Never have I encountered a game as pretentious and padded out than Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar Games, the developer who can apparently do no wrong, brings us a prequel that no one asked for, with a world so dense and packed with minuscule details as to be obsessive, and a story filled to the brim with endless cinematics and story beats that drag too long and are repeated throughout its garish 60-hour runtime. It’s mechanics are a dated mix of elements done better by a hundred titles, yet it’s a Rockstar game, so obviously it’s perfect and without criticism. The first question I have regarding the story is this: how am I supposed to empathise with or root for the characters Rockstar have written to be so vile, despicable and bereft of personality or emotion that we just simply want to see them meet their end? For what’s it worth, we play Arthur Morgan, member of a gang of outlaws run by Dutch van der Linde, as he and the perhaps excessive number of members try to find solace in a world that’s evolving. To move on from violence and theft, they must make enough money to escape that life by using violence and theft. The characters feel like walking contradictions, and I liked none of them. The biggest problem with writing a prequel story is that we know what is going to happen. We cannot be surprised by any death, no matter how violent or dramatic, because they simply didn’t exist in the original game. So writing such sombre moments into the end of the story comes off as a little hollow. At least the world looks nice. Everything looks about what you’d want from a 2018 game. It’s a bit too perfectionist for me, with all the pointless details that do nothing but make me wonder how better that time making horse testicles shrink, could be used to craft more interesting gameplay. The details often come across as incredibly self-indulgent and pretentious, seemingly made “just because” rather than to serve the story or gameplay. Then there’s the animations, the feel like working a forklift the morning after a boozy night out. Everything is slow and, what with that problem of having to walk back and forth until the button appears to interact with that cabinet, just makes the game that more cumbersome. I’ll say it outright, the gameplay in Red Dead Redemption 2 is TERRIBLE. The gunplay hasn’t evolved from the first game, which also means the AI hasn’t. Auto-aim is pretty much mandatory lest you be gunned down incessantly while you wrestle with the clunky controls. The missions are linear and follow the usual open-world trope of being punished for even slight derivation from the script. Dutch and the gang rob so many places with such frequency as to become a pastime. Shootouts eventually blur together into a repetitive haze. Nothing in this game is fun. Even killing in the GTA sense doesn’t feel fun anymore, because the law comes after you so quickly it’s barely worth it. At least the voice acting is top notch. Every character is voiced incredibly well, even though some accents fall into that trope in the “gawd daymit” and “yeehaw” sense. Red Dead Redemption 2 shouldn’t surprise me. People have cried and cried for realism in games for so long, that we’re now duplicating our real world responsibilities. I have to make sure Arthur shaves, eats, cleans his guns, brews coffee before drinking it and watching his horse’s balls shrink. It’s tedium done to the extreme, and the constant shootouts, lack of personality or colour in its characters and the stone-cold seriousness of its world make it one big chore.
