Available for: Playstation 4, Xbox One
Reviewed for: Playstation 4
A common archetype in modern storytelling is a protagonist who wants people to love them, but actively pushes them away because they don't know how to handle human contact and have a difficult time expressing themselves. This character typically ends up finding happiness in the form of a love interest who understands that this flaw comes with the package, and this love interest holds the protagonist tightly and says something to the effect of "I won't abandon you." Then the story progresses, and conflict, being essential to a compelling narrative, rears its head. Despite loving the love interest, the protagonist perhaps pushes the love interest a little too hard and for a moment, it seems like the happiness they had is over. But cut to the climax and the final scenes, and more often than not the two reconcile, and though things are a tad bit shakier now, they resolve to take it one day at a time, because they believe their love is worth that. This is hardly the first time I've used relationship tropes to describe my feelings about a game. Back when Bioshock: Infinite was swooping up Game of the Year awards left and right, I likened my relationship with it to an abusive relationship. Bioshock: Infinite kept on doing me wrong, but I kept coming back, trying desperately to love it despite everything I hated about it, and everyone around me was telling me what a great guy Infinite was, so there was no way he could have a nonsensical gobbledygook multiverse story. I try not to use the same party tricks twice, but as I played through Red Dead Redemption 2, I couldn't help but think of the protagonist archetype I laid out at the start of this introduction. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that desperately wants to be loved (in fact, it wants that so much that Rockstar Games forced its workers to work 100+ hour workweeks in an attempt to make it as beautiful and enticing as possible...shade thrown), but at every turn it seems to want to push me away. And like the aforementioned love interest, there are times when it pushes a little too much. However, I deeply love Red Dead Redemption 2, so I've consistently come back and enjoyed myself in spite of some undoubtedly real problems. Every week I listen to Jim Sterling's podcast, "The Podquisition," and in the first week or so after this game released, Jim's co-host, Laura Kay Dale, offered up a bit of advice in regards to playing it: "Don't think of it as a game that you have to get through. Think of it as a world that you're just going to exist in for a while." When I heard this, I couldn't help but be reminded of the archetype I've been talking about this whole paragraph. I had to learn to be still in the moment, and not worry about how my frustrations were hampering my progress. I had to view the game as an experience, not something with a beginning and end. After all, if you go into a relationship with the latter mindset, it's doomed to failure. If you go into it with the former mindset, it doesn't change the fact that there are issues, but it makes it easier to view them as an unfortunate part of something greater rather than something standing in your way. This is likely the longest and least actually relevant introduction I've written in a long time, but I felt I needed to make it clear from the get-go that I loved Red Dead Redemption 2, but that there was no universe in existence where I was going to give it either a 10/10 or Game of the Year. If that's a problem, feel free to scroll down to the comments to call me a Cuck before resuming your typical routine of leaving 0/10 user reviews on Metacritic and other things that people with no emotional maturity do. If not, then allow me to lay out the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year's best-selling title: Red Dead Redemption 2.
Adding to this is the way in which RDR2 presents the time period. When it comes to social issues, the normal Rockstar MO is to loudly and directly make a statement. When making fun of conservatives, Rockstar has things like the "Civil Border Patrol" in Grand Theft Auto V, rounding up anybody who even remotely looks Mexican and saying "they think they can just come here and try to get better lives for them and their families?! Not on MY watch!" When making fun of liberals, Rockstar (again, in Grant Theft Auto V) has things like billboards and radio ads encouraging voters to go out and vote for a bill to ban the nuclear family. No matter who Rockstar chooses to satirize, you'll always know who it is and the reference will be obvious. Not so in RDR2. There are a number of themes this story ends up touching upon that can be considered relevant to the current day, but (to the stomping and whining of many, I'd bet) Rockstar simply lets them exist as a way of painting a picture of the time. One example is a story mission that has Arthur driving and protecting a group of Suffragettes through town to spread the sentiment of equality in voting, and he does so against a jeering crowd of men. I half expected the townsfolk to start chanting "Lock her up," but instead, the crowd's taunts are more to the effect of "this is unnatural" and "you'll ruin us all," the kinds of things I imagine that actual initial opponents of women's suffrage said. There's literally a few story missions you take on for Native Americans who are fighting the federal government because the federal government is trying to start drilling for oil on the reservations (prime territory to make a nod to the Dakota pipeline). But no nod to the current time is made. You know what the result of that is? You know what the result of just letting the time be the time is? You know what the result of not making a statement with a bit of tongue in cheek humor is? Effective emotional impact and more effectiveness as a statement. Watching the US Army screw over the Native Americans for about the millionth time in history hurts a lot more and makes a person think a lot more when they can't feel Rockstar turning around in its chair to do finger guns at them. There are even smaller details that could've been used for Rockstar's normal satire methods. Early on in the game, the gang has a celebration to commemorate the safe return of a kidnapped member. During this celebration, most of the men of the group gather around the campfire and start singing a song. When the song started I was making my way to the campfire, and I could hear the catchy, bouncy beat, but I couldn't hear the words. I got closer to the campfire and I heard a bit of the lyrics: "The Ring-Dang-Do, now what is that?" before being interrupted by another character. When I finally zoned back into the song and started making Arthur sing along, they were at the end of verse two and were just starting the chorus, and I was bouncing up and down in my chair with some kind of moronic cartoon smile on my face. Then the chorus continued and my bouncing slowed and eventually stopped. This was the full chorus:
"The Ring-Dang-Do, now what is that?
