Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

Simply getting to grips with the game’s (frankly awful) control scheme took me a huge chunk of time. I can’t count the amount of times I pulled a gun on someone I was trying to help simply because the trigger also allows you to talk to people, in context-sensitive situations. Ninety percent of my crimes in the first few hours of the game – and the bounties I consequently accrued – where usually down to mishandling Arthur. Truthfully I didn’t fall in love with RDR2 until I was about ten hours in, when it’s most basic of components began locking into place both in the game world and in my head, as I finally made sense of it all, and I wouldn’t expect everyone to be willing to work as hard as the game asks just to make sense of it. But – once it locked I fell head over heels. It’s a game experience that will likely sully Open World games for me for a while, just like its predecessor did, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

Presentation:

Red Dead Redemption II’s world is simply without equal. Its level of detail and polish is unparalleled in video games, and it helps sell the entire experience as one worthy of getting invested in. I could list all the neat ways the world reacts to you – how animals you kill in the wild will turn to bones over the course of in-game weeks, how rainwater fills your footprints in the muddy streets of Valentine, how civilians will remember crimes they saw you commit, even if the law has absolved you. The game is a smorgasbord of surprises, however, surprises that wouldn’t be right to spoil. I was stunned every time I booted up RDR2 – not just at the beauty of the world, but at how reactive it feels, and how deep its systems run.

The audio is also just as impressive: the voice acting is flawless – warm when it needs to be, terrifying and dramatic at turns, and full of character, no matter who is speaking. The music is also lovely, scoring your slower days with melancholy guitar riffs coming out of nowhere, whilst appropriately bombastic Hollywood scores cut in during gunfights or chase scenes.

As a complete presentation this is Rockstar’s finest work to date – complete in its fullness and synchronicity. Nothing feels out of place when everything is going right – which is why it’s such a shame when things occasionally go wrong. There were a couple of annoying glitches I found whilst playing, one of which took an important character out of my camp for a couple of chapters – a character who, frustratingly, is also a quest giver. I missed those quests entirely, and only found out about it days later when someone told me about some cool antics they’d gotten up to, long after I was willing to reload old saves and try again. A world of this scale is bound to have bugs, and for the most part these are laughable at worse, negligible at best, but when they’re causing me to miss out on content I get upset – especially when the content is this good.

Conclusion:

“Red Dead Redemption II” is a phenomenal achievement in video games – an achievement that other developers will be cursing Rockstar for in the years to come. They’ve set a bar so incomparably high that other games are going to really struggle to compete, and its these kind of watershed moments that push the industry as a whole to be better. You’ll be done with RDR2 in about a hundred hours – a vast stretch of time to be sure – but you’ll be feeling its effects for the next ten years of gaming.