A Late Look: Red Dead Redemption II - Article
by Mark Nielsen , posted on 07 November 2024 / 6,486 Views
Welcome to A Late Look, a series of articles where I take a belated look at games from yesteryear that I missed out on the first time around. Not quite review and not quite rant, it’s more a casual assessment of what I – the gamer of the future – consider to be each game’s strengths and weaknesses in retrospect.
This time we’re saddling up for a look at Red Dead Redemption II, one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of the last ten years. It conveniently went completely under my radar, allowing me to look at it now. I was ten years late to the first game, this time it’s only six, so at this rate I’ll definitely be playing Red Dead Redemption IV on launch day. I'm looking forward to that, but for now let’s see how the second game fares in 2024.
Strength: The Van der Linde Gang
Travel back to a time before former-outlaw John Marston got pulled from his farmer life in the first title, to when he was… well, an outlaw. While you might play as Arthur Morgan, in this game you become part of John’s old gang – the Van der Linde gang – together with Marston himself and other familiar and unfamiliar characters. While RDR2 also boasts a few other strong characters, this gang is at the heart of the game and, luckily, is also its strongest element, with plenty of faces and personalities that (almost) all get their time to shine. What adds all the more to the connection and believability of these characters is the living nature of the camp itself; it's your home base outside of missions, where the gang will go about their daily tasks and have conversations & arguments that you can occasionally join in on – there are even celebrations and songs around the campfire. Even if it’s mostly just flavor, the strength of this particular feature and what it adds in terms of immersion shouldn’t be understated.
Weakness: Red Dead Redemption II: Usability Nightmare
I must admit to have laughed when I saw RDR2 described as the current pinnacle of video game design (back in 2018) because, as good as it is, if there’s one thing this game should decidedly not be made a role model for then it's game design. Where to start? Perhaps the controls, as that’s where the issues are clearest. Unintuitive, often unresponsive, and with every button doing multiple different things depending on the situation. Worst of all, when starting up the game I legitimately felt unable to see what the controls were (on console) because when you open the control section in the menu it will auto-scroll through the different actions of each button with no ability to pause it and actually have time to read more than one button. It’s baffling that this control “overview” made it to release, and even more baffling that it still functions like that to this day.
Then there’s the fact that essentially every action, from opening your inventory to looting the myriads of corpses you’ll leave in your path, requires holding down a button rather than pressing it, which is certainly a choice (I’ll give it that much), but one that mostly adds to the clunkiness the controls already suffer from at times. There’s also the fact that while missions have plenty of checkpoints which you’ll restart from when killed, you can’t choose to do so manually, leading me to intentionally catch a few bullets in the chest at times to be able to start something over that had gone wrong. There was also one case of having to run off my own property to set up a camp outside in order to sleep, because apparently the bed inside the house wasn’t good enough.
Admittedly once you get used to RDR2 and are in the flow of things you’ll only rarely get pulled out of it by these or other cases of usability awkwardness, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game could most certainly have done without them.
Strength-ish: Rich Simulation
The first Red Dead Redemption was in large part wild west Grand Theft Auto, with a tad stronger emphasis on story and setting. RDR2 follows that tradition but also undertakes a new mission of its own: to bring as much of real-life as possible into the game. From having to brush your horse, clean your weapons, manage your characters' beard growth and weight, to the way your horse’s testicles shrink in cold weather (yes, that’s a real thing). I’m surprised they didn’t implement a tipping mechanic at the bar that affects your honor rating. Perhaps the one major exemption to this rule is the very gamey element of sleep restoring all stats. Multiple gun wounds? Nothing a little nap won’t solve.
In any case, RDR2 pulls out all the stops in terms of both attention-to-detail and adding systems out of everything it can, making for one hell of a wild west simulator – but arguably also a noisy one. Whether you think the positives outweigh the negatives or vice-versa probably depends more on the player than the game. Personally, I liked this focus for its novelty and uniqueness, but at the same time I’m glad not every game is like this, as there are often more important elements to focus on. That being said, I greatly appreciated the narratively-fitting wizening of Arthur Morgan throughout his journey, as I went the whole game without shaving once.
Weakness-ish: Mostly Horseriding
Don’t get me wrong here, the horse riding is well-implemented as a major part of the game, and there are also useful features like auto-riding to any point you can mark on the map. In many ways horse riding is a positive and often calming element of the game, but it plays a part in many of the game's other issues, like repetitiveness, pacing, and predictable mission structures. There’s only so much open prairie you can see before you’ve seen what open prairie looks like, and the slowness of the main storyline led me to seek out less side-content throughout the game, not least because the main missions felt like that themselves at times. This comes from the predictable structure where every mission starts with a ride-and-talk and ends in a massive shootout where your gang of would-be Rambos consistently takes down ten times your own numbers; and there’s a certain satisfaction in that for sure, just like there is in the riding, but too much of a good thing becomes very real when the inevitable conclusion to every stealth mission is “looks like we’ll have to shoot our way out of here!”
Strength: Story
It might feel a bit like cheating to cover both characters and story as separate strengths, but even though I could also throw in elements like the open world or the (generally) satisfying dead eye mechanic, neither warrants quite as much praise as the game’s simple ability to tell a good tale with strong dialogue. As one would expect, the story covers major themes like (hold on to your cowboy hats) redemption, but also the opposite theme, as certain characters and indeed the gang’s way of life takes a distinct fall from grace. Even if it can seem heavy handed at times, RDR2 doesn’t hide the fact that the world is changing, and the characters change right along with it, making this nearly 50-hour long game quite the journey. So even if the pacing is a bit mixed, and I was a little disappointed by how the very end of the ending was handled (the endings do indeed have endings in this game, where even the epilogue has chapters), RDR2 is still undoubtedly overall a great piece of storytelling that features many powerful moments along the way.
Conclusion
Red Dead Redemption II is still, to this day, one of the most ambitious games ever made, for better and worse (but mostly better). It’s a technical marvel, an example of great worldbuilding and storytelling, and it has the most realistic horses you’ll find outside of a farm or petting zoo. However, getting to enjoy all of this required quite a bit of patience on my part, and a willingness to put up with several cases of awkward design and controls. Even if you took away those flaws, core elements like the shooting aren’t anything to write home about, but a game doesn’t have to deliver in every area to provide a good experience, and RDR2 was most certainly that... and also quite possibly one of the best depictions of the wild west in media.
Personal Verdict: 4 Dead Reds out of 5
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I finally played RDR1 from start to finish earlier this year.
It was quite noticeable how well RDR2 tied up plot points that are often changed in other series. Hearing John and Abigal discuss events that I'd seen in RDR2 added more weight to their story, especially given they were abstract events at RDR1's release.
Oh, and I found your dead Red counter amusing.
You ever played a game so good, you ignored the fact that sometimes you went to talk to people and ended up shooting them in the face because the aim button is the same as shoot button? Or how it took you 15 hours to realise there was a fast travel but you had to setup camp first, a thing you never used?
Red Dead 2 for all it's small gameplay issues is a superb experience and truely one of the mot emotional ones in gaming I've ever had.... and I only played it for the first time 6 months ago.
The pacing of RDR2 is a strength, not a weakness of the game.
We didn't realise that this was as good as it was going to get at the time, I look back on this game more fondly as time goes on. Yeah, the mission design is outdated but the production value has yet to be equalled. GTA6 will be another one that devs won't be able to reach for some time.
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