Tyler Krenzin
Lantern Staff
How do you know when you’re looking at the next greatest work of art? Does it capture some feeling in you nothing else has, or does it make you think beyond belief or maybe the piece of art was made by Rockstar? Rockstar games has brought us the third installment of the Red Dead series with Red Dead Redemption 2, which at first glance can be confusing, but yes there are three games and the third one is called the second: Just get over it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 follows the story of the Dutch Van der Linde gang. Users play as Arthur Morgan, the right-hand man to Dutch Van Der Linde, as he tries to help to keep everyone in the group safe from the Pinkerton Detective agency. The story almost feels like a game of cat and mouse, a chase scene that lasts the whole game. Honestly, it’s hard to come up with any qualms about the story, as all the characters are fleshed out. This shows up almost to a fault, a side antagonist named Colm O’Driscoll, leader of a rival gang that is also on the run, is a character that has no redeeming qualities, and Rockstar does a wonderful job making you hate him. This shows with Red Dead Redemption 2, players attacking a person named Colm O’Driscoll on Twitter, and while many won’t understand, Colm understood that it was all in good fun.
As far as graphics, understand I played on an Xbox One S, it’s absolutely stunning. It was hard for me to believe that they were going to come up with graphics better than Grand Theft Auto V, but it almost seems like they overhauled everything, making it run smother than most games do at launch, and that is just part of the Rockstar experience. They spend five to six years working on a game not because they don’t want to work as hard, but because they spend every second of it double checking work that had been triple checked the week before. Rarely in Red Dead Redemption 2 did I ever feel like a part of the game hadn’t been fleshed out enough. You can interact with almost every Non Playable Character, and there are countless random events that will have you scratching your head thinking, “Who at Rockstar had the time to think of this?”
No mission ever feels like it’s a burden to complete, and while the game isn’t necessarily hard, it has difficulty spikes to keep things interesting. And one of my biggest complaints from GTA V is resolved. It never seems like you only have to do missions from one to three characters to progress the story. You never know who will be the lead on the next mission, and while at the time of writing this, I’m only 60 percent through the main story, the story arc has had enough twists and turns that I haven’t been bored. The system of only being able to carry a certain number of guns seemed like it was going to bother me the whole game, but in reality it just makes you think before you leave your horse “what guns do I need?” and “can I get away with using two shotguns?”
Red Dead Redemption 2 brings a quality that we have grown to expect from the developers at Rockstar, an expectation that they blew out of the park. It’s hard to call a game “Game of the Year” only two weeks into its release, but it would be far more difficult to find a reason for why it isn’t deserving of the title. 9.9/10
Bonus rating of the decapitating shotgun: 10/10