It's soft and round like a pussycat
Got a hole in the middle an' it's split in two,
And that's what 'ya call the Ring-Dang-Do!"
The song was essentially about a guy getting lucky. The rest of the verses went on to describe how the father of the woman in the song walked in on the proceedings, kicked her out of the house, and told her to "go an' make your livin' off the Ring-Dang-Do." The final verse was about the specific prices she ended up charging. The men around the campfire were hooting and hollering and laughing the whole time.
Kinda makes you feel uncomfortable, eh? The Rockstar I know would've had a character say something like "Grab 'er by the Ring-Dang-Do" or something like that, but not here. Instead, this little, easily missable moment just serves to paint a picture of the masculinity of the time. At the time, nobody would have thought anything of that song, and it makes the world feel so much more genuine.
There's one last thing that Rockstar's approach to the social climate of the time helps with, and that's the theme I brought up earlier: the battle between American individualism and society. By just letting the time period be, Rockstar cleverly shows off the strengths and pitfalls of both. In individualism you have groups like the van der Linde gang: men and women of all types (European Immigrants, African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, the whole lot) cooperating together and treating each other as equals. But also in individualism you have...groups like the van der Linde gang...people robbing and killing whomever they want. In collectivist constructs like society you have systems of law and order that ensure crimes are met with justice. But also in collectivist constructs like society you will always have institutionalized oppression of some sort, whether it be by race, gender, or leader vs non-leader status. In the individualism the van der Linde gang fights for, women are part of the family, actively take part in the gang's schemes, and take an equal cut of the spoils. In society, women have to beg a bunch of men in Washington for the right to even have a voice. In the individualism that the van der Linde gang fights for, the cycle of violence potentially never ends when a crime is committed against another. In society, those who do harm to others are punished democratically. By just sitting back, painting an accurate picture of the time, and leaving it at that, Rockstar allows everything I've just spelled out to be exhibited without a word. And it's just brilliant.
Circling back to the story itself, however, Dragon Age: Inquisition comes to mind in that RDR2 retroactively makes its last installment's story better. DA:I made Dragon Age II's story feel more purposeful by casting the templar Samson (who in II was just a sleezy side character) in the role of a major villain and making Red Lyrium a natural force of evil. Similarly, RDR2 retroactively gives the original game's story much greater depth by showing us more about the people John Marston will eventually hunt down and sell to the feds. The thing about the original is that I thought all the targets were pretty weak. Bill Williamson was amusing, but not a strong villain. Javier Esquella only showed up briefly. And Dutch van der Linde himself didn't work...maybe just because of that freaking shirt he was wearing (seriously, who thought that that shirt was a good choice for villain design...I think I'm going to include a picture of it for the concluding paragraph). However, in RDR2, we get to see the dedicated, loyal side of Bill Williamson. We get to ride with Javier Esquella and listen to his beautiful voice as he sings Spanish songs by the campfire. We get to watch Dutch van der Linde go from caring leader to total psychopath under the weight of stress. Dutch, who I once made fun of because of his shirt, is now Rockstar's single greatest, most well fleshed-out villain. The shirt he wore in the original is still stupid, but I digress. Even the family dynamic between John Marston, his soon-to-be wife Abigail, and their son Jack is made retroactively better. This is mostly due to the game's stellar writing. Rockstar games are always exceedingly well-written (even when they're being tongue-in-cheek), but even by Rockstar standards the writing in RDR2 is not to be believed. Every character has a unique voice, and the interactions between each unique voice are written so realistically that it's hard to believe the lines were written by professional writers and not average folk just speaking the way they normally would. There came a point where John and Abigail were having an incredibly happy moment, a moment the likes of which we've seen in stories before, but it was written with such sincerity that it had me grinning from ear to ear...but in the moment, I suddenly stopped and felt my heart hurting because I remembered how it all turns out in the end. That's a great example of how this game makes you feel things despite knowing the outcome. Red Dead Redemption 2 is far from just the greatest story Rockstar has ever told; it also makes the Red Dead Redemption canon one of gaming's most well-written and impactful tragedies. This game has serious issues that I'll be getting to in a moment, but credit must be given where credit is due: What an incredible story.
