Red Dead Redemption 2

Well it took me a couple of months to get through this beast of a game but I’ve finally completed the main quest and I’m ready to give my two cents on it (bear in mind that I haven’t played the first Red Dead so I’ve essentially gone in blind). Now Red Dead Redemption 2 is a cinematic action game that takes place at the turn of the century in 1889 and just as the Wild West was being phased out by law and order. The story follows Arthur Morgan, a gunslinger part of a gang of outlaws who’ve found themselves on the run from the law ever since a botched robbery took place. Now Rockstar Games is the kind of studio that really favors cinematics and realism over game-play fluidity so no doubt this is a game not really suited for an old school gamer such as myself, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating the lengths the developers and writers took to flesh out this massive and gripping story.

Arthur Morgan is the kind of protagonist that finds himself portraying the sceptical straight man amongst a diverse group of wild and zany gang members, he’s also the right hand man of the group’s leader; Dutch van der Linde, a noble dreamer who sees his sanity dwindle as his plans repeatedly fall flat on his face. Initially Arthur and the supporting cast didn’t really jump out at me, as the first half of the game showcases a lot of the typical writing tropes and archetypes of many AAA games these days. It’s really around the second half when the stakes gets raised, when the gang’s internal relationships get increasingly challenged, and when the moral buttons get pushed that Red Dead 2’s story really starts to take off. I began to feel sympathy for Arthur and some of the other cast members, while they did a great job of vilifying the game’s main antagonists (but I won’t spoil anything here). Even a lot of the side content presented interesting story elements, and some optional missions even get called back to in the main story or influence how the final chapter plays out.

My complaints with the main story range from again; the incredibly slow pacing in the first half of the game (and the epilogues for that matter), to the practically pointless honor system that only really impacts small details surrounding the final mission (yet the overall conclusion remains the same), and a few odd writing decisions also pertaining to the final mission that I can’t spoil, but I’ll just say that a few baffling circumstances arise. That said, I was extremely satisfied with Arthur Morgan’s conclusion, they really nailed his journey through redemption and repentance from his life as a murderous criminal, hell it even made me tear up a few times. There’s also some mixed opinions surrounding the game’s 5th chapter which sort of acts like an isolated arc out on an island in Timbuktu, although it felt like a bit of a random inclusion into the game’s story I didn’t mind it as much since the missions embedded within it are very action packed and adrenaline pumping (even if it felt like we were taking a break from Red Dead to play a chapter ripped out of Uncharted).

Okay enough about the story, I should talk about the game-play. I’ll start off by saying that I hate how Arthur feels, he’s incredibly slow and clunky (his walking speed in camp makes me want to commit suicide), small precise movements are made weirdly difficult thanks to his absurd momentum and walking animations, meaning it can take several moments before you’re able to approach an object to interact with it especially if the object is small or amongst several other objects. Having to spam X to run was a bad decision and must be remedied in the control menu by switching to toggling X. Horse riding on the other hand feels a lot more natural, but pulling off sharp turns or navigating through cluttered areas can be a nightmare since your horse will just flip over when colliding with waist-high objects even at moderate speeds. The gunplay is fine, it’s mostly just driven by an auto aim system and landing head shots is a matter of slightly scrolling up after you’ve locked onto an enemy, yeah it’s a bit brain dead but it works I guess. The cover mechanic was a bit of a pain to get a handle off, sometimes Arthur wouldn’t hide on the right side of the object I wanted him to take cover behind, and thanks to his stupid sense of movement in general; I’d sometimes jump right on top of the object I wanted to hide behind allowing everyone to shoot at me like a sitting duck.

The game’s story missions are very linear and most follow a very strict format of; follow person to location, do a small task in location, then have a shootout and escape the area. Variation in the story content was badly needed, but a lot of the game’s side content helps compensate for that by allowing you to do lots of other activities like hunting, fishing, poker, dominoes, robbing trains, collecting bounties, hijacking stagecoaches, and even experiencing shows and short films in various town theatres. Even exploring the game’s world can be a treat in and of itself, since events can be sprung onto you randomly as you travel from one place to the next. The game’s wanted system can be annoying sometimes, since you can be charged with crimes for the littlest things (even if it was brought on by an NPC), witnesses may assume you’ve murdered someone even if you didn’t, and cops will show up ridiculously quickly after a shootout in the main story missions preventing you from looting the surrounding area for goodies.

There’s a heck of a lot more I could talk about with a game this massive, but I feel like I’ve touched on the most important elements. Overall this is a giant mixed bag of a game; on the one hand I really appreciated the VERY beefy and fleshed out story, the tasteful writing and characters, the technically impressive cinematics, the detailed and spontaneous open-world, and the diversity of the side content. But on the other hand I think the quality of life as far as the game-play is concerned was greatly impaired by the game’s “realism” to the point where basic mobility was constantly frustrating, the combat was mindless, missions tended to feel repetitive, and some of the systems (like the wanted system) felt underdeveloped or even unfair at times. I think my overall experience was positive, since something about game’s story and world kept drawing me back in throughout the 80 hours it took to complete this thing, but holy Christ is this ever a testament to the glaring flaws of modern AAA game development.