Red Dead Redemption 2 review:
After eight years in the making, Rockstar has delivered the vast and highly-polished game everyone hoped for. But just because it has a perfect finish doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be great
Red Dead Redemption 2 does not start off how you would expect. There are no endless vistas of scraggy desert, broken up by the occasional cactus. No vultures circling overhead or decrepit ranches to explore.
Instead, there’s snow. A lot of snow. The year is 1899 – 12 years before the events of Red Dead Redemption – and Dutch Van der Linde’s gang of ill-mannered misfits are trudging into the mountains after a disastrous heist in the nearby town of Blackwater. The snow is waist-high and still falling in a thick, heavy blanket. A far cry from the wide-open panoramas of the last game, you can barely see the hoof prints your horse leaves in the snow a few metres behind you.
The story is just as bleak. Right from the off, you find that one of your fellow gang members hasn’t survived the journey and another – John Marston, the protagonist from the previous game – has been savaged by wolves and needs rescuing. Food is scarce and the law is always just around the corner. If the Van der Linde gang is going to survive in the barely-tamed west, then they’d better stick together.
You play as Arthur Morgan, a grizzled and emotionally-stunted enforcer who has been with the Van der Linde gang since childhood. As with John Marston, Morgan’s moral universe is painted entirely in various shades of grey. “We’re bad men, but we ain’t them,” he says after a run-in with a rival gang. Morality runs through the entire game, even doing small favours for a passerby can boost Morgan’s honour rating, earning him discounts in certain stores. At other times, the moral choices are more stark: kill a trio of hostages or let them go, help an old friend out on an errand or turn away.
It’s only after a few hours of gameplay, however, that Red Dead Redemption really opens up. After trekking through fictitious East Grizzlies mountain range, the Van der Linde gang sets up camp and Dutch lays out some ground rules. “It’s time for everyone to earn their keep,” Dutch tells his assembled gang members. This means contributing to the camp’s coffers, hunting animals so the camp can eat, resupplying the medicine cart when supplies run low and upgrading the camp facilities when you’ve got a bit of spare cash from a recent heist.
Sound like a chore? It feels like it. Where Red Dead Redemption reveled in the freedom of the undeveloped West, its follow-up sometimes gets bogged-down in the RPG-like intricacies of keeping going in the game world. The vital-signs system is based around three ‘cores’ – health, stamina and dead-eye – which all deplete over time unless you maintain them by eating, smoking and drinking. But eat too much and you’ll get fat, and your vitals will deplete more quickly. Wear the wrong clothes for the weather and your cores will take a hit too.
Rockstar
Your horse, too, has its own needs. It has cores of its own (just stamina and health), a coat that needs brushing and, if you want to unlock certain skills, then you need to bond with the horse by patting and taking care of it.
I call my horse Gulliver, because he travels. Gulliver doesn’t seem to mind that his name is based on an awful pun, and as a result I don’t feel too resentful keeping him fed with oatcakes and running him through a stream when his coat gets dirty. I even upgrade his stirrups for a slightly nattier pair which, despite the supposed stats boost, seem to make little discernible difference to his speed.
Eventually, however, I began to suspect that Gulliver isn't appreciating the time I was putting into keeping him into top-notch condition. Didn’t he know that I had a camp to feed, guns to maintain, plants to harvest and animal bait to craft? How could I even contemplate buying him a new saddle when he’d already landed me with a bounty payment for assault after running into an unsuspecting pedestrian in the town of Valentine?
Fortunately, fate interceded to take a load off my to-do list when Gulliver ‘accidentally’ ran full-pelt into a wagon. Laying in the dust at my feet, my $150 horse was a clearly a goner. As Morgan stuck the knife into his chest with a brutal final flourish, my emotions were conflicted. My deep pang of regret tempered by the guilty relief I felt at finally getting my beautiful horse – and major time suck – off my hands.
