Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games

Red Dead Redemption 2 provides an immersive experience that's second-to-none

I'll start off by saying that, although I do consider this game worth playing, and though it has had clear effort and care put into its development, it is certainly no masterpiece, and I fought regular frustration with it. I was surprised to see so many gaming publications and fans alike score it a perfect 10 because, in my opinion, it is severely flawed. It's a good open world game with stunning detail, it tells one of the best, most emotionally devastating and bittersweet stories in gaming history with great characters, but outside of that, I actually found it frustrating and shallow.

The open world is incredible and full of remarkable depth. From random events to NPC encounters, a staggering amount of detail has been injected into this world by the developers who really did a fantastic job. There's a stunning amount of handcrafted detail to stumble over that will more than satisfy most fans of open world games, so if that's your thing, go ahead and buy Red Dead Redemption 2 without regret.

I've seen plenty of praise for the graphics, which I think this is mostly due to the fantastic lighting engine. Volumetric lighting and how it reacts with fog and geometry looks incredible, god rays are marvelous, and the glow that permeates the setting from light sources serves to do a lot of heavy graphical lifting here. It's really something to behold, and combined with the fantastic soundtrack it serves to add a lot of atmospheric heft to the experience. This feeds into the high quality and immersive nature of the open world, one of this game's strengths.

I enjoyed how the game gave me hidden side quests to find in the form of Stranger encounters littered through the world. Many of these grow to add detail to the setting and its people and have lots of writing depth to them, despite being little more than random encounters triggered by the player entering a certain area. Despite the strong open world, this experience is at its best during its thrilling, affecting main story missions and when you're getting to know the very well-written side characters in the Van Der Linde Gang via taking on camp side quests, usually in the form of coach robbery, hunting, or fishing with them. However many of the main story missions—although they're often very compelling narratively—are so on-rails that deviating from the set mission path will often lead you to a fail state outright and push you back to a checkpoint, and the checkpointing system is often poor. For one stealthy mission in Chapter 4 I was forced repeatedly to view the same full minute-long wagon ride into the camp over and over, as the game failed me for trying to sneak into a roof window. I later realized the game fails you if you go off the 1st floor, and you're expected to sneak through the ground level. This kind of railroading stifles player agency regularly and pulls you right out of the experience.

Despite these flaws, single player is a strong narrative with good characters, twists and turns that mostly feel earned and are emotionally impactful, well-written dialogue, and fantastic voice acting and performance capture. Dan Houser and the writing team at Rockstar are at the peak of their abilities. This is a well-told story which makes important points about American exceptionalism, frontier expansion, human civilization, and morality. It's all helped along by the fantastic performance of the cast, particularly the player character's actor, Roger Clark. A fair amount of the side content is also quite compelling, but a lot of it does unfortunately fall into typical open world game territory, which leaves you feeling like you're doing tedious busywork for NPCs whom you just met and don't care about. Although I admittedly loved some side quests, I began skipping side content later in the game after one too many "collect 5 bounty posters" type missions, which was very disappointing.

The slow, laggy way that both the player character and horses control is awful, unfortunately. There were several extremely frustrating moments during combat in which my character would become stuck either on a piece of in-game geometry, or running in a loop, which led to some frustrating deaths. Additionally, inventory management is an unintuitive chore, and you're never quite sure which weapon Arthur considers his default, as you're constantly drowning in dozens of them since the game doesn't allow to equip a main, nor sell those you aren't using. There's something very wrong about a game in which you're a wild west gunslinger, yet half the time you attempting to draw your pistol quickly (by holding right mouse button, then clicking left mouse button), the game fails to respond at all and you stand there like an idiot as you get shot to death. These clunky bugaboos ensured I never felt fully in control of the player character, and some of the game's fantastic immersive quality was lost as a result. I regularly felt frustrated from moment-to-moment while playing this game.

Despite the compelling main quests and companion quests, this game also features some of the typical open world bloat that I've come to despise in games of this sort. I never want to hunt animals for crafting components, for example. Not out of any sort of animal-rights motivation, but because it's never been compelling for me to go out into the woods and spend hours trying to find the right damn animal to obtain materials from. I've also long despised hunting for treasure using only hand-drawn maps—another sin this game commits. I had a particularly poor experience finally finding a treasure location, only to open the hidden compartment and receive another map to decipher: What a kick in the groin it was spending 15 minutes trying to scale Caliban's Seat to complete the first treasure map I purchased, battling bad platform jumping and awkward walk/run controls and falling a couple of times only to finally find it and realize it was ANOTHER TREASURE MAP. This is the kind of boring, time-wasting side content I can't stand, and I was disappointed to see it in yet another open world game which is an otherwise fantastic experience.

Additionally, the camp upgrade options are little more than window dressing. Beyond gaining fast travel capabilities and gaining new satchels, there's almost nothing of value to be gained by upgrading your camp, which is a huge missed opportunity. Because the characters are so compelling, the acting is so great, and the dialogue is so carefully crafted, I found myself wishing for an opportunity to impact the lives of the gang around me by putting some of my hard-earned wealth into the camp. It's prohibitively expensive to do so, and you gain little in-game reward for it other than certain cosmetic flourishes. If I could do it again I'd have instead poured that money into my own clothing and horses. It's simply not worth it, and before long I began ignoring the feature entirely.

There are also several sorts of minigames available, such as poker or five finger fillet, but most of these—although they received obvious care in development in the form of unique animations and lines for the NPCs against whom you play—ended up feeling obviously rigged to me. The worst of this is during the poker game in Saint Denis, which one player always just stomps and led me to think he was cheating in-game. But no further explanation is available, so it instead feels just like he was programmed to take all of your money by winning lucky hands constantly. I gave up on most of the minigames after experiencing this.

Red Dead Redemption 2 lives or dies on its being a great story and a deep, atmospheric world. If you love immersive, engulfing video game worlds or want an amazing story, you're going to love it. If you want great shooting or compelling gameplay in general, you're likely to end up frustrated.

⭐⭐⭐⭐