Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

 

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most character driven single player triple A game I've ever played. It's closest analog is the Witcher 3, but it's better written despite being just as huge. Just like CD Projekt's baby, it'll take you over one-hundred hours to do everything, which I probably don't recommend, unless you like playing poker with NPCs or hunting legendary animals to craft some hideous outfit. Come for the story and atmosphere, poke around a bit with role playing (this isn't an RPG) and then see how many months it takes before you've had your fill. I'm not a huge fan of long games nowadays; I'm too damn busy with life to play every title for one-hundred hours or more, but some games are worth investing time in, just like it's worth it to read the Brothers Karamazov, provided you enjoy character driven fiction.

In Red Dead 2, you play as Arthur Morgan, an outlaw on the run with the Van der Linde gang. Arthur's a great character to play; he ain't a good guy--you'll do some pretty bad things in his shoes, such as beating debtors and robbing households--but he ain't a sociopath either; rather, he's a man of his circumstances, a relic from the old West who knows his time is coming. Other members of the gang, all of whom you'll go on personal missions with, have their own compelling personalities. Hosea is a good-natured con-man who resents the increasingly bloody heists of the Van der Leinde gang, while Micha is a stone-cold shooter who resembles a seventies' serial killer in his hair style and general unhinged demeanor. These characters inhabit a world taken straight from classic spaghetti Westerns. There's one region that resembles frontier Montana; another is basically Texas or Arizona desert; Saint Denis is a New Orleans stand in; the red clay of Georgia is present in a Southern environment. All of these regions are beautifully rendered and inhabited by realistically behaving fauna--hunting is a big mini game that I mostly avoided, although it's well implemented. Fast travel is almost non-existent, so you'll spend a lot of time galloping around on your horse, admiring the scenery. Nothing happens quickly in this game--Arthur saunters about at a realistic human pace rather than a video game sprint--so you're best advised to take your time and enjoy all the artistry on display. One of my favorite quests has Arthur taking a young gang member named Lenny on a drinking escapade that plays out like a drunk's memories--did you and Lenny really dance hand and hand with the entire bar? Did you almost drown a man in a horse trough? Although Red Dead 2 isn't an RPG, you have opportunities to steer Arthur toward a more ambivalent direction. You can chose to give a stranger a lift or rescue a hog-tied woman from a vengeful husband, but you'll still take part in the gang's increasingly desperate schemes. I haven't finished the plot yet, but the warning signs are obvious, and you know that Arthur and his gang's time is limited. As a PC exclusive player, I haven't played the first game, but seeing how this is actually a prequel, that's not a problem. Even at two years old on PC (Red Dead 2 was a console exclusive in 2018), this is a beast of a game at max graphical settings. At 1440p, I'm running it mostly on High settings, with textures and soft shadows set to Ultra, and a couple others set to Medium (Far Volumetric Resolution; Water Refractions), and I'm able to run it at over 60 frames per second. With everything at Ultra, my frame rate drops into the forties. My solidly mid-range system has finally met its match.

If you're looking for a Western with the quality of the Witcher 3's open world, then you've already probably played Red Dead 2. As someone who's never been a fan of Rockstar (the Grand Theft Auto games are too damn cynical for my liking), this game lived up to the hype. Screenshots below (the photo mode is brilliant).