4/5 ★ – alexcoleridge10's review of Red Dead Redemption II.

Story: 4/5 Gameplay 4/5 (or 3.75/5) I enjoyed this, although it did disappoint compared to my expectations. Like with breath of the wild, I was told by the elders of the internet that this was a true masterpiece of a game, with a story almost unrivalled in video games, and some of the best characters in fiction. This was not that game. The story was, on the whole, pretty good. It was far too long (~50 hours), and for the first half of the narrative I never felt like the story was really developing in an interesting way. The game (a prequel to Red dead 1) begins with the gang on the run from the law, so that they have to find a camp in a new state. Then, they are on the run from a powerful man whose train they robbed, and they have to go on the run and find a new camp in a new state. Then, the law catches up to them again, and they have to go on the run again and find a temporary camp in the same state, before they do one last big score and escape somewhere entirely new (Australia, Tahiti, New York). It’s only with that botched bank robbery that things start to get properly interesting, but for these first 3 and a half chapters, very little of substance happens. You could start the story at the beginning of chapter 4 (there were 6 in total, plus the epilogue) and you would not miss out on that much in the game. Once the gang’s robbery fails, and two of them die and one ends up in prison, while the others are washed ashore on the Cuban island of Guarma after an attempt to escape by boat, you start to see the characters develop a little, and the story starts to move towards a climax and conclusion. But so much of the beginning content was pretty insignificant. This just made a lot of the game feel a bit tedious and meaningless. The Guarma chapter itself was pretty disappointing (some content was cut from it). You spend a short time participating in some kind of war between two groups, but then quickly find your way home. I don’t really see how it was necessary. It kind of made the whole story seem a little more unbelievable. The rest of the story was fairly grounded in reality, but this just felt like too much of an exciting adventure to really fit with the styles of red dead. The final chapter in Beaver Hollow was more exciting. Seeing the gang fall apart, John get to escape, and Arthur sacrifice himself to save John was all compelling. Arthur’s TB diagnosis was one of my favourite parts: it added a lot of humanity to the character and made the story feel more realistic. The characters were generally good. It was well acted; Dutch’s performance stood out. But I don’t see why people laud Arthur Morgan as one of the best characters in video games. He seemed pretty one dimensional and never really developed much in the game. Arthur’s story seemed to be one of learning and accepting that the age of outlaws was over, and gangs like the one he belonged to had to die. By the end, Arthur made his purpose in helping John escape with his family, rather than standing by Dutch and the gang. But I didn’t feel like Arthur went on much of a journey in this respect; if Dutch had gone crazy at the beginning of the game, and left John to die in the first train robbery rather than the last, I don’t see him acting very differently than how he did at the end. It seemed like getting TB and seeing Dutch become more evil was just what made him realise that the gang was over. I didn’t feel Dutch’s descent into madness was particularly well executed. It more or less comes out of nowhere, once things start getting worse and worse for the gang. It could’ve been developed more intricately and slowly throughout the game, rather than starting halfway through chapter 4 and then pretty quickly ramping up to the point where he’s leaving Arthur and John (both of whom he practically raised) to die when it’s advantageous to him. I just didn’t get that there was much of a reason for Dutch acting so differently so soon. Some of the side characters, especially Sadie, Charles, and Abigail, were great fun and were very likeable. But since Arthur wasn’t a great protagonist, it made the lengthy epilogue where you play as John the best part of the game, along with Chapter 6. Doing missions with Sadie, Charles and Abigail was real fun, and with it being basically a prologue to Red Dead 1, it was very satisfying to go back to many of the locations from Red Dead 1 that were rebuilt in this game. I think the whole story is less effective if you haven’t played the first one. It would be kind of confusing why you’re getting so much of John at the end if you don’t know that he’s the main character of the first one, and not getting to see what happens to certain characters because their story is resolved in the first game would be unsatisfying. Finally, and this is related to the gameplay, I would note that the story suffered from its mission format. They need to have missions because it's an open world game, and they want you to be able to explore the world and do side quests while not on mission. Missions usually follow a format roughly like this: 1. You meet a character, usually a member of your gang, often in the gang's camp. There is a cutscene where you discuss what's going on and what you're going to do. 2. You ride your horse, or walk, to another location 3. There is sometimes something unique to do here: you're planting dynamite on a bridge, you're drinking with Lenny, you're hunting for crabs in a swamp, etc 4. You end up engaged in combat with some enemies 5. You go back to the location you started the mission or sometimes to a third final location 6. The mission ends, and the status quo is restored (even if the characters are now better or worse off in some way than when the mission began) This repeats for around 100 missions. Each mission is 10-25 minutes. In this short time, it's difficult to explore any one idea or scenario in depth, and you just have to keep doing one task after another. This just makes it difficult for the story to pick up real momentum or tension, because things keep going back to normal so that you can explore the open world. (On reflection, I would say this is one of the biggest problems with the whole story.) Because Dutch is the main antagonist of the first game and dies in that one, he can't get his comeuppance in this game. So they had to introduce Micah (who is not in Red Dead 1), a plainly mean member of the gang who is always at Arthur's throat and ends up snitching. The epilogue concludes with you taking down Micah, with, unexpectedly, help from Dutch. But this made the confrontation between John and Dutch in the first game retroactively weaker, as Dutch had a moment of good where he killed Micah, John says "thank you", and Dutch just walks away and John lets him go. It doesn't really make sense, then, that Dutch never mentions these events during the first game, even though you would certainly expect him to, because Dutch had earlier left John to die, and John keeps bringing this up as part of the reason why he is hunting Dutch. Wouldn't Dutch be like "yeah, I left you, but then I saved you and we seemed to let each other go?". In the epilogue of this game, Dutch half gets his Red Dead Redemption, which