This review is dedicated to Going Merry and Artax, two of the best horses who's lives were cut short by random bullshit enemy spawns
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that genuinely should be a live-action Western movie instead. For as good as the story and writing is (I won't deny this, but I will avoid discussion to keep this spoiler free), the game itself that this runs on only hinders it at every turn. After 50 hours of this I can honestly say this game broke me on several levels, none of which were from any impactful story moments or groundbreaking gameplay. This game broke me through sheer frustration at how stiff the scripting was to how terrible its gunplay felt, this game broke me through the absolute slog its last 2 main story chapters were, this game broke me through finally starting to get some enjoyment out of the experience only for that to be completely rug pulled from me and ripped to shreds multiple times.
GRAPHICS (4K, Ultra settings)
I wanted to get this point out of the way first; while I appreciate visual design and fluid animation in games, there comes a point where it becomes completely unneeded and distracting. Red Dead Redemption 2 blasted through that wall for me, to where I felt like the aesthetics were just a coat of paint over the sheer clunkiness of under its hood. Having to cook each piece of meat or tonic at a fire or cleaning your gun for 5 seconds and watching the same animation over, and over, and over got so old I avoided hunting/maintanence alltogether. Walking through the towns and cities was nice, but I could care less about seeing each set of foot/wagon prints, nor do I care about individual blades of grass. Whatever poor artist that was chained to their desk to crunch on this I feel for, but only because they were made to work on something nobody gives a fuck about seeing. The water in this game looked terrible to me, someone who has a 7900XT gpu and set the water on Ultra. It looks like gel more than water, the entire body should not move when you do. Pokemon Legends Arceus has better looking water to me because at least motion of water is localized to the object displacing it rather than the whole segment of stream moving like a piece of fabric. I additionally had other weird graphical issues with finer objects like flowers and hair causing extreme tearing, but that I will let slide as that could be due to FSR, the shaders, or something else unintended.
RIGIDITY OF SCRIPTING
One main thought/thing I noticed early on with this game was how rigid some of the missions and ai scripting was. Was I overly sensitive to this after having just come off of Deus Ex, the ultimate genre-defining Immersive Sim? Perhaps. Would it have still been an issue otherwise? Absolutely. Even in one of the first few missions I felt this, where you had to hide behind a rock for cover. But wait, oh no you arent at the right spot to hop the fence so we won't let you at all, you have to walk 5 feet to the left and THEN we will let you. All the while in this sequence you were somehow detected so now the stealth is broken and your gang is yelling at you because you didn't walk the EXACT way Rockstar wants you to. This then happens later on when riding with your gang; I rode up a rocky pass for a better vantage point on a camp but OOPS you fail the mission because you were more than 10 feet away and not directly riding into the ambush WE setup for you because we built setpieces like legos. I had this issue throughout the game, I was able to work past it at times, other moments it would rear its ugly head and rubber band me back into position. "Oh wait a moment, I know you are taking cold damage which we JUST told you about as soon as you dismounted, but because you left your horse you can't go back on it to change. Your punishment is to stand A Framed on top of your horse while we Divine Intervention style snap you back on the ground on the side of the horse." I understand the careful design of missions, but in the same token there has to be some form of give and take or freedom associated with it. In some missions they give you that freedom and punish you for it, but in a lot of them they would rather just fail the mission outright and send you back to a checkpoint. At one point in the story you are in a shootout with a massive gator coming at your boat. I could not figure out the magic script for this encounter to where I would survive it, unloading all my guns did nothing, Dead Eye unloading of my guns did nothing either. I had no choice to skip that checkpoint, as I had nothing to go off of for what else to try. There are other moments like these that will be touched on in the other section as well, trust me.
GUNPLAY
By and around the weakest aspect of this game for me. Gun differences didn't matter at all when only headshots are a 100% kill, 100% of the time. Otherwise its a crapshoot. I directly coorelate my enjoyment of a sequece by the sheer number of enemies you have to face. The more enemies you have to shoot, the worst the guns were and the worse I felt. This was especially apparent at the end, when you are fighting literal armies of men. Each gun is slow, clunky, and difficult. None of them were standout, one size fits all weapons. They were all bad in larger combat fights unless you spent 5 minutes for each wave behind cover. Not only this, but I ran into the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced with a combat system. I had a fight with an enemy at point blank range, I unload an entire repeater into his chest. Not a SINGLE hit registered; only because he was scripted to be killed by Generic Indian Warrior #4 ONLY via a "badass" tomahawk kill animation some intern probably spent a whole year making. The rage I felt in that moment overshadowed all else, and that was on my second attempt at the mission after my game crashed during the ending cinematic forcing me to play the entire mission over.
No spoilers here either, but the final FINAL gun duel with <REDACTED> was the stupidest, most bullshit fight. Completely pointless. I unloaded an entire magnum into their skull, visible hole and all and they just walk it off like its nothing. Garbage.
