Red Dead Redemption

I pop a bullet in her captor to scoop maximum Honour and the eternal gratitude of her father. But, I'm told, if I'd arrived too late and she'd been killed I would still have received some Honour since I'd tried my best to help. If I'd just stamped on her head instead it would've worked the other way, no doubt.

The final playable mission is from later in the game. Marston calls on a shambling drunk named Irish, who knows the location of a Gatling gun he needs for a major hit. The only problem is it's stored deep within a heavily guarded mine. A tense shootout in tight, underground tunnels plays out, before the gun is retrieved and transported out in an entertaining mine cart sequence. At one point, I spot an enemy up ahead laying explosives on the track in my path; a panicked Dead Eye shot misses the explosives completely but kills the guy, while another shot successfully ignites the obstacle at exactly the moment the body lands on it, causing it to shoot backwards spectacularly as Marston and the cart zoom safely through the smoke. Yee-haw!

Of course, this being a Rockstar openworld game, even on a couple of hours' playthrough there's an enormous amount to see, do and speculate upon. A game of poker in the back of the saloon in Armadillo, ends in a ferocious firefight as I get bored, shoot everyone, steal their money and leg it.

Committing a crime in a town will result in you being grassed up to the sheriff, at which point your Wanted rating shoots up. This works like the stars system in GTA. To get the law off your arse, you need to get the hell out of the trouble spot and move beyond the area highlighted on the mini-map. That will lower your Wanted level allowing you to return safely, but won't remove your Wanted status - leaving you vulnerable to bounty hunters. To get rid of that, you can either pay off a fine or acquire a pardon letter.

There's so much more to say. I could talk about the vulture-shooting mini-game; the deliciously cruel potential of the lasso; the bad, bad thing I did in a church; collapsing unconscious in a bar after caning two shots of hard liquor (eerily similar to my own tolerance). And then there's multiplayer, which, according to Rockstar, will be part of the next reveal. I could go on, but like Grand Theft Auto, the joy is in the discovery and individual experiences.

Technically there are still rough edges that need smoothing out. The frame-rate plummets dramatically during particularly intense action sequences, and there are still noticeable bugs. But the rep says the game is basically content-complete, so the San Diego team is now locked-down in polish-and-fix mode.

Before this week, teased by assured demos and typically slick trailers, Red Dead Redemption was perhaps the gameworld I was most looking forward to immersing myself in this year. What little I've now directly experienced hasn't done anything to change that.

It's dangerous to draw broad conclusions for a game of this scale from such tiny samples, and there are many disparate elements here that need to work together to make a compelling, satisfying whole. But the potential at least is clear.

Rockstar has always had the best toys in the sandbox. The promise of an entirely new sandbox to try them out in remains an intoxicating prospect.