Red Dead Redemption is a clear frontrunner for Game of the Year lead primarily by its engaging and huge single player experience. So when Rockstar revealed the details of their big, single player focused expansion, my ears certainly perked up then an eyebrow was lifted. Zombies? Do we really need another zombie game and one that takes place within a very classically styled western landscape? I guess there’s only one way to find out.
Undead Nightmare, like other Rockstar downloadable episodes (The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony), is one serious chunk of content for an already established and well respected game. From the overall aesthetic and tone to the random encounters on the trail, from the bounty missions to even the interface, they’ve gone in and tweaked just about everything you can imagine here. Even the gameplay itself has undergone a change, though not mechanically. If you’ve played the original Red Dead Redemption, you’ll know that you can spend a ton of time hiding behind cover and popping out to shoot some outlaw in the face. Due to the new zombified menace though, if you enter cover, you gon’ DIE. It’s all about running away and getting headshots, many times while using the Dead Eye system.
In the original game, I honestly rarely used Dead Eye. I felt that the standard snap-to targeting was sufficient and was never in a position that really required me to slow things down. Now though, if you’re not using it? Dead. Sure you can snap off a couple skull cracking rifle shots from a distance. But when those undead start swarming and you’re on your heels, if you’re out of Dead Eye meter? Dead. Combine that with severely limited ammo and what seemed like a walk in the park before is now a very tense, and different feeling game.
The story presented is one of nonsense, and everyone seems to know it. There’s a slew of humorous tongue-in-cheek remarks, plenty of self aware dialog, and the same great voicework from John Marston you’ve come to expect. It takes place towards the end of the original game’s campaign in a sort of parallel timeline. From nearly the outset, you’ll see that Undead Nightmare clearly isn’t canon, nor does it end where all of the characters could just shrug it off like it didn’t happen. Basically it goes down like this: Something happens (you don’t know what), your wife and kid get infected as zombies, and instead of offing them you tie them up to go look for a cure. You’ll come across a bunch of familiar faces like Bonnie MacFarlane, Landon Ricketts and that crazy gravedigger Seth Briars while making your way through just about every town in the original game asking the same question: “What the hell is going on?”
Yeah, that’s one issue I had with Nightmare. Not only are you consistently asking the same question over and over, but you’re generally performing the same tasks too. Each town has been overrun by zombies and you roll in to clear them out. To do so, you’ll either approach some survivors and help them out, or just go in guns blazing till every last walker is dead–again. I never felt that the risk of running through a zombie horde just to assist some survivors was worth taking, so instead I used my limited ammo and took them all down from a distance. After suppressing the uprising, the gloomy funk over each locale will lift presenting a more “natural” and serene environment. Due to the stupid nature of zombies, each town encounter doesn’t really change much throughout with the exception of a few different kinds of undead and in different numbers. If you head out and don’t pay attention to towns enough, they’ll become overrun again, so you can never truly save them.
Pushing my complaints aside, the 7-or-so-hour campaign has some pretty interesting and thought provoking dialog in the final mission despite some weak segments during. As an overall package, there’s really quite a bit of content here. The most interesting addition are the mythical creatures, some of which you can tame and ride, and others that you hunt. There’s also a few new weapons to assist specifically against zombies, like the obliterating blunderbus which is loaded with zombie parts. Multiplayer has even been updated to allow for a new hoard mode game type, and a Land Grab mode in which you’ll be asked to protect a major town for a set amount of time.
For ten bucks, you’ve got more content added into Red Dead Redemption than you’ll find in some recently released full priced titles, and certainly more than a lot of the crap $15 XBLA titles out there. Sure, it isn’t all awesome; but Rockstar certainly knows how to handle downloadable episodes and I wish other developers would take a page from their book. Even if you’re not completely sold on the zombie motif, if you’re a fan of Red Dead at all, there’s little reason to avoid Undead Nightmare.
4 out of 5
Originally posted at Evil Avatar.