OTHER THOUGHTS
After 50 hours of this, I really can only say I'm burnt out on Open World games, more specifically Rockstar open world games. Majority of the side content I found were all useless collectibles. Which is fine, but not to the degree of what's on offer in RDR2. It was WAY too much padding out of a game. I don't want to devote 100s of hours of my life filling out compendium after compendium for little to no reward. Thats asinine. Before I get comments asking "oh did you see so and so, their quest is pivitol to character development," my rebuttal to this statement is, if its such a cool key moment why the hell is it not part of the main story and missable? I'm not stopping to smell roses and waste time here, unless such things are marked on my map so I know where to go.
The bounty and honor system in this game was also insanely bad for me. If bandanas are your way of commiting crimes without being noticed, why the hell am I still getting bounties for completing story missions that REQUIRE me to do crimes? Why do you encourage me to loot bodies at cleared out bases, yet punish me with an army of bounty hunters/lawmen after 1 minute of mission completion and a wanted level? I don't get it. I went with a High Honor playthough as a roleplay of a Gunslinger that wants to be reformed. I hated how much your gang hates this choice and actively call you a pansy for being a good person, when its obvious that is what Arthur wants the entire time. Let me play how I want to, don't further ridicule me.
There is a segment in Chapter 5 where you are sent to a new map where all there is is 4-5 missions. Absolute worst of the worst section. Made no sense to the story, added nothing apart from one action a character takes that we already knew they were capable of doing. Never discussed again afterward. Why is this here? Useless filler.
If you are playing this on PC, do yourselves a favor and use a controller. This game is designed for it. I have no utter idea why Rockstar thinks Mouse and Keyboard should be layed out by a masochist but some frustration was alleviated for me by switching to controller.
The real thing, the REAL THING that fully broke me and made me dislike this game as much as I do though, was said in the opening dedication of this review. I bonded with the first horse you get in the first mission of the story. This horse carried me thorough the first 1.5 chapters, until a random mugging event where I was locked into the prompt to surrender. By the time I was able to break out of the scripting and pull my gun out, I was already dead along with my horse. The game saves this and counts your horse as dead. No chance to revive. I respawned in a field with no horse in sight. I wanted to quit right then and there, but I managed to eventually find a new horse and begrudingly continued on.
Artax was a much better horse, I got through a lot of the game with her and everything was enjoyable once more. It then happened again, random enemy mugging. Only this time they had a minigun that shredded me and Artax instantly, with zero chance to react. It was at this moment that I lost all desire to try and enjoy the game, all bets were off. The horse it gave me was it, I used this one to the end of the game. No name. No attachment. I was an empty man and only wanted to see this through to the end.
This game was a slog that I really am glad I got on sale. I did not have a good experience with it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that genuinely should be a live-action Western movie instead. For as good as the story and writing is (I won't deny this, but I will avoid discussion to keep this spoiler free), the game itself that this runs on only hinders it at every turn. After 50 hours of this I can honestly say this game broke me on several levels, none of which were from any impactful story moments or groundbreaking gameplay. This game broke me through sheer frustration at how stiff the scripting was to how terrible its gunplay felt, this game broke me through the absolute slog its last 2 main story chapters were, this game broke me through finally starting to get some enjoyment out of the experience only for that to be completely rug pulled from me and ripped to shreds multiple times.
GRAPHICS (4K, Ultra settings)
I wanted to get this point out of the way first; while I appreciate visual design and fluid animation in games, there comes a point where it becomes completely unneeded and distracting. Red Dead Redemption 2 blasted through that wall for me, to where I felt like the aesthetics were just a coat of paint over the sheer clunkiness of under its hood. Having to cook each piece of meat or tonic at a fire or cleaning your gun for 5 seconds and watching the same animation over, and over, and over got so old I avoided hunting/maintanence alltogether. Walking through the towns and cities was nice, but I could care less about seeing each set of foot/wagon prints, nor do I care about individual blades of grass. Whatever poor artist that was chained to their desk to crunch on this I feel for, but only because they were made to work on something nobody gives a fuck about seeing. The water in this game looked terrible to me, someone who has a 7900XT gpu and set the water on Ultra. It looks like gel more than water, the entire body should not move when you do. Pokemon Legends Arceus has better looking water to me because at least motion of water is localized to the object displacing it rather than the whole segment of stream moving like a piece of fabric. I additionally had other weird graphical issues with finer objects like flowers and hair causing extreme tearing, but that I will let slide as that could be due to FSR, the shaders, or something else unintended.
