Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

When talking about the masterpiece in the gaming industry, our mind clicks only a few names, and Red Dead Redemption tops that list. Rockstar Games did a marvelous job creating this absolute combination of the story in an open-world adventure. Red Dead Redemption 2 surpassed Grand Theft Auto of Rockstar Games and proved to be the company’s best production in recent years. It is an open-world game in which a man is trying to get back to his family and the world where he is no longer welcome. The game carries a rare western theme and present you with the marvels of adventures and long journey.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Mathew Bradford

Story
Gameplay
Graphics and Sound

Summary

If you have time and an appetite for the story-based open-world game, then Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best you can play. It gives you gameplay that mesmerizes you and satisfies your gaming needs.

4.3
Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 4
Credits: Rockstar Games

Red Dead Redemption is the prequel to the famous Red Dead Redemption, which also featured an open-world adventure. We can declare it the last two decades as you do not see this type of game more often in the market. In the first Redemption, we see an outlaw, John Marston’s story, and carry cowboys’ theme in the world with established civilization. While in the new part of Redemption, we have a story where civilization is still coming, and the law is not well established. The story moves around Marston’s former crew featuring Van der Linde Gang and involves shooting and robbing with the gangs all over the place.

The Red Dead Redemption gives exposure to the open-world American West and provides us with a glimpse of the past world without laws. The game presents the real power of graphics combined with an epic gameplay. The Rockstar Games’ current hot deal gives you a clear view of their powerful developers team. It took them eight years to develop and process the game, and the result is more than satisfying. This happens when you have a big team of developers with infinite time and budget.

The Red Dead Redemption 2 provides an almost similar experience to the Grand Theft Auto series; however, the theme is different. It features the era of cowboys opposite to the modern cities of GTA. The story is solid here, forcing you to indulge in it and give exception pleasure while wandering over the horses in the Wild West.

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The Story

Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 3
Credits: Rockstar Games

Red Dead Redemption 2 story takes you back straight to the 1890s, where a gang travels to the Wild West of America with a character named Arthur Morgan. Arthur travels with his gang member to a city known as Blackwater and plans robbery. Upon the wrong execution, the theft went wrong. They move towards the east part and join the gang to collect resources and food. In their journey, they loot trains and pass through different situations by undertaking several missions. Arthur needs to plan the activities and make decisions regarding his gang and its members’ care.

The game’s storyline is pure gold and developed with Rockstar Writer’s dedication that you sometimes immerse in the dialogues and forget that you are playing a PC game. Many games have similar gameplay and story but no one narrative the story in the way that we see in Red Dead Redemption 2. We circle the story in the entire game, and the delivery of dialogues and chat between the characters feels natural. You begin the game with a strong storyline aided

Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 5
Credits: Rockstar Games

Van der Linde and his gang and represent an iconic display of Redemption. The run consist of locations having snow-covered mountains, and characters experience starving and freezing. After they screw up on a job, one gang member dies during the campaign. All of them are searching for freedom in their lives by scoring big and get themselves to their desired destination.

The story’s fate does not end well as all of the gangs’ expectation does not meet in the end. They didn’t get their hands on a big score and failed to gain freedom from their past. A desire for a peaceful life and a good lifestyle ends in a tragic happening. The last member of the gang hunts down by John Marston and Dutch Van Der Linde to escape from fate, hurls himself from the cliff, and gets to its fatal end. John Marston does not live long and gets killed by the federal agents. His wife Abigail joins him in the aftermath and dies soon after John’s death.

The story written in Dead Red Redemption 2 gives immense emotional moments that you get hits emotionally and provide you some of the eye-watering events. This all drama became possible only due to the excellent writing, motion capture, and depicting those moments with pure acting. Unlike many games, the characters look so real and engage you in the story. The game development plays a crucial role in revitalizing the user experience and contributing to the gameplay’s overall enrichment with an excellent storyline.

Sometimes the story feels so long that it takes ages to complete the game. You play a dozen hours to cover a portion of the game. A large part of the game takes place in dialogues and cutscenes. A long journey accompanied by horse riding in an open world provides you with events that may look tiresome but engaging at the same time. Few missions do not make sense to you, but they contribute to the story’s endgame and show the characters’ general nature. In one mission, you need a boat and empty it. In this process, you have to open few crawfish traps that the boat is carrying. One mission involves going to a bar and getting drunk enough to vomit all over the field and have no clue about its contribution to the story. But this happens in the same genre that you do missions that might not link with the story, but overall are required to keep the character alive and show their social sides.

