I want to start by being upfront here, I did not want to and had no intention of playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Gasps from the crowd, but why? Well, firstly I don't like Westerns and cowboy themes as I'm not big into them, secondly and more importantly, the original Red Dead Redemption. As a whole, I like a lot of the games Rockstar release, with Red Dead Redemption being one of the few I don't. It was a game that was really hyped, people said how great it was, blah, blah, blah. Decided to play it, found it extremely buggy, a little dull and while it was a large open world it often felt very bare. So naturally, when people were bouncing off the walls about Red Dead Redemption 2 I shrugged my shoulders and said 'meh'. After many strongly worded conversations with my friend Dave, I finally decided to give it a go along with Nolls (who really wanted to play it, having never been biased by the first game).
Food glorious food. Nothing quite beats a nice turkey dinner with all the trimmings. There is a lot to like about them but some things I don't. I hate when there are Brussel Sprouts or mashed vegetables (apart from potatoes), or cranberry jelly. I mean if I'm making it myself no problem but if I'm out or at a friends house, I just have to deal with it, there are enough good things in it to help me ignore the bad. Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I found myself asking was there enough tasty stuff to ignore the not so tasty?
Story
It's 1899, the wild west is quickly becoming the tamed west and the time of gunslingers is coming to an end. Most people are happy about this new civilized society - others, not so much. Dutch Van Der Linde and his gang are the latter. Dutch still believes in the old west and wants to shoot and rob his way to freedom. You play as Arthur, who has been in the gang for a long time and in many ways, Dutch is like your father. Things are getting more dangerous and you need a big score to buy everyone's freedom. It may sound strange but that's all the detail I can get into without providing large spoilers. What I can say is that there are many likable and unlikeable characters, my personal favorites being Sadie, Lenny, and Charles. Each character feels like a real person, with their own backstories and personalities. Nolls loved these three as well, along with the Irish character Sean. We both hated Strauss and Micah, as we felt was the intention.
There are many, many side quests to explore and in engage in, which Nolls particularly took to. She loved ones including a lion tamer, a very suspicious redneck couple, a slave owner, a widow learning to live off the land alone, a wildlife photographer, a series of missions which leads to you obtaining a rare amped up horse, and a controversial French artist. She thought a lot of these were far better than the main stories in the game, which are quite regularly summed up as: bad plan, everything goes wrong, run away, rinse and repeat. That said, there are also random encounters with people in distress, not quite side-missions, but opportunities to boost your reputation or get some gun store credit later, and she also encountered the same Spaniard being attacked by wolves about five times as she played - she saved him twice but left him to his fate after that because dammit man learn from your mistakes.
Overall the story is compelling enjoyable but on occasion it was frustrating. The ending left me in many ways disappointed and the epilogue, while enjoyable, did feel needless. Nolls had barely registered the relevant character up to that point so it felt a bit shoehorned to her. We both felt it would have made far more sense as a DLC episode on its own.
Visuals
The game provides breathtaking visuals, warm open country, forested mountains, arid desert, idyllic country ranches, and small towns, a bustling city, an alligator-infested swampland and so much more. There is so much detail and life around you from plants to animals and more. I was really impressed by the snow as it felt cold and was tough traverse. Nolls frequently took to pointing her horse in the general direction of her destination and ignoring the map entirely to trek cross-country and really enjoy the incredible world.
Overall the visuals are almost beyond words and are probably the strongest element of the game.
Music
I initially struggled to try to think about how to best describe the music in Red Dead Redemption 2, and then it hit me. Imagine if Dire Straits and Ennio Morricone had a baby and that baby grew up and played with its neighbors, country, and American rock. The score is composed by American composer, producer, and musician Woody Jackson. Woody has worked on a number of Rockstar games including; L.A. Noire, Grand Theft Auto V and Max Payne 3.