RIGIDITY OF SCRIPTING
One main thought/thing I noticed early on with this game was how rigid some of the missions and ai scripting was. Was I overly sensitive to this after having just come off of Deus Ex, the ultimate genre-defining Immersive Sim? Perhaps. Would it have still been an issue otherwise? Absolutely. Even in one of the first few missions I felt this, where you had to hide behind a rock for cover. But wait, oh no you arent at the right spot to hop the fence so we won't let you at all, you have to walk 5 feet to the left and THEN we will let you. All the while in this sequence you were somehow detected so now the stealth is broken and your gang is yelling at you because you didn't walk the EXACT way Rockstar wants you to. This then happens later on when riding with your gang; I rode up a rocky pass for a better vantage point on a camp but OOPS you fail the mission because you were more than 10 feet away and not directly riding into the ambush WE setup for you because we built setpieces like legos. I had this issue throughout the game, I was able to work past it at times, other moments it would rear its ugly head and rubber band me back into position. "Oh wait a moment, I know you are taking cold damage which we JUST told you about as soon as you dismounted, but because you left your horse you can't go back on it to change. Your punishment is to stand A Framed on top of your horse while we Divine Intervention style snap you back on the ground on the side of the horse." I understand the careful design of missions, but in the same token there has to be some form of give and take or freedom associated with it. In some missions they give you that freedom and punish you for it, but in a lot of them they would rather just fail the mission outright and send you back to a checkpoint. At one point in the story you are in a shootout with a massive gator coming at your boat. I could not figure out the magic script for this encounter to where I would survive it, unloading all my guns did nothing, Dead Eye unloading of my guns did nothing either. I had no choice to skip that checkpoint, as I had nothing to go off of for what else to try. There are other moments like these that will be touched on in the other section as well, trust me.
GUNPLAY
By and around the weakest aspect of this game for me. Gun differences didn't matter at all when only headshots are a 100% kill, 100% of the time. Otherwise its a crapshoot. I directly coorelate my enjoyment of a sequece by the sheer number of enemies you have to face. The more enemies you have to shoot, the worst the guns were and the worse I felt. This was especially apparent at the end, when you are fighting literal armies of men. Each gun is slow, clunky, and difficult. None of them were standout, one size fits all weapons. They were all bad in larger combat fights unless you spent 5 minutes for each wave behind cover. Not only this, but I ran into the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced with a combat system. I had a fight with an enemy at point blank range, I unload an entire repeater into his chest. Not a SINGLE hit registered; only because he was scripted to be killed by Generic Indian Warrior #4 ONLY via a "badass" tomahawk kill animation some intern probably spent a whole year making. The rage I felt in that moment overshadowed all else, and that was on my second attempt at the mission after my game crashed during the ending cinematic forcing me to play the entire mission over.
No spoilers here either, but the final FINAL gun duel with <REDACTED> was the stupidest, most bullshit fight. Completely pointless. I unloaded an entire magnum into their skull, visible hole and all and they just walk it off like its nothing. Garbage.
OTHER THOUGHTS
After 50 hours of this, I really can only say I'm burnt out on Open World games, more specifically Rockstar open world games. Majority of the side content I found were all useless collectibles. Which is fine, but not to the degree of what's on offer in RDR2. It was WAY too much padding out of a game. I don't want to devote 100s of hours of my life filling out compendium after compendium for little to no reward. Thats asinine. Before I get comments asking "oh did you see so and so, their quest is pivitol to character development," my rebuttal to this statement is, if its such a cool key moment why the hell is it not part of the main story and missable? I'm not stopping to smell roses and waste time here, unless such things are marked on my map so I know where to go.
The bounty and honor system in this game was also insanely bad for me. If bandanas are your way of commiting crimes without being noticed, why the hell am I still getting bounties for completing story missions that REQUIRE me to do crimes? Why do you encourage me to loot bodies at cleared out bases, yet punish me with an army of bounty hunters/lawmen after 1 minute of mission completion and a wanted level? I don't get it. I went with a High Honor playthough as a roleplay of a Gunslinger that wants to be reformed. I hated how much your gang hates this choice and actively call you a pansy for being a good person, when its obvious that is what Arthur wants the entire time. Let me play how I want to, don't further ridicule me.
There is a segment in Chapter 5 where you are sent to a new map where all there is is 4-5 missions. Absolute worst of the worst section. Made no sense to the story, added nothing apart from one action a character takes that we already knew they were capable of doing. Never discussed again afterward. Why is this here? Useless filler.
If you are playing this on PC, do yourselves a favor and use a controller. This game is designed for it. I have no utter idea why Rockstar thinks Mouse and Keyboard should be layed out by a masochist but some frustration was alleviated for me by switching to controller.
The real thing, the REAL THING that fully broke me and made me dislike this game as much as I do though, was said in the opening dedication of this review. I bonded with the first horse you get in the first mission of the story. This horse carried me thorough the first 1.5 chapters, until a random mugging event where I was locked into the prompt to surrender. By the time I was able to break out of the scripting and pull my gun out, I was already dead along with my horse. The game saves this and counts your horse as dead. No chance to revive. I respawned in a field with no horse in sight. I wanted to quit right then and there, but I managed to eventually find a new horse and begrudingly continued on.
Artax was a much better horse, I got through a lot of the game with her and everything was enjoyable once more. It then happened again, random enemy mugging. Only this time they had a minigun that shredded me and Artax instantly, with zero chance to react. It was at this moment that I lost all desire to try and enjoy the game, all bets were off. The horse it gave me was it, I used this one to the end of the game. No name. No attachment. I was an empty man and only wanted to see this through to the end.
This game was a slog that I really am glad I got on sale. I did not have a good experience with it.
NoChillBen
3 months ago