Now I'll touch on one last thing on the story before I go on to talk about the game's shortcomings: the ending. I'm not going to give spoilers for this game, but I will be discussing the ending of the original, so if for some reason you haven't played the original and might want to experience it for yourself at some point, skip to the next paragraph now...right, now, assuming you're ok with continuing, let's continue. RDR2 couldn't possibly hope to outdo the original in terms of its ending. After all, there are few endings as iconic as the one in which John Marston is betrayed by the federal government and goes the way of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid mere days after fulfilling his end of the deal and getting his family back in return. Few endings have stuck with me and many other gamers as much as this one just because of how tragic and unfair it was. All of this is a way of confirming your suspicions: The ending of RDR2 isn't nearly as good as the original. And you know what? That's ok. Like I said, that's an unfair standard to hold the game to even if it's by the same developer. That being said, there are actually multiple endings in this game. I got one of (I believe) 3 possible endings, and the one I got was still really darn good. It may seem like an odd thing to dedicate a paragraph to, but I felt it deserved to be touched on. If you play this game, go into it expecting a good ending, but don't expect Rockstar to raise the bar.
I'd like to take a second to touch on something I said in that last bit: player freedom. Though you don't get to customize your character, Arthur is highly customizable himself. There are plenty of hats and clothing options (though if you don't wear the duster coat, how can you call yourself a cowboy?), and Arthur's hair and beard grow somewhat in real-time. You can let him look like some kind of nightmarish inbred abomination by having his hair and beard grow to their maximum length, you can have him be a mostly shaved John Wayne type like I did, or any combination of lengths inbetween. You can also customize Arthur's weight by either eating a lot or (shockingly) not eating a lot, and either option has gameplay strengths and weaknesses attached. With this customization, however, comes some degree of upkeep. Choosing to shave or have your hair cut in a particular style doesn't mean you get to keep it, as your hair will continue to grow. You can wear what you want, but different outfits are designed for different climates, and if you're ill-prepared for the cold or for heat, you can suffer some negative effects to one of your "cores." You see, you have some incentive to eat food beyond having whatever weight you want. Your health, stamina, and deadeye bars all have "cores" that determine how fast each of these qualities regenerate. Over time, these cores deteriorate, and in conditions you aren't prepared for (such as cold), these cores deteriorate at a significantly faster rate. Eating various kinds of foods restores certain cores, so as I said, you'll need to perform some upkeep. As far as survival mechanics go, it's far from the worst I've seen, but it's still just a little too fiddly and nagging for my tastes.
