5/5 ★ – DaysposableHero's review of Red Dead Redemption II.

When I first started playing Red Dead Redemption II, I was afraid I was going to be disappointed. I remember being frustrated by some aspect of the game or another. Was it the controls? Was it the extremely light survival elements of hunger and crafting? For the life of me, I can’t remember. By the time I rolled credits, over two hundred hours later, my complaints had evaporated, like the smell of gunsmoke after a poker game gone wrong. Like Arthur, and John, and Bill, and all the others who fell under Dutch’s spell, I discovered that I no longer wanted to leave. I felt like I belonged here. I was fully involved. I wasn’t just playing this video game anymore. I was living in this world. The world of Red Dead Redemption II is vast, and beautiful. It may be the best looking game I’ve ever seen. I can’t help but recall the horror stories of crunch at Rockstar Games, and I must remind myself that no amount of virtual aesthetics is worth actual human misery. But sometimes, that’s difficult to do. It’s much easier to look at the sun coming in through the trees at dawn, playing off the fog and mist covering the ground on a cool morning in the woods of New Hanover and think “Whatever it took to create this was worth it.” It wasn’t. But damn, it sure looks good. It makes you want to just sit and bask in it for a while. Or longer than a while. At one point, I had been living in the countryside, hunting for my dinner, selling pelts and horns and so forth for a living, for so long that one of my fellow gang members came to find me. As if the developers had known that I might sometimes need a reminder that hey, this is a video game, and there are missions to accomplish, and NPCs that can’t move on until you do what you have to do to move the story forward. I turned him down. Sent him back to our hideout alone, and told him I’d be back soon enough. I wasn’t. Rockstar has populated their version of the (extremely) late 19th century American west with all manner of very Rockstar-ish embellishments. Some of them lead somewhere – to new NPCs, new missions, and new relationships. The man I considered to be my “best friend” in the game was an NPC who I found to have been bucked off his horse, just off the road into the woods. That discovery lead to one of the bigger emotional moments in the game for me, and a questline that – as far as I could tell – is entirely optional. In another instance, I discovered a young woman who needed my help to survive alone in the wilderness, her husband having succumbed to some kind of frontier threat (wolves? Disease? I can’t remember). Seeing her take my lessons to heart and go from a damsel in distress to a competent and successful, if eccentric, hermit lady was endearing. Of course, there are also the Rockstar open world trademark goofs. I found the remains of a UFO cult, tracked a serial killer across three states, and possibly had a conversation with bigfoot. Though I’m not entirely sure about that last one. But that’s a Rockstar game for you. When I finally decided to head back to camp and move the plot along, I wasn’t disappointed there either. The main narrative of RDR2 unfolds across multiple chapters and most of the sprawling map, from the snow-driven slopes of Rockstar’s equivalent of the Rocky Mountains – the Grizzlies – to the sun soaked and mosquito infested swamplands of their New Orleans (Saint Denis). I play as – or, rather, inhabit – Arthur Morgan, a man of contradictions if ever there was one. At once hardened by a life lived outside the comforts of society and often on the wrong side of the law, while at the same time harboring an appealing naivety, or maybe optimism, about the good that he still longs for in himself and those he cares about. Arthur’s story is both a warning about unquestioned loyalty, and a reminder that its never too late to care about people. As Arthur Morgan, I lean into the relationships I’ve built in the Van der Linde gang, hoping as each new disaster strikes, that this time we’ll get it right, we’ll all pull together to make it work, just like we always have. As the player, I know it’s a fantasy that can never be. And it makes it that much harder to watch Arthur try so hard. It’s like watching Sisyphus’ first ever attempt to push the boulder. We know how this ends. He doesn’t. Que dramatic tension. Red Dead Redemption II is, without a doubt, one of the best games I’ve ever played. But it is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The controls can be frustrating, at times. You would think that pulling out a gun, cocking it, and shooting someone in the face would be something difficult to do on accident. Not here. I got into a fight on more than one occasion that stemmed from me pistol whipping a stranger in the street instead of giving them a “Howdy, sir.” The AI pathing is complete garbage. Left to its own devices my horse would run full speed headlong into a stationary wagon, even while being on the game’s version of “autopilot”. The map is clunky to use with a controller, and I’m really tired of having to craft every individual special bullet I intend to fire, one at a time. There are a handful of other gripes I could level at the game, and frequently do while playing it. But in the end, I just have to shrug and admit that, well, they don’t matter that much. None of the things that made me initially hesitant about the game are significant enough to impact my experience when its all said and done. Much like Arthur himself, I can look back at the world of Red Dead Redemption II, warts and all, and kind of wish I still belonged there.