BENGALURU: When I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2, what came to mind most often was a sense of surprise. Surprise at the game’s intricacies, yes; at its foibles, certainly. However, the flavour that surfaced most often was a sense of astonishment that Rockstar managed to make a game like this in 2018.
First, an overview — RDR 2 is a prequel to the critically-acclaimed Red Dead Redemption, and tells the story of Arthur Morgan.
Arthur is a loyal member of the Dutch van der Linde gang, and so shares screentime with some characters you might recognize if you played the first game; including its protagonist, one John Marston. After a heist goes wrong, the gang is forced to flee the city of Blackwater into the mountains and then eastwards.
In the beginning, the game moves at a glacial pace; so much so, in fact, that many people gave up on it in those early stages. This is not a game that’s interested in getting to the action quick or clearly signposting everything — RDR 2 is going to take its time setting the scene, and the devil take the rest. If that also means that you’re not always sure how certain systems work or how to go about accomplishing any particular thing, well, you can’t make a Wild West without some uncertainty.
There’s just so much packed into this game that trying to list all the gameplay mechanics would be a fool’s errand, so I’m skipping that bit entirely. Instead, let’s talk about the world that this game comes with. For my money, Rockstar has created the finest open world that gaming has ever seen. The sheer amount of detail packed into this is scarcely believable, and would probably require something like a few years to properly appreciate. It also happens to be the best-looking world you’ll see, with graphics good enough to verge on photorealistic in some instances and to make you just put the controller down and stare in others. It’s a beautiful, magnetic and immersive world, and I honestly didn’t want to finish the game just to stay.
RDR 2 is a game that will only properly be judged in the years to come, I suspect. I think it’s a staggering achievement of a game, and that’s easy to see now; but I have a strong suspicion that it will come to be regarded as a masterpiece and one of the finest examples of what a video game can be. It’s all the more impressive when you consider that it’s a follow-up to a critical darling and an all-time-great in its own right; even with the weight of those expectations, Rockstar managed to exceed them.
If you point a six-shooter at my head, I think that RDR is still the better story — chiefly because it’s more tightly focused and coherent — but RDR 2 might just be the better game. Those are words I thought I’d never type, but there you go. No matter what your gaming tastes are, you should play RDR2 — games like this don’t come around too often.