RDR2 feels unbelievably realistic, and in some cases that's an enormous strength of the game (as I'll go on to describe a little later), but in most cases it's just frustrating. Sure, it isn't realistic to have your horse spawn next to you when you whistle. But it isn't fun to have to stand there and wait for your horse to walk to you in real-time, or worse, have to walk for miles and miles because a mission put you way out of your horse's hearing range. Sure, it isn't realistic that Arthur would be holding all of his weapons on his person at all times. But it isn't fun to have to manually re-equip my weapons every single time I get off of my horse. It wouldn't have been hard to simply program an extra bit of animation as Arthur dismounts where he reaches into his saddle bag to retrieve his weapons. But nope. Unless you equip your weapons while on your horse half a minute or so before you dismount, you'll have to manually re-equip every time, and you dismount a lot in this game. Sure, it isn't realistic that Arthur could feed his horse a sugar cube while riding at breakneck speeds. But it isn't fun to have to slow down to a slow trot in order to restore my horse's health and stamina cores. Sure, it isn't realistic that you wouldn't get a bounty on your head for running over a person with your horse. But it isn't fun to have to go through towns as slowly as humanly possible because you'll get run out of town, have to go to a post office, and pay a fee for ever-so-lightly brushing up against an npc while on horseback. Sure, it isn't realistic that you'd sprint through your camp or through your home. But it isn't fun to have to spend a full minute walking at a snail's pace to get to your shaving kit or your bed. Sure, it isn't realistic that if a person were eating a box of crackers, you wouldn't see them eating that box of crackers. But it isn't fun to have to re-open the radial menu, scroll over to items, manually select "box of crackers," have the menu be closed down, and have to do it all again because the eating animation has to play out. There are so many wrong decisions made in the name of realism, and it makes playing this game feel more like a chore at times. One bit of realism that I actually didn't mind was the gun maintenance. As you use your guns, they start to wear down, and as a result, qualities like damage and accuracy go down. Even at the lowest quality, the gameplay differences aren't at all noticeable, so that's the difference. Gun maintenance isn't required. It's just something that's there for people who really love realism and for gun enthusiasts such as myself, who find it therapeutic to go through the cleaning process. One aspect of realism that I haven't yet touched on is the hunting, but I never did it, so I have nothing to report on that front. But by all accounts, it's the naggiest bit of realism in the game.
More irritating than the realism, however, is Rockstar's utter insistence on wrestling your control away from you whenever it feels like it. Your speed, your ability to control, the freedom you have in the open world, all of it is subject to change whenever Rockstar wills it. I remember early on in the game I had a mission where I needed to take a couple of the women into town in a wagon to start looking for leads on places to rob, etc. I'd already been feeling mighty irritated by the way the game controls (more on that later), so I wasn't in a good mood. As I drove the wagon into the town of Valentine, the wagon slowed down to an absolute crawl. I figured I just hadn't pressed the x button at the right time and the speed must have reset. So I started pressing the x button again to at least move a little bit faster, but the wagon just wouldn't speed up. I started getting more and more irritated, as the objective marker was on the other side of town and we were moving too doggoned friggin slow. I started hammering on the x button, mentally screaming "JustGOJustF***INGGO! It's RIGHT THERE!!!" But it was all to no avail. Either because Rockstar wanted me to hear the rest of the dialogue or because Rockstar just wanted to show off the town (in all its choppy framerate glory...more on that later) on my first time visiting it in a mission, Rockstar said "Nope, sorry, you don't get to play the game the way you want to anymore, you're in my house now, son!" I can't remember the last time I got so viscerally agitated by something so small in a game...and I definitely haven't completely bashed in a button as violently as I did with that x button since I was a kid. Later in the game, there came a bank robbing mission. Arthur, Dutch, and the gang made it in and secured the cooperation of the teller. In a previous bank robbing mission, I'd been instructed to blow the safes open with dynamite. So in this moment, I thought, "right, that first one was a way of tutorializing how to rob banks, let me get out the dynamite!" I equipped the dynamite, blew the safe open, and started trying to loot the contents...but I couldn't. No prompt came up. "Great," I thought, "a bug." But it turned out it wasn't a bug, I'd just jumped the gun a little, and I was actually supposed to wait for the teller to call out the combination. So then I got a prompt on the safe to crack the code...even though the safe no longer had a door and I could see the money inside. So Arthur crouched down, put his hands on the air in front of the safe like some kind of moron, turned nothing to the right until a click came out of the ether, turned nothing to the left until a click materialized from the matter in the air, turned nothing to the right one last time and behold, for I have delivered upon the sons of van der Linde a click so that they may prosper, I am your God. That one wasn't irritating, per se, but it did get an eye roll out of me. Like, come on, they teach you to rob banks by blowing up the safe, but the second they change their mind they hard code it so that the bank can't be robbed except with a combination? A smart developer would've had Dutch ask Arthur, "You wanna blow the safes or make this fool talk?" and leave the possibilities open. But nope. Player freedom schmayer schmeedom. I want to emphasize that I didn't particularly care how we robbed the bank, it's just ridiculous that I blew open the safe and the game didn't pick up on it because the mission was that linear. There were a couple of missions in which I couldn't actually steer my horse. I had to make it move, and I could steer it a little bit, but the game would essentially railroad me down whatever path it wanted. This was annoying every time, but then there came a mission that ended with Arthur and friends fleeing from the US army on horseback through the forest. There was a tree in my way, so I was trying to steer around it, but instead the game simply had my horse turn a liiiitle bit so that it barely missed the tree. It didn't take into account the direction I aimed in or anything. In that moment, I thought "If it pleases the crown, may I please just play the game, please?" It's just bizarre to me that Rockstar insists on wrestling control away for small things like these.