then makes his and John's rivalry in Red Dead One a little more confusing. Gameplay The gameplay was mixed, but strong. You spent most of your time either riding your horse or shooting people. Horse riding was implemented well: I quite liked how you had to keep your horse clean and fed, cause it made them seem more like a living creature rather than a lifeless vehicle, like your car in GTA. Although it did get tedious having to brush your horse so often. Shooting and combat was reasonably good, but pretty simplistic like other rockstar games. The slow motion Dead Eye ability is fun to use, but it can kind of take you out of the game if you use it too much, as it pauses the music, you can't hear any dialogue, and it does just make the combat super easy. The variety of weapons was pretty nice, dual wielding pistols was fun, and I liked that you could only have four guns (two pistols, two rifles), and the rest would be stored on your horse. It's better than having an arsenal in your pocket, and prevents you from switching guns too much. My biggest criticism is probably that the combat was too easy and too simplistic. In every combat scenario, there are a dozen enemies who simply stand there and shoot at you with no kind of tactics or strategy. There is very little opportunity for stealth. Your character can take a dozen bullets before being killed, and you never have to think about your own strategy before doing combat. There are a small number of opportunities for stealth in the game, but where there is stealth, it is always scripted that you are eventually spotted and a shootout begins. Since you are in combat hundreds of times in the game, there just wasn't enough uniqueness or challenge to make it exciting; it was honestly just annoying when almost every cutscene in the game inevitably ended with some excuse for a gunfight. Melee was great though, when you had to fistfight an enemy. Really fun! In combat, it was generally fluid and easy to use the controls. Other times, the controls seemed to be designed to frustrate you as much as possible. I spent about half of the game looking at the bottom right of my screen to figure out what I was supposed to press to perform certain actions. R was generally searching things (wardrobes), but looting them was E, and interacting with items in the world was R, but often if that item had quest importance it was E. Then F was hogtie, and R was pick up. I only figured this out by the end; it was not really consistent. It was always difficult to look in the right place to interact with what I wanted to interact with; I often had to enter first person to make my character look at what I wanted to pick up. And with almost every prompt you have to hold the key down for 0.5-1 second, which made it more, not less, difficult to properly execute actions (since I had to make sure my camera was still while holding down the button, lest I move it too far and select something else). There were just so many moments when it really felt unnecessary to require you to hold down the key to actually do the thing. The frustration was heightened when it came to the elements of realism they added. A case in point: There are several challenge branches you can complete in the game, each with 10 challenges. These are things like Gambler, Sharpshooter, Hunter, Horseman etc. I really enjoyed these in Red dead 1 and completed all of them. In this game, they were made vexingly complicated and difficult such that I was not able to get through too many. The second hunter challenge, for example, is to collect 3 perfect rabbit pelts. When you skin an animal in this game, the quality of their pelt is affected by how many wounds the animal has. Any shot to a rabbit with any weapon will degrade its pelt from perfect to good. The only tip the game gives you for how to keep the pelt perfect is to use small game arrows. It wasn't clear how to find these; I only figured out much later that you can craft them. Annoyingly, only about 2/5 of any rabbits spawn with a perfect (3 star) pelt. And when I found these and shot them with small game arrows, I found that they never died! I tried so many times, but it seemed impossible, even with the weak spots highlighted with dead eye. In total (including the time to find materials to craft small game arrows) I tried to do this challenge for well over an hour but then had to give up. Many other elements of gameplay were frustrating in a similar way (if you die on your horse, you respawn but your horse doesn't??). The minigames, poker especially, were really fun. But that's mainly cause poker is a fun game - I'm grateful to this and red dead 1 for teaching me how to play it. Dominoes is also fun, five finger fillet is a pain. They should've had liar's dice from the first one. Fishing was painful. It wasn't even fun the first time! So boring. To my surprise since it is a Rockstar game, it was super buggy. There were many times in my camp when it wouldn't allow me to walk a certain way, many times when my horse absolutely refused to walk in a certain direction for no reason, times when some button wouldn't work, etc. it was pretty annoying. Music On the whole, I liked the music, especially during the missions. It could've been a little bit richer during free roam rather than so sparse. I understand what they were trying to do though. I loved when the old themes from Red dead 1 came back at the end during the epilogue. World/terrain The world was pretty incredible. It was so diverse, with tons of different environments to explore and play in. This compared to the Red dead one map which was all pretty similar. I remember being excited when you finally get to West Elizabeth in Red dead one, and getting to see grass, lush trees, and a real city rather than just desert. This game blew that away. The city of Saint Denis was particularly stunning. Even more amazing was that they remade the entire state of New Austin from the first game, even though you only visit one small part of New Austin very briefly in the epilogue. Seeing West Elizabeth, especially Blackwater, again was a treat. Graphics Where I can offer the highest praise for this game is in the graphics. It's only rivalled by the last of us 2, but this still beats it, despite coming out two years earlier. I don't know how much I can really say about it, but almost everything was simply the best I've seen - the lighting especially. I was happy, in the first few hours, to ride from place to place without galloping just so I could take in the scenery (that got old eventually). The character models and facial animations were probably the only places where the last of us won out. This made going back to West Elizabeth and New Austin even better. On the whole, worth the 60 hours I spent, but not my favourite game and a little disappointing compared to expectations. Although it wasn't executed perfectly, it was certainly a very satisfying conclusion to the world and the characters in it. Everything was very faithful to what they had built in the first game, and the characters and world were designed with a lot of thought and creativity. I feel like I'm liking it more and more as the hours pass since playing it, but maybe that's just because I don't have to brush my horse anymore.