Review Of Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Perfection 2

To fully appreciate how far this game has pushed the open world action adventure genre, we have to take a time machine back to the year 2000. Angel Studios (who would wind up becoming Rockstar San Diego) working under  publisher  Capcom,  were  working on a secret title. In 2002, Take-Two announced they had acquired the studio and the project went under review from Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games. In May of 2004, Red Dead Revolver was released. It had generally favorable reviews and this eventually got the ball rolling on its successor, Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption was released in May of 2010 to universal acclaim and praise, with many reviewers stating that the environment and graphics were much better than those of games released in the same time frame.  Rockstar San Diego had improved upon GTA IV from 2 years prior in so many ways with their in house graphics engine, R.A.G.E. There was a lot of replayability with the game because depending on the choices you made, you could have different outcomes, also a relatively new thing with video games.

This brings us to Red Dead Redemption 2. Originally announced in 2016, the game is actually a prequel to the first Red Dead Redemption, giving us a backstory as to what happened to lead us to the events of the first game and protagonist John Marston going after his former gang to save his wife and child. RDR2 is set in 1899, in the US but with fictional states. The game is massive. That is one of two main themes in the game, the other being slowing down the pacing. Try as I might, rushing through the game really isn’t doable or even fun. What I mean by this is that Rockstar wrote and designed this game in such a fashion that forces you to “stop and smell the roses.”

To elaborate on that point, I would point to the game’s opening sequence. The situation is dire; one of the gang’s prominent members is dying and there is a wicked snowstorm going on in the middle of May. The leader of the Van Der Linde gang, your gang, Dutch, sends Arthur (who you play as) to find shelter for everyone and you get a sense of both how big the world is, and how unforgiving it can be. Fast forward 2 missions when we had found camp, and I wandered away from there on my horse. The game warned me to turn around and return as I wasn’t equipped to brave the cold. I scoffed at the idea and plowed through the 4-foot snow drifts and my horse quickly keeled over. I succumbed to hypothermia about 15 seconds after my horse had died. I immediately dashboarded so it didn’t save my dumb mistake. 

Nothing will capture your attention to how great this game looks more than the foliage. Well maybe the snow in the beginning of the game, but trees/bushes/etc. are insane in this game. To put this in perspective, God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn have fantastic snow deformations; among the best ever in a video game. Red Dead blows these games out of the water with deformations, and graphics in general. It would not be a stretch to say this is the best-looking game on consoles, specifically Xbox One X. The native 4k rendering really shows both how great the high dynamic range is in the game, and how great the God rays look when the sun or moon is shining through the trees. On the flip side, while the game still looks fantastic on PS4, the way it processes the image to get it to 4K (A process called checkerboarding) really washes out the scene, which is really unfortunate. Again, the game looks amazing regardless of the system you choose, but when you see the Xbox One X vs PS4 Pro, the X wins, and it’s not even close.

Another fantastic attention to detail is the sound in the game. Rockstar hired Woody Jackson, who had done the score for the first Red Dead Redemption, to lend his expertise to giving the game the authentic Old West feel. The ambiance is one of “not new to this, but I’m still in way over my head and I don’t care.” I’ll be the first to tell you that this fantastic, because it gives a sense of life to the game. Sometimes you’ll be riding on your trusty steed and you’ll hear some twanging on the guitar, but then you roll into “Legendary Animal” territory and the tone totally changes. You become uneasy because as I mentioned before, you can die at any given time for any reason (reasons that make sense and not because you fell through the map.) Another wonderful thing was the dialogue. All the dialogue. All 500,000+ lines of it. Yes, you read correctly; FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND PLUS lines of dialogue recorded for Red Dead. You can interact with literally every single person in the game, and not have the same situation play out more than once or twice.

Moving on to actual gameplay, your best chance of succeeding in the game is studying your surroundings and making an educated decision on whether or not you can survive whatever it is you plan to do. You want to take on a pack of wolves? Awesome, make sure you hitch your horse and have enough arrows, or you will have a bad time. (Bullets will damage the pelts that you can either sell for cash or craft new satchels/hats/etc.) You want to take on that gang hideout you found in the bayou? Wonderful. Make sure you have all your snake oil and tonics ready to go or your raid will be cut short very quickly. Random events happen much more frequently than they did in GTA V. For example, you can help criminals accused of heinous crimes escape the law, or you can find yourself on the wrong end of a robbery and if you challenge them and are undergunned, you’ll get very familiar with the “DEAD” screen. It’s the common theme I keep alluding to. The game forces you to slow down and make decisions or it will punish you for not thinking things through.

Another thing about the gameplay is the Honor system. It’s pretty straightforward in how it works, if you help someone get their horse back or return some money, you get positive honor. If you go around treating the world like Grand Theft Wild West, your honor will go into the red and you will eventually be shot on sight even if you aren’t breaking the law. If you’ve ever played the Mass Effect or Infamous games, you’ll have an idea of what it will do for you, both positive and negative. Pro tip: if you want to enjoy the game in the long haul until you finish the story, I’d recommend not trying to max out your meter in the red.

At current time of writing this, I have approximately 25 hours in game and am about 34% to 100% completion. There are a lot of things to do in the game. A lot. Hunting, fishing, stagecoach and home robberies, bounty hunting (A personal favorite) you will have a blast playing the game. There were a lot of complaints online before the game released about how the game would be dead due to the lack of online launching with the game. It was always perplexing to read these theories because there are still a lot of people who like single player games. Rockstar doesn’t really put out bad games. (Their only so-so game to release in the last 10 years was L.A. Noire.) The Grand Theft series has always been well written, and the original Red Dead won numerous awards for its writing; so, the notion that the game couldn’t stand alone with single player for a few weeks was asinine at best. Replayability is definitely here if you want to go for the platinum trophy on PS4 (There is no equivalent on Xbox to my knowledge) replaying missions to meet the objectives to get gold medals is necessary. I personally have the game guide and still don’t have gold on least half of the missions just because the way the missions play out can throw you for a loop the first time or two you play them. Once online releases, it will likely improve on what GTA V brought out 5 years ago. Online was somewhat lame back when we stepped onto the streets of Los Santos, but Rockstar continued to work on the online component and now it is so much different than the launch product. You can make the argument that they did too much but that is a different conversation for a different review. The point being that take the online release with a grain of salt and be patient; Rockstar won’t abandon this game anytime soon.

I can’t praise this game enough. Draw distances are insane and I’ve never seen them like this on a game. I haven’t seen anything pop in due to memory issues. There are some weird control issues with horses and on foot, and sometimes you can’t interact with things the first time and you have to do a 360 and it’ll work without issue. Save some weird interaction issues, the game is very polished. If you like games like Grand Theft Auto V or Just Cause, this is a no-brainer. If you like games in general, this is an easy yes. Only reason you should hold off on the game is if you’re big into FPS and don’t want to pay top dollar for a game that won’t get a lot of your time. This game overtook both God of War and Spider-Man as my Game of the Year, and it honestly isn’t close anymore, as great as those games are. 10/10