There's one last thing that's more fiddly than it needs to be, but it doesn't fall into either of the previous categories and is less about poor decisions and more about poor implementation: the controls and the handling. Rockstar hasn't learned its lesson after years upon years of the same problems. I'm sorry, but if you have to mash a button in order to run at full speed (and yes, you can toggle to just pressing it once to run, but you still have to mash to run the fastest), your game is undeserving of a 10/10. So that's still a problem, and the classic Rockstar character clunkiness hasn't gone away. Arthur consistently turns too far so you have to practically make him dance in order to position him the right way so he can pick up a can of beans. This clunkiness is especially bad in combat, as Arthur will turn too far and accidentally take cover right in the line of enemy fire instead of behind the rock you tried to make him hide behind. More often than not, my deaths were caused by Arthur not doing what I told him to and not taking sufficient cover, not doing what I told him to and moving to cover too slowly, or not doing what I told him to and leaping on top of cover when I specifically pressed the "take cover" button. It was never bad enough to make me rage quit, but it was enough to make me audibly grunt and groan with anger. Furthermore, the conversation button is the exact same as the "aim gun" button. By default it's conversation, so unless you consistently ride with your weapon drawn (because if you don't do that you'll unequip them and put them in the saddle bag because realism), if you're ever ambushed on horseback, you're dead. Every single time I got ambushed on horseback, I'd press L2 to, you know, aim my gun like the kind of situation where bullets are flying at me demands, realize my gun wasn't drawn, press R2 to draw the gun way too slowly (oh sorry I mean realistically), and die. Every single time it would go as follows: I would try to start firing back, think "pulloutyourgunPULLOUTYOURGUNPULLOUTYOURF***INGGUN oh I'm dead, great," count my losses, and hope I didn't get ambushed again later on. Another time I saved a man from a group of ruffians who were firing on him, he came up to thank me, and I promptly aimed my gun at him, causing him to fire back and causing me to have to kill him...all because the button I was trying to use to say "no problem" was the same button as the one to rob him depending on the context. Just stupid.
*sigh*
Look, it's here where Laura Kay Dale's bit of advice really helps. All of the instances I've described where the internal dialogue involves enough swearing to make my late Grandfather say I'm being excessive came before I started taking that advice to heart. On the other hand, the instances where the internal dialogue is more "if it pleases the crown" came afterwards. These fiddly bits never go away, but a stupid in-game death isn't as annoying if you don't view it as something standing between you and the credits. Saying that a game's completely moronic and ever-present problems aren't quite as bad if you just pretend you aren't playing a game is faint praise indeed, but the impact is actually substantial.
Secondly, some of the best moments I experienced in this game were the random encounters. Typically random encounters in Rockstar games piss me off. They'll pop up right as you're trying to make your way to the next mission and interrupt you, sometimes sealing off missions for a while (in the case of GTAV, anyway). However, the random encounters here are actually quite varied and compelling, and some yield rewards. For instance, early on in the game I came across a stranger who had been bitten by a snake and needed medicine. I gave him medicine, and he went about his business after profusely thanking me. A couple of hours later I ended up in a nearby town, and that stranger was sitting in front of the gun shop. He saw me, stood up, and pointed me out as the guy that saved his life. He then told me to head into the gun store and buy something on his dime. So I did just that, went inside the gun store, and had a brief conversation with the gunsmith about that stranger and the situation before picking out a brand new pistol at no charge. Even when there isn't any benefit from these encounters, the extra bits of lore they provide are sometimes great. I was galloping through the great plains at one point in the dead of night, and I came across a stranger sitting at a campfire, obviously drunk. Curious, I steered my horse off the road and went to say hello. The stranger beckoned me to sit with him by the fire. I did so, and we sat in silence for a little while (no ambient music or anything, just the crickets and sounds of nighttime). Finally he finished his bottle of whatever liquor he had and said he had incredible secrets that he could be persuaded to share in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. I was intrigued, thinking I might be given the location of some grand treasure or something like that. So I gave the man a bottle of whiskey and prepped my ears. I want to take a moment to emphasize the silence. Again, no background music. Just the crackling of the campfire and the chirping of crickets as these two people who had never met had a conversation in the dead of night. The stranger started talking about how he had worked at a prison camp where the government held Native Americans when he was younger. He said that they'd killed some of their prisoners, but some of them had died slowly. As he talked, he gradually took more and more swigs from the bottle. His tone started shifting as he talked about how the job paid well, but the money didn't last nearly as long as the memories of the atrocities he'd committed. The interaction ended with the stranger tearily saying he could still see his victims' faces clearly all these years later, then declaring that he was going to rest his eyes a little bit, and seemingly drinking himself to death in front of me. This moment could've easily been missed, but because I decided to indulge my curiosity, I got to experience a character who talked like he had something to share but just needed somebody to confess to, an extra little bit of lore about the world, and a heartbreaking side story. Not all random encounters are so heavy, but nearly all of them are worthwhile to participate in.