Emotionally confusing though it was, Gulliver’s murder provides the kind of visceral, grisly edge that sets RDR2apart from its predecessor. Gone are the coy cutaways when your character skins an animal. Instead you see the whole thing from the moment you saw through the skin, pulling it off the animal’s flesh right up to the dead carcass swinging and going rotten on your horse’s saddle. In one mission you track a bear into the forest and have to empty your rifle into its huge body while it rears up just feet away.
But it’s in the towns that RDR2 really comes alive. The streets buzz with snippets of overheard conversation – much of it about Arthur Morgan, if you’ve been making a name for yourself around town. As you walk pass non-playable characters you can greet or antagonise them – tip your hat or muscle them out of the way and they will respond in kind. The backroads that crisscross the game map are alive their own tiny stories that you might only get a glimpse of – lawmen transporting fugitives from afar and families building new lives out west. Sometimes they’ll offer you a way to get involved, but just as often you can pass them by and believe that they’ll live on someplace else in the game world, just out of your sight.
And what a world it is. Once you’re past its claustrophobic opening, RDR2 is huge. The map stitches together verdant plains, cities on the edge of modernisation, ramshackle frontier towns, foggy bayous as well as the desert settings familiar from the first instalment. Much of your time will be spent riding between far-flung locations, and that is where the fun really begins in this game. RDR2 is a beautifully realised, absorbing world that is constantly begging you to forget the mission you’re meant to be heading towards and lose yourself in the little details.
Rockstar
Stumbling across these hidden wonders are one of the true delights of the game. After being furnished with a treasure map after a debt-collecting mission turned up nothing, I found myself in a secluded forested area. At one end was a cabin in a serious state of disrepair, inside it a collection of skeletons and letters containing a sermon to some intergalactic god. On my way out after looting the cabin I ran into a rival gang, intent on settling some old rivalries in a firefight. Topping up my dead eye meter with a tonic, I let loose a couple of rounds from my carbine rifle before scarpering altogether.
Such is the way of RDR2. Long period of nothing much happening, interspersed with short bursts of action. Unlike the previous installment, the story in this game isn’t just left for the cutscenes. As you wander around the camp, characters hash out old rivalries that are then explored in later missions, or as you’re travelling from one place to another someone might fill you in on a backstory that only comes to a head much later in the game. Although the bulk of the game is spent on lonely backroads, the story centres around the ragtag outlaws that make up the Van der Linde gang, and their numerous misadventures.
This contradiction – loneliness and the uneasy comradeship of the Van der Linde gang – is right at the heart of RDR2. And in it, Rockstar has achieved a goal that has taken eight years, thousands of staff, and potentially unhealthy number of nights , to pull off. Almost unfeasibly vast and detailed – with 60 hours in the main storyline, and many more than that outside of it – RDR2 is exactly the follow-up that fans of the original game have been clamouring for.
Inside the Rockstar offices, staff will surely be clearing the shelves in preparation for the stack of game of the year awards coming their way. RDR2 is the highly-refined evolution of everything that made the previous game great. But is it a sheer joy to play? I’m not so sure.
Everything about RDR2 feels engineered to make me stop and admire its intricacy and detail. Yes, its graphics are jaw-dropping, but they don’t truly invite me to step within the world in the same that BioShock’s otherworldly underwater dystopia did. In its perfection, RDR2 exchanges immersion for observation. At times, the constant character maintenance feels like a chore and the slow nature of the gameplay makes it the perfect game to play for long stints but, unlike GTA V, not one you can pick up and being have a blast with in minutes.
Perhaps it was inevitable that a game so meticulously polished requires an near-equal level of dedication from the player to truly get the most out of it. And if you’ve got the time and will to sink into it, RDR2 will provide ample rewards for your attention. But the best games don’t leave you when you’ve stepped away from the console. They hook into your brain and compel you to finish them as soon as you get the chance. Now, as I think about my half-empty in-game compendium and gun that needs oiling, the prospect of returning to Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like another line on my to-do list. Is it a perfect game? Sure. Does that make it a great one? Maybe not.
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