The game’s story has a bunch of stuff, and you never seem to cover all that in one go, but its needs reorganizations and much editing. Few events seem to be out of order but still manage to indulge well in the story. Overall it takes more time to finish off the game than a usual open-world game. But the time invested in the game worth every moment and gave an in-depth experience of life in Wild West with a lot of expeditions.

The story itself is long, but it is not dull and covers all of the events nicely. You get to see everything finished to a conclusion and nothing left unanswered. Some moments make you forget everything that comes before and dark events. You enjoy every event and get through missions to the end of the game in a satisfied manner.

Gameplay

Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 6
Credits: Rockstar Games

Rockstar Games is an open-world adventure expert due to its famous GTA series that offers wild fun without any restrictions. But unlike the GTA series, Red Dead Redemption 2 carry you throughout the story as a character of Arthur Morgan struggling through his life in the 1890s. You can do many things aside from the story, but the central theme keeps you bound to the story and impresses you with diverse gameplay.

The game whirls around, spending eternity to discover things in the game are present in the game inside its vast story. The map covers the American topology and theme of the 1890s with a vast area to wander and unlock missions. The landscape in the game is beautiful, with a mix of mountains and bare lands. You start the massive map on snow-covered mountains of the west and make your way through the countryside. As you go further inside the map, the landscape keeps changing and gets to the area’s more realistic look. You encounter several beautiful areas: lakes, rivers, small towns, farms, forest trails, and plains. The beautiful landscape with realistic graphics sometimes feels so real that you mistake it for a movie. Aside from the scenery, there are much more things that you never get enough of the map and open world in the game.

A much detailing in the maps presents that you see everything in the town precisely designed. The roads, alleys, bars, and buildings in the town show meticulous details. Your characters interact with everything present in the towns and maps, and you feel a real connection towards them. Everything that involves in the gameplay keeps reminding you of the realistic approach of the game. Either you are brawling in the bars, or outside you see evident damage and effects. For example, you can see your cloth covered in mud and blood as you fight with the human allies. Even you can see blood or dirt on the character’s face, and you are reminded about it by comments of the people about your cleanliness. You have the choice to shoot them or ignore them and carry on your journey in the game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is about fighting the humans and getting through the story straight to the ending, but it involves different instances of fighting wild animals and nature. You can find yourself stuck in the forest, and while enjoying the beautiful scenery, you can suddenly get chased by a pack of wolves. As you were busy enjoying the scene and forget to check the map, you remained unaware of the incoming threat. Once they get near, you have merely a few moments to get back to the horse and get your weapons. In this case, you can either run on the horse and fight back with the weapon mounted on the horse. As the horse is away, you might get yourself injured and get through medical care.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 8
Credits: Rockstar Games

It’s not only about the wild wolves, but you can come across other animals like wild bears. There are also bounty hunters searching for you and can get to you at any moment in the game. You have to keep an eye on all of the incoming threats and face the situations. The game continues so that any event can happen, and it won’t trigger an alarm before the event. Instead, you have to keep an eye on minimap to keep yourself alert from upcoming threats. The world in Red Dead Redemption 2 is equally beautiful and dangerous and poses all the dangers that a human can face in the real world. If you are a fan of this type of gameplay, then chances are there that you might play the game the whole day without even getting tired or bored.

The gameplay in Red Dead Redemption 2 has given full attention to even minor details. You, as an Arthur, need to take care of yourself and your horse just like in real life. Keeping yourself healthy, restored, and living to foresee the events in the game is very vital. You need to be a real cowboy for your horse and take good care of it without any delays. You need to pat, feed, and clean the horse during the mission. Also, health is an essential factor to monitor during gameplay. There is a bond between you and your horse, and it gets stronger with the care you show for him. Arthurs horse can also hide weapons and equipment on it, but there is a clear limit on stacking the weapons. Rockstar Games has given attention to even minor details like your horse shows low performance and suffers if you overload him. Also, there are fun events like getting a kick if you try to steal items from other horses and occasionally see your horse pooping during the game.

