Red Dead Redemption II

If I had to describe Red Dead Redemption 2 in one word, it would be dense. This game is jam-packed with so many systems and things to do, that it can honestly be overwhelming at times. From big things like story missions and train robberies to smaller things like landscape photography, Red Dead Redemption 2 is vast in both scale and scope. Serving as a prequel to 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, this game has you playing as Arthur Morgan, the right-hand man in the Dutch Van Der Linde outlaw gang. The game opens with the gang on the run after a failed heist and finds them trapped on a mountain during a blizzard. Once this lengthy introductory tutorial chapter is finished the game opens up and the true breadth is on display.

As I said before, Red Dead Redemption 2 is dense. There are so many layers to each of the things you can do in the game. On top of the narrative missions, activities such as fishing, hunting, gambling, and a few others are available to do at any time and each has their own intricacies that make for shockingly deep experiences in each activity. For fishing, there are multiple types of lures and baits that attract different fish depending on what type of water body you are attempting to catch fish from. For hunting, there are specific weapon types that you can use to get the highest quality pelts from animals and the necessary weapon type is different for every one of the 100+ animals in the game. For both of these, there are entire economic and gameplay aspects in the selling of high-quality fish, pelts, and meat, or by saving those to use for both crafting and cooking to provide various bonuses for Arthur’s stats. All of these systems lead to one of the few games that I can think of where you could role play as a fisherman or hunter and have a fun and profitable time doing so.

This level of density isn't just relegated to side activities either. In the moment to moment gameplay, there are three stat cores that need to be managed; health, stamina, and dead eye. As you use these abilities, either by taking damage, sprinting, or using dead eye, respectively, the core and meter outside the circle both drain. The fullness of the core affects the rate at which the meter refills. Every consumable item in the game impacts the three cores in various ways. Food will fill all cores to varying degrees, cigars and cigarettes will fill dead eye at the cost of stamina. There is an entire dense system with these cores that sounds like a ton of busy work, but they really aren’t. It’s more of a fill as needed sort of thing as you really never need to go out of the way to manage those things like you would in a traditional survival game. I don’t have any criticisms of the cores system, but I don’t really have much in the way of positives either. They’re just kind of there.

But there are a few other things I do have criticisms for. One of the most obvious issues from the very start is the deliberate animations. Even though I eventually got used to them, every once in a while issues would arise. One specific example is when I was fishing and I noticed a group of bounty hunters rapidly approaching my location. By the time I was able to retract my line, put the rod away, and pull out a weapon, I was already being shot at. While I was able to make it out of that situation, the slow animations made it a closer call than it had any right being. As much of an issue as that can be, it is a small complaint compared to the two major issues I had with my 75+ hours with the game. In Red Dead Redemption 2, there are around 107 story missions. If I had to guess, I would say around 90+ of them were the same ride to a place, have a big shootout, then either ride somewhere else or be left miles away from the next mission marker. Repetitive mission structure has been an issue with every one of Rockstar’s past games, although GTA V was at least good at hiding it. As much as I loved riding around the world fishing, hunting, and photographing the environment, I still always wanted to see where the story would go and how it got there. Then I would do a few missions that were the standard structure I mentioned above. With as good as the story gets in later chapters, it’s a shame that Rockstar still relied on the same exact mission type for most of it. At a certain point, it just felt like I was headshotting dudes on autopilot until the next cutscene started. As I said this is sort of true for most of Rockstar’s games, but in this game it is especially grating because of my other major criticism. Half of this game doesn’t need to exist. Of the 107 missions in this game, 75 or more of them could have been cut entirely and I never would have noticed. The entire first half of chapter 5, which to be fair is a cool diversion, could be removed and the game would be no different. If the entire first part of the epilogue were relegated to cutscenes, I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more than when I was doing menial labor for hours. As much as the high points of this game stand out, there is no denying that it would be much better if someone took a knife to it and took out a bunch of the unnecessary parts.

Despite my criticisms, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an achievement is so many ways. The world is such a joy to explore and there are so many activities that all have their own dense layers of mechanics, that it felt like I was having just as much fun fishing and photographing landscapes as I was robbing trains and getting into massive shootouts. The characters in the gang are so well realized and feel so real that I found myself hanging out at camp just listening to their tales and songs for hours on end. The story is so engrossing that by the end of the game I was rushing back to the mission markers just so I could see what happened next. With everything this game does well- which is a lot- it’s a shame that the things it does poorly negatively impact such a large portion of it.

For the past few months, I’ve been looking for a game in which I could lose myself. Red Dead Redemption 2 not only provides me that experience, it also provided me with maybe the best chill out activities I can think of. If I’m having a bad day or life is taking its toll on me, turning on this game just to go fishing or hunting allows me to just relax for a while. Riding around the game’s gorgeous world has reinvigorated my love of landscape photography, and allows me to go on a photography adventure without having to drive a long way to do so. I could sit here and complain about the design decisions of this game until I fall asleep, then complain some more, but at its core, this game is about freedom. Freedom to ride around taking pictures of pretty waterfalls, freedom to fish and hunt, freedom to rob trains, freedom to hogtie people and throw them off a cliff, freedom to do missions or not do them as I wished. The mission structure of this game may not be great, but there is so much to it beyond missions, that I will keep coming back to this game long past the credits screen. And there are very few games I can truly say that about. Thanks for reading.

Likes: Breathtakingly gorgeous visuals, engrossing story, #content

Dislikes: Mission Structure is repetitive, deliberate animations can sometimes be an issue, half of the game doesn’t need to exist,