Because it’s Halloween, like any responsible and correctly-functioning adult, I’ve been looking for spooky video games to play. I am also a massive wimp (I genuinely think if I’d had a chance to play P.T., the interactive Silent Hills teaser, I’d have actually died), so I was on the hunt for a spooky game that didn’t endanger my sleep/underwear.
Thankfully, Rockstar released a remaster of its original cowboy sim, Red Dead Redemption, for PC just in time for Halloween – and it includes Undead Nightmare – one of the best game expansions ever made. I remember playing it on the PS3 back in the day and loving the shlocky B-movie vibes, and finding the combination of the Wild West and a zombie invasion to be so good that I imagined the game would create its own sub-genre.
Now, 14 years later, I’ve been given the perfect chance to revisit the classic game without having to dust off my PS3 – so I installed it on my Asus ROG Ally X handheld gaming PC and settled in for an All Hallows' Eve… eve (I played it the day before Halloween, basically) session of cowboys and zombies – and I was shocked, surprised and yes, even a little bit scared.
The devilishly good
Let’s start off with the things that really impressed me. After a nightmarish installation process (more on that in a bit), the fact that I was playing a game that, despite being almost a decade and a half old, was as sprawling and ambitious as Red Dead Redemption on a handheld device was incredibly impressive.
I started off running the game at 1080p and with graphics set to ‘medium’, and was very impressed with the performance. However, at this graphics setting, the age of the game was pretty evident, especially with low-res textures and surfaces.
So, feeling more ambitious, I upped the graphics to ‘Ultra’ and… well, I quickly lowered them again. At ‘Ultra’ the game became very sluggish to play as the frame rates dropped, but at ‘High’ there was a good balance between visual quality and performance.
Sure, it was still obviously an older game, and controls remained a bit sluggish – but this is a Rockstar game, after all. Controls that feel like you’re wading waist-deep through particularly bloated zombie guts is all part of the ‘charm’.
Of course, I could always play the game on my RTX 4090-equipped gaming PC and whack the resolution up to 4K (or maybe even 8K…) and graphical settings to ‘Ultra’, but I really loved the idea of being able to play the game comfortably from the couch or snuggled up in bed as the dour October-in-England weather battered my windows from the outside – and the Asus ROG Ally X offers me the perfect chance to do that, being a powerful handheld gaming PC device that’s as easy to hold as the Nintendo Switch, and yet has some of the most powerful components you can find in a handheld right now. As much as I still love my Steam Deck, I felt that the ROG Ally X would give me a better gaming experience.
And there were times when the game looked gorgeous. Riding over the plains with sunlight breaking through the clouds, or slowly riding over a bridge that’s on fire as zombies rampage through a town at night, manage to be extremely atmospheric despite the age of the original game and the small screen of the ROG Ally X.
I really should give a shoutout to the teams at Rockstar and Double Eleven, which ported the game to PC. After the mess that was the GTA Trilogy remaster, my hopes for Red Dead Redemption Remastered were certainly tempered, especially as this was the first time the game would officially be playable on PC.
So far, I’ve found it to be a faithful recreation of a classic game that has been modernised where necessary, but doesn’t compromise – or disrespect – the original game.
It’s also a testament to the hardware of the Asus ROG Ally X that the game runs so well on a handheld. Perhaps most surprisingly, however, I was perhaps most impressed with the speakers of the ROG Ally X. Despite the two speakers being built into the ROG Ally X, the audio quality was excellent and the stereo separation was wide. It meant that the growls of zombies and screams of victims seemed to come from all around me – an immersive touch that is remarkable considering the hardware.
And as for the game itself – well, it’s considered a masterpiece for a reason, and that includes Undead Nightmare. As it’s a standalone story, you can dive straight in, and I was reminded not just how fun Undead Nightmare is to play, but how tense and scary it could be – and how funny it was as well.
There were plenty of creepy moments (those weird scampering zombies that crawl towards you are particularly distressing), but that was balanced with a knowing wink and a nod to classic zombie movies – and dialogue that is genuinely laugh out loud funny, showcasing Rockstar’s brilliant writing and the awesome performances from the games voice stars. It made me wish that Rockstar would go back to releasing more than one game per decade.
The demonically bad… and downright ugly
While there were plenty of pleasant surprises while playing Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare on the Asus ROG Ally X, there were a few bad ones as well.
Some of the graphics, especially when it comes to textures, reminded me of why I rarely return to games from this era. I’ll happily play 2D classics from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, but I find the PS1 – PS3 era (including the N64) to be rough when it comes to a lot of 3D games.
Having the game running at 1080p on the 7-inch ROG Ally X’s screen was a good move by me I think (humble brag), as blowing the game up to my 77-inch 4K OLED TV (not-so-humble brag) would make the lower polygon counts and texture resolutions much more noticeable.
It also reminded me how sad it is that we’ll never get an Undead Nightmare-like expansion for Red Dead Redemption 2 – or even a remake of the original game within its sequel, despite the entire map being included. Red Dead Redemption 2 remains one of the most beautiful games ever made, and I’d have loved to have seen what the original game and expansion would have looked like in the newer engine.
It also made me sad that we might never get a single player expansion of Undead Nightmare’s calibre from Rockstar ever again. Since GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, it appears that Rockstar isn’t interested in single player DLC, with its focus on online campaigns instead.
And then we get to the ugly – and the nightmare that is using Windows 11 on a handheld device. As I’ve moaned about before, including in my Asus ROG Ally X review, Windows 11, an operating system designed for laptop and desktop PCs, is manifestly unsuitable for handheld devices. Windows 11 needs a mouse and keyboard to work best, and its led to manufacturers like Asus making their own touchscreen and controller-friendly interfaces for launching games – but these just sit awkwardly over Windows 11.
Installing Red Dead Redemption Remastered on the ROG Ally X highlighted just how awful Windows 11 is for this kind of thing. Launching Steam from the Armoury Crate interface was easy enough. I selected to install the game from within Steam, and after a quick download, a screen came up saying ‘Installation Initialising’. I left it for a while. And then a bit longer. And longer. Eventually, I figured out something wasn’t right – swiping up from the bottom of the screen showed the Windows 11 taskbar and I could see another app had opened. Clicking that, it was a window asking to install the Rockstar launcher. So I had to click through several windows (all of which were small and fiddly to control with just a touch screen). After installing that… I then had to log in to my Rockstar account. After finding my details, I then entered them in, painfully slowly by tapping the onscreen keyboard.
Another window appeared, this time asking me to check my emails and enter a two-factor code, which again I had to do all while awkwardly tapping buttons that were too small.
The whole thing was incredibly frustrating, and while having to download a new launcher and log into yet another account just to play a game I own on Steam, isn’t unique to either this game or the Windows 11, the process was made more annoying with the various windows and messages that popped up. For anyone looking for a console-like experience where you can just load up a game and play, Windows 11 just can’t offer that. It’s a real shame.
It meant that on a night of Western zombie slaying, having to deal with Windows 11 on a handheld device was by far the scariest part. And that’s just not good enough.
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