Another positive to touch on is...drumroll please...there's only one shepherding mission! That's right, remember the absolute worst part of the original game? You only do it once here, it's more intuitive, and it just exists as a tutorial to say "hey, you can rustle livestock."
One last thing, there are, in fact, opossums in this game. They're the world's greatest animal, so I was glad to see them. I drew a little circle in the screenshot I took and used as the picture for this section, so maybe you can see it!
All that being said, however, I do have to say that Red Dead Redemption 2 is Rockstar's shoddiest technical package to date. That still puts it leaps and bounds above the quality of other AAA releases these days, but RDR2 just isn't as polished as past titles. It's almost as if the people making the game were forced into 100+ hour workweeks without time off and with no ability to take sick leave, conditions under which things are incredibly likely to slip through the cracks. Hmmmmm. But I digress. Like I said, there aren't any texture pop-ins and the draw distance is incredible, but the framerate starts sputtering and lagging behind (not unlike a Rockstar employee 99 hours into his 100+ hour workweek that he'll be fired from if he gets sick) any time you enter a town. It doesn't matter which town or how large the town is, if you enter one, the framerate dips for a little while before correcting itself. Then there's a decent assortment of bugs. At one point I was minding my own business riding through the countryside, and all of a sudden I got a wanted notice stating that my "crime had been reported." I hadn't killed anyone even in self-defense since the last story mission, and there was nobody else around, but suddenly I had a $10 bounty. Another time, I briefly got caught in a falling animation loop, and yet another time I got stuck between two horses and only escaped by furiously pounding the x button and managing to break through. I once (and admittedly, only once) had to restart a story mission because the button to investigate a clue never showed up. All of these are relatively small when compared to the kinds of bugs we see in other AAA titles, especially considering that there weren't any crashes (hard or soft), no game breaking bugs, and no audio errors, but they still need to be mentioned.
The world is correct to say that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a great game, because it objectively is. However, I feel that people have had their blinders on when discussing it. I think that people have wanted it to be good so badly that they needlessly brushed off the serious issues that the game has. The thing is, a game doesn't have to be a 10/10 to be worth buying at full price and investing hours of your time into. A game can have major issues and still be worthy of love (I hold that Oblivion is the best game ever made, so trust me, I practice what I preach here). But returning to the theme from the introduction, love doesn't mean pretending flaws don't exist. It means acknowledging flaws, helping the other party to grow wherever it can, and continuing to love in spite of where it can't. I loved my time with Red Dead Redemption 2. The story was phenomenal and phenomenally written, the characters were lovable, well-acted, and well-animated, and this saga has been strengthened as a whole by this game's existence. The gameplay is mostly solid, the easily missable encounters are compelling, and the world is beautifully realized and rendered. The sense of setting and social themes are all made better by Rockstar's choice of subtlety over commentary. However, aspects of the game are far too fiddly to be enjoyable. Sometimes this fiddliness is a result of a decision made in the name of realism, sometimes it's a result of Rockstar wanting you to do things its way, but it doesn't go away. Furthermore, RDR2 just doesn't have the same level of technical polish we've come to expect from this developer. However, if you play RDR2's way, if you put yourself in a headspace of existing in a beautifully realized open world adventure, I think you'll find yourself having a fantastic time.
Let us review:
Overly fiddly -1
Technical issues - 0.3
The final score for Red Dead Redemption 2 is...
8.7/10 - Great (formerly "Quite Good" on my scale)
Great work, Rockstar, great work
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