Red Dead Revolver

Red Dead Revolver brought a third-person western action game to the PlayStation 2, in which the player, as gunslinger Red Harlow, sets out on the trail of the men who murdered his family during his childhood, gradually getting caught up in a web of betrayal, revenge, and his own past tied to guns that once belonged to his father. The game combined fast-paced firefights with the iconic slow-motion Dead Eye aiming mode, which let the player mark multiple targets at once and take them out with a single swift motion — a mechanic that later became the trademark of the entire Red Dead series.

Besides the linear campaign, the game also offered arena battles in Showdown mode and the option to play as several different characters, each with their own weapons, stats, and fighting styles, adding variety to an otherwise straightforward western-shooter concept. Dusty towns, saloons, mines, and desert landscapes were rendered with a real feel for the genre, accompanied by music inspired by classic spaghetti westerns, which, together with the exaggeratedly stylized characters, rounded out the distinctive, unmistakable atmosphere of Red Dead Revolver's western world.

The game had a turbulent development history — it was originally started by Capcom in collaboration with Angel Studios, before Rockstar San Diego took over the project and finished it with its own, more distinctive vision. The result was received as a solid, atmospheric western action game, though it would take its sequel, Red Dead Redemption, several years later to show the full potential of an open-world western concept. On the PS2, Red Dead Revolver remains a well-regarded predecessor to the later major series and a demonstration of Rockstar's shift toward more distinctive action games. For fans of the later, bigger series, it's interesting in hindsight to see just how many ideas and motifs from this smaller title actually carried forward into the future.

Why play it: For fans of the Red Dead series, it's interesting as an atmospheric, if smaller, predecessor in which you can retroactively spot a number of ideas that Red Dead Redemption would later develop to their full potential.