If it were straight-up greatest games of all time - where story, characters, immersion within a given world and everything offered therein mattered equal; then RDR would be number one. It's just that damn good. Still, even though the really big takeaways from Red Dead are the endgame plot-twist and what happens after, getting to that point is one of the most enjoyable you'll ever have. You can literally stop at any point and breathe in the landscape ahead of you - 'every frame is a painting' as they say, with the way the clouds hang in the sky, John sitting proudly atop a shiny black stallion and the ground beneath teams with dust and lizards skittering about being the perfect tribute to the romanticised Old West. For the gameplay Rockstar took the GTA IV cover n' shoot engine and refined it to make sure you could pull off headshots whenever necessary - as well as introducing the brilliant Dead Eye mode that you'll level up across a hefty runtime; forever switching it on to watch bullets perforate enemy eye-sockets in ultra slow-motion every five minutes. Red Dead benefits from having some of the best dialogue ever written across all of Rockstar's games, and it's taking the time to breathe in the vast countryside as John and his company wax lyrical on everything from their respective lives that draws you in and holds you for the duration.