The soundtrack is well over three hours long, some of my favorite pieces included; 'Outlaws from the West', 'House Building Theme', 'Bank Robbery Theme', 'Old Friends' and 'Train Heist (Shoot Out)'. Overall the soundtrack was overly long and while there are many tracks some of them sound very similar to each other. While I understand the game is huge I think the soundtrack could have been shrunk down somewhat and perhaps it would have it more memorable. Nolls really liked the music for the most part but agreed it was largely generic.
Gameplay
Wow, where do I even begin? There is so much to do in Red Dead Redemption 2, obviously, there are the main story missions, but there are also there are tons of side missions, challenges, and collectibles. Outside of that, there are all the Legendary Animals and Fish to hunt and regular ones too. There's great freedom in how you live daily life as Arthur and insane amounts of detail in every part of the game - while I was happy to grab supplies from towns, Nolls got a kick out of picking oregano to season her freshly-killed pronghorn deer venison at her makeshift roadside campfires while her horse enjoyed wild carrots she picked herself. She also made sure to regularly buy newspapers from the towns, which would report on shocking train robberies or other crimes committed by unknown folk (Nolls, of course). You can choose to act nobly or criminally, and your reputation will increase or decrease accordingly. Riding around towns greeting everyone in sight will raise your reputation and genuinely give your mood a boost - it's true what Arthur says - "say what you want about the folk round here, they're real friendly".
The game itself doesn't really offer much in the way of a tutorial, this allows you to discover a lot of things through simple trial and error. The only difficulty I found with the controls is that one slight slip and you would go from greeting someone to sticking your gun in their face. This could be amusing at times, other times not so much. Upgrading and customizing your gear is important, firstly because it's fun (don't lie, you enjoyed dressing Arthur up too) and secondly you want to have the best weapons available for the job at hand - be it hunting big or small game, capturing a target alive or taking on an entire gang in a shootout. Maintaining your weapons is important as well, weapons in poor condition won't work effectively and in a shoot out and you don't want that. You can even improve your weapons or upgrade their appearance - right down to engraving the wooden stock.
While guns are important there is one thing in the game almost equal in importance, your horse. You can find them in the wild and break them, buy them from stables or steal them. If you want the best horse early in the game, you can kill yourself for an hour or more getting an Arabian Horse (to be fair he is badass). Taking care of your horse is important - feed them, brush them, bond with them and always have a horse reviver on hand in case it gets mortally wounded (Nolls mortally wounded her own horses more than once by accidentally plunging off cliffs, over rocks, or straight into trees at full speed. This is why she doesn't have a real horse). Horses will help carry your many weapons, equipment, and animal skins. The game prides itself on realistic gameplay actions - something we both learned early on when we frequently ran empty-handed into a gunfight, having completely forgotten that we needed to remove our chosen guns from the horse's saddle upon dismount.
There are a few camps through the main story, each of which can upgrade cosmetically but also from a more practical standpoint. Upgrading the medicine wagon mean more medicine for you and the gang, the same goes for ammunition. Dutch will encourage you and others to pay into the pot to help keep the camp afloat if you don't though it's not the end of the world.
There is so much to see and do a few mere paragraphs can hardly describe, plus telling you more would just ruin your own future experience. Basically, massive open world game where you can do pretty much anything, just not the crazy stuff you see in just cause. Overall the gameplay is really enjoyable, the controls can be a little fiddly on occasion and the game will glitch on occasion (it crashed twice on Nolls) but this is not very common.
Final Thoughts
So, after seventy plus hours how did I feel? Pretty good, better than I expected. The story was interesting, and if I don't linger too much on the ending or epilogue overall it was close to perfect - the vast number of side quests means it would be easy to dismiss the main story if you're not too keen on it anyway. The visuals were beyond amazing and was always a please to traverse the lands on my horse, the music was okay but lacked a certain something, sometime less is more. The gameplay initially took me a little while to get used to but overall was pretty fun. Overall this one gets a 4 out of 5
