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

While a Rockstar fan I've never played RDR1 and don't even know much about it. Just that John Marston is the lead and Dutch is also in it. So I was going blind into it and it gripped me all the same. I guess it takes some time to get used to the heavy controls and systems upon systems with your cores, weapons, upgrades, collectibles and a million other things but the start of the game kinda invites you to engage with those systems as much as you like. Especially hunting and fishing are their own kind of insanely detailed mini games. You can spend hours just doing that. The first chapter is pretty much a tutorial and 2/3 of the second one are random little adventures but the story supports this structure completely. It's so good that it immediatelly throws you in a life or death end-of-their-rope situation to inject some immediacy to the early "here's how you aim" levels. By the time you reach the open world you re kinda relieved and perfectly fine to do random shit with the gang and look at all the bells and whistles for a while. It took me about 20 hours just to reach chapter 3 because of all the hunting and exploring. And even after the story became more intense I still did all of the honor and stranger missions I could find along the way. Most of them are so well thought and full of interesting characters/situations, they make the world feel way more alive. Even the money collecting missions, the definition of a fetch quest, is where Rockstar hangs Arthur's entire character arc and I swear when I ride to go to one of those missions there's a sad "you 're bad guy" music starting playing every time. I'm convinced it's intentional, the people that made this game are really insane. I 've played really good games like GTAV where most of the open world is just beautiful scenery and really good games like Far Cry 4 where you can't take two steps before an eagle attacking a jaguar attacking an enemy attacks you. Between those two extremes, Red Dead for me is the perfect balance of an open world game where every encounter flows naturally in your way. There are times when you go from A to B in 5 minutes and nothing happens. And other times going the exact same route you fall into a rival gang's ambush, meet a stranger and end up on the town figuring out that the gunsmith is a fucking pervert who has a man dressed as a boy chained to his basement. But despite all the flaws ands virtues RDR2 has, what really tilts it for me to masterpiece territory is the story and the scope of its ambition. It's crazy how they managed to introduce and develop so many people through camp interactions, side or main missions and make sure you end up knowing all 20-25 characters and the various dynamics between them. It's both Arthur's story of redemption and the story of the whole group falling apart and they way the two threads play of off each other is just seamless. One little thing that bothers me though is that I feel the whole "choose to play as good or bad Arthur" is kinda bullshit. I don't know how much changes in outcome if you play as a bad guy but I think the story would make zero sense anyway if Arthur was a worse piece of shit than Micah for the entire game.