games do a very good job at making the player sympathize with both Niko and John's situations. It's very difficult to choose between the two as they are very similar but I'll give the point to John Marston because I like his hat.

Now, on to the other characters in the games. GTA has a wider variety of characters, with gangsters, cops, cab drivers, crazy motor-heads, bikers, drug dealers; all with well thought out personalities and back stories. They all feel like real people. RDR achieves the same richness of character but just doesn't have as much variety. For that reason the point goes to GTA.

It's difficult to say exactly how long the campaign is because it all depends on how happy you are running around killing everything and how distracted you are by side quests. Both games took me about the same time to complete, but to be honest, a lot more time will be spent riding from place to place on your horse in RDR and it seems silly to include this in campaign length. Also, it is a lot easier and a lot more fun causing chaos in GTA so you are more likely to spend longer messing around than in RDR. So, both games will probably take about the same time, but GTA has better reasons for this time consumption so it gets the point. Full completion for both games, like shooting all the pigeons (GTA) or hunting loads of animals (RDR), will take much longer although I can't imagine why anyone would bother.

There is an abundance of side quests in both games. In GTA, there are taxi jobs, stealing cars, and stranger encounters. In RDR, there is bounty hunting, treasure hunting, animal hunting, night watch, and also stranger encounters. There are several others but I won't name them all. To be honest, I never bothered with the taxi jobs and stealing cars after the first couple but the stranger encounters were pretty good. A stranger shows up as a picture of a man on the GTA map and a "?" on RDR and involve a one off mission for a stranger. The stranger encounters in both games were my favourite side quests. The other side quests I did in RDR was the bounty hunting ones; the others were not as fun. However, RDR has a lot of random encounters as well, such as bandit attacks and public hangings. I quite enjoyed the variety of these encounters and this helped to make the long horse rides slightly less dull.

As far as mini games are concerned, neither game really excels. In GTA you can play pool, bowling and a few others. In RDR, you can play poker, blackjack, dice and five finger fillet. I didn't really enjoy the mini games in either game very much, but overall, the point for side quests and mini games goes to Red Dead.

Grand Theft Auto is set in the vibrant metropolis of Liberty City, filled with thousands of citizens roaming the streets either on foot or in a variety of vehicles. Red Dead Redemption is set in a baron wasteland with a few tiny settlements dotted about. Where as Liberty City feels alive, everything feels dead in RDR. You can travel for quite a long time without coming into contact with anyone or anything, for that matter. There really aren't many people or animals populating the desert which can be annoying, especially for some quests which involve hunting certain animals. For one side quest, I had to get 4 or 5 beaver furs and I'm pretty sure even seen 2 beavers throughout the entire game. Also, most of the people you do encounter in RDR either ignore you completely or try to kill you so I'm quite happy that there aren't too many of them running about the wilderness.

The thing is, just being in Liberty City is more fun. Getting into a truck and smashing through anything that gets in your way is hilarious. You can't really get the same feeling in RDR as your horse can't smash anything up except the occasional dog and I actually felt quite bad when I accidentally galloped into and killed a dog who just happened to walk out onto the dirt track at the wrong time.

That's another point for Grand Theft Auto.

I only briefly played the multiplayer for both games so I have a rather limited knowledge of them. The link and video below will explain GTA and RDR multiplayer respectively. I will not be awarding a point to either game for multiplayer.

Red Read Redemption is basically just Grand Theft Auto IV set in the old west. However, one new thing it does introduce is Dead Eye. This is where you can slow time and aim at specific spots on your target's body. It's similar to the VATS in Fallout 3 but you control exactly where you aim in RDR and you will always hit the target. However, Dead Eye is limited so you can't use it all the time. It does regenerate slowly.

A limitation with RDR is that the only mode of transport is a horse, or a donkey if you really can't find anything else. There are stage coaches which can be used as fast travel but there are only a few scattered around at specific locations and sometimes they aren't there, which can be very annoying. GTA has a much better selection of vehicles: cars, motorbikes, helicopters, trucks and boats. Also, there are loads of taxis and trains you can use to get around the city quickly.

RDR has better graphics than GTA, which is to be expected, since GTA is a much older game. The graphics in both games are very good, and definitely help immerse the player into the story.

There are a decent number of weapons in GTA and RDR but in Red Dead, there isn't really much difference between weapons of the same type. For example, there isn't much advantage in changing from one revolver to another, at least not that I noticed. In contrast, the difference between weapons of the same type in GTA is quite obvious, although there aren't quite as many.

There is one major annoyance with the controls in RDR. When on a horse, you have to either tap or hold the "A", on Xbox, button to move faster than a corpse, but in order to shoot, you will have to aim with the right analogue stick, both of which require the use of your right thumb. This means if you try to shoot while on horseback, your horse will slow to a crawl, and your attackers will run circles around you and destroy you. Using Dead Eye, also causes you to stop so you better make sure you get everyone. Shooting out of a car or bike on GTA is much easier and does not require a weird, mutated hand with two thumbs.

One other noticeable problem with RDR is that money is absolutely useless. All you can do with it is buy weapons, most of which you can get for free doing missions; or you can spend it on potions for health and dead eye, which regenerate by themselves so there really is no point to earning money and by extension, side quests have no point as they only generate money.

As you can see from the table to the right, Grand Theft Auto wins by a large margin. Despite my complaints against Red Dead, I still enjoyed playing it through, although this was almost entirely because I was engrossed in the story. I think that RDR is definitely worth a play through although you may want to wait for it to drop in price a little. Of course, multiplayer could be its saving grace although I cannot say.

In my opinion, GTA is by far the superior game and if you don't have it, you should get it sometime in the near future. I have played through the campaign three times now. It is a truly great game. I give GTA 10 out of 10 and RDR 7.5 out of 10.

I hope that Rockstar leaves the western style games alone from now on and go back to the winning GTA formula. Grand Theft Auto IV is my favourite in the series and hopefully they will make an even better one soon.