14 DAY TRIAL // There was never a man in the West as capable with a weapon as Marston, the protagonist of Red Dead Redemption. Those who are interested in the setting are accustomed to seeing gunslingers who have the sight of eagles and the speed of wild cats, able to draw before their enemy and shoot guns out of hands, hats of heads or buckles of belts.
But none of them can come close to the feats that John Marston, with his Dead Eye ability, which actually puts the player in a sort of bullet time where they can take the time in order to put a well placed shot where they want it or in order to put a bullet in more than one enemy as quickly as possible.
Dead Eye is rarely a necessity to progress but allows for some of the most Western-like battles of Red Dead Redemption. The game even provides some weapons, like the Mauser pistol (how did that one arrive in the early XX United States?) and the Winchester Repeater, the most iconic weapon of the setting, that work so well with the special ability that gamers might actually get to play Red Dead Redemption more like Max Payne, constantly going in and out of bullet time, rather than like flowing in a real-time run and gun kind of shooter. It's useful in terms of taking out enemies but it can detract from the immersion and the feeling that the game works so hard to transmit.
The developers at Rockstar managed to craft a world that is believable and coherent, and further limiting the Dead Eye sequences for the player would have gone a long way towards making it more attractive.
It would have been interesting to link the bullet time to the injuries the player sustained, a good indication of how well they were doing in any battle. Another option would have been to tie it to the weapons, making the best confer less bullet time, as a balancing mechanism. As it is now, Dead Eye is just a world-breaking way of solving any tough fire fight in Read Dead Redemption.