This is supposed to be the greatest game of all time??? (★★☆☆☆)
Red Dead Redemption looks great, even fabulous. It’s the best looking game yet. Extra kudos for the clothes, the streetlights in St Denis, water physics in rivers, the starry sky, fog in the bayou and, well, pretty much everything.
But I did not expect this. Meeting the cast from the first RDR again felt more like PTSD than anything else. God, not you people. Don’t tell me I’m stuck with all those characters from ten years ago whose only real defining feature was that you had to go through a dozen stupid subquests to find their sorry asses. Oh God, now I remember Uncle…
More than 50% of the Red Dead Redemption II is just riding to some destination, and most of that time is spent listening to « period gangsta » quips. The main character is just a grumpy gopher, like almost every other Rockstar protagonist. I’ve just heard enough backtalking and smart mouthing to last a lifetime.
It doesn’t help that the actual story is dumb and annoying. You spend hours upon hours not being told about « what happened in Blackwater » or hearing how « we’ll turn this thing around » or « the world doesn’t want folks like us no more ». Dude, of course it doesn’t, you’re thieves and murderers… it doesn’t even make sense! It’s like playing a Kojima game, but without any endearing weirdness.
You’d think a game that has a « punch your captive into silence » button would listen to its own advice.
Speaking of Kojima, it’s interesting that he figured out in Death Stranding that open-world games are about getting from point A to point B a lot, and consequently makes that the crux of the game. What Red Dead Redemption II does is… remove quick travel and give you a “cinematic” button so now you can let go of the controller and wait until you get to your destination. When Hideo Kojima is making more sense than you, maybe you should take a step back.
It doesn’t help that once you finally get to where you want to go, the guts of the game feel wrong. I sure doesn’t help that the game has some of the most atrocious control scheme, UI and menus I’ve seen in a AAA game and gameplay that has been focus-tested into irrelevance.
Movement is awkward and slow. Shooting is mediocre, at best, and you’re almost invincible from the get-go. And it only gets worse from there as you level up. Who says the Wild West is dying, I’m bulletproof! Talk about the game’s mechanics not following the game’s theme.
It feels like hunting is the real game. It’s certainly the most elaborate part in terms of mechanics, diversity and rewards. But it’s finicky (there’s one specific way to kill every animal) and it feels like busywork nonetheless. And no, I do not want to play video poker or dominoes in 2020. (By the way, the tedious quips do not stop during minigames. They do not stop for anything.)
There are numerous technical niggles too. The UI is too small. Menus are horrible and unintuitive. Mission NPCs bug out. There’s no obvious way to get out of replaying a story mission once you commit to it. You’re not allowed to buy almost anything unless the game tells you to. Besides, you don’t really need the upgrades anyway.
So much of the game feels like ticking boxes. The developers ticked boxes by adding activities. Lots of ‘em. They went above and beyond all other open world games, I’d say. Your job is to tick boxes by doing those million sub-activities. It’s not unusual for the genre of course, but it’s no excuse.
Speaking of which, I’ve got an idea, says the game. I’ve got medals for you! How about you replay all story missions, including their interminable riding scenes, to meet some random criteria? No thanks game.
It’s an enormous game with meticulously crafted visuals where nothing feels fun or worth doing.
Seriously, I feel kind of sorry for saying the game is bad. But hey, I’m sure Rockstar will keep on doing fine anyway.
Anyway, I’m not the only one thinking the praise is overblown:
https://mashable.com/article/red-dead-redemption-2-excess-waste-problem/
And yet… Red Dead Redemption sure isn’t the Citizen Kane of video games, it’s the Heaven’s Gate of video games. It’s a game that has some very pretty things to show you and some insane attention to detail, but that is mired in its own bloated overindulgence and lack of focus (As an aside, you can probably watch the entire original theatrical release of Heaven’s Gate before finishing the prologue chapter. How’s that for bloat?).
(Spoilers ahead!)
Credit where credit’s due: the end of Arthur’s arc in chapter 6 is spectacular. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hero cope with his own mortality and fear and regrets quite like this. “All them bullets shot at me, all them horses threw me, all them fights and it was the beating of that pathetic little fella Downes that killed me, I reckon”.
Of course, you’re not supposed to think about the video game logic of it: Arthur’s condition seems to have no drawback whatsoever on his superhuman prowess and he “finds redemption” by killing an *extra* 150 lawmen/soldiers to help his accomplices get away. *shrug*
And then what do you get? A 20-hour two-part epilogue that sucks most of the goodwill built by chapter 6. “You know how the epilogue for the original was a return to normal life? Let’s do this *again*, but now it’s ten times as long! What the players want… is to know how John learned to put up a picket fence. Or how he got a bank loan! We’re geniuses!”
The final cutscene of the epilogue is particularly painful and ham-fisted. Before it comes one of the worst shitty anticlimax boss fights I’ve ever played (protip: the trick is to do absolutely nothing). Dutch seems to be spending the entire scene thinking: wait, what’s my character’s motivation here? Why am I killing my ally for someone whom I think betrayed me twice and leaving him all the money I’ve spent years obsessing over? Am I having an epiphany here? Why am I again in a standoff with Micah, but now without the emotional relevance of when it happened in chapter 6? Shit, I don’t know! Roll credits!
I still have no idea why the game doesn’t bother showing you the glory days the game spends hours telling you about. Are they keeping it for the pre-prequel, *Red Dead Redemption III – Hosea and the Civil War*? I assume they are, because an entire part of the story’s arc is missing, the part where Dutch was apparently a good leader.
There’s about two hours of dialogue in chapter 6 that are brilliant. It’s a shame about the other 98 hours though… it’s like the writers could only sustain that level of writing for a little while. Those two hours don’t really redeem all the rest either. Rockstar has turned into a JRPG company.
But maybe it’s not *really* about the story. I tried doing at bit of that “smelling the roses” everyone is talking about. So I found a priest making a sermon near someone’s grave. Interesting! I used the greet response, my character said something inappropriate and the priest just left. Then I tried to get closer to the grave and the NPCs ran to call the cops. WTF?
Instead of Heaven’s Gate’s exploding horses and endless takes, Red Dead Redemption II has years of crunch culture. It makes me wonder what the reception for the game would have been if the media’s coverage of the game had been less lavish.
The truth is I feel sorry for all the time I’ve spent with the game. I feel sorry for the completionists who do all the stupid playstyle challenges and hunt pelts for all the camp and pouch upgrades… only to discover the camp disappears for good after chapter 6 and all the pouch upgrades are essentially free in post-game. Seriously, what a lack of respect for the player’s time.
I also feel sorry for the poor programmers that made shrinking horse balls, mechanics that have no real use, tutorial prompts no one will ever heed because they have no relevance to anything whatsoever, the entire Guarma segment and making a whole fifth of the map a post-game bonus that’s mostly empty.
Some completionist said that you have better chance of finding a woodpecker in real life than in the game. Food for thought… Honestly, Red Dead Redemption II made me want to cut back on playing video games. What kind of real wilderness could I have seen with those 100 hours?
Then again, what a time to have the revelation that I should go outside the house and play, huh?
Idle Thoughts 