Your character in the game needs to feed correctly during the game and need good hunting skills to overcome the situation. You either chase a deer in the wild or use your skills to get to it and stealthily kill it. You can trade the skin or cook the deer once you have successfully hunted. To give you a real-life wilderness experience, you can camp anywhere in the wild. While camping, you can select any location to ear, sleep, and taking a rest.

The fight between the characters in Red Dead Redemption 2 always fascinates you in several ways. No detail left out when developing the game. It doesn’t matter if you are shooting at enemies with pistols or shotguns; the mechanics work the same way. You should know the skills of your weapons and should have proper knowledge of fights. Aiming for the head and other body parts results in different outcomes and can decide your fate. You have to practice and see what works well for different enemies and weapons.

There are bow and arrow in-game that act differently from real life as you do not need to take care of wind velocity and other stuff while aiming for the enemies. One more exciting thing about fights is that you can throw a lasso to catch the enemy. Once you succeed in this, you can tighten the lasso and drag the enemy behind the horse.

During the fights, you eventually kill the enemies and get loot from them or throw the bodies away and continue your journey. But sometimes, you get morality between you and killing the enemies, and you stop for a brief moment deciding whether to kill him or not. In case you choose them to free, they will again try to attack you, resulting in you killing them. So keep aware of these situations and also keep alert from NPCs. If they see you killing the enemy, they go straight to the law enforcement and report you unless you kill them and get rid of them before it happens.

There is a lot of drama and gameplay in Red Dead Redemption 2, and we can write it the whole day. But we are letting that on you to discover the rest of the most unique and beautiful world.

Graphics and Sounds

Red Dead Redemption 2 - image 1
Credits: Rockstar Games

Graphics are a big positive for Red Dead Redemption 2 success. The PC graphics are more accurate and crisp to make things look real. However, to see the actual performance and better graphics, your PC needs a good specification and above mid-range GPU. Due to its intensive use of resources, a good PC handles the graphics better and avoids any frame drops.

Everything in the game is well detailed, and textures represent how you get a whole look of materials without any quality loss. When laying down on the grass, you see every glass blade separately. Woven clothes, weapons, landscape, guns, and character faces give you a detailed look. When playing the game for the first few hours, you notice the graphical venture’s an evident miracle. The lighting in the scenes is fantastic and gives you a glimpse of every aspect. The ratio of light and dark in the moonlight is well balanced. Whereas in the snowstorm, you feel every bit of detail that you should get in real life. Despite overall graphical excellence, ray tracing is missing from the game, and Rockstar Games might reserve it for the upcoming titles. Many aftermarket mods are available with ray tracing that improves the gameplay to further excellence and gives more graphics details.

What the game does right

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a fantastic combination of open-world and visual excellence. It is the most ambitious open-world game that we have seen in decades. You can get enormous gameplay along with an exciting storyline. The whole game is a unique concept, and you do not feel any copy-paste work. The story is compelling and filled with numerous events and characters that are unforgettable. The visuals are appropriately developed and give you a detailed look at true gaming marvel.

What brings it Down

Despite the graphical excellence and strong storyline, the game feels too prolong to hours and feels slow-paced sometimes. Sometimes visual bugs and glitches can pop up and interrupt the smooth gameplay. But these are minor issues and usually get corrected with time.

Minimum System Requirements

Red Dead Redemption 2 minimum requirements are following

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • Operating System: Windows 7 – Service Pack 1
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K / AMD FX-6300
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 2GB / AMD Radeon R9 280 3GB
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 150 GB available space
  • Sound Card: Direct X Compatible

Recommended Requirements

Recommended requirements for Red Dead Redemption 2 are following

  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 – April 2018 Update (v1803)
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4770K / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
  • Memory: 12 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
  • Storage: 150 GB available space
  • Sound Card: Direct X Compatible

Parental Guide

The game has an M rating because of the violence involved in the game. Although the game’s primary goal is not violence, the game carries violent activities throughout the story. Most of the time, you spend time in non-violent actions and helping people in their daily tasks. You get along the story buying some fancy clothes and talking to the friends.

Violence in the game is more in single-player as compared to the multiplayer mode. The straight M rating is due to the gunshots and intense shooting incidents in the game. However, you don’t see the blood everywhere and only see it when you shoot head, legs, and hands. Leg or headshot is brutal, and gore is more visible. You can go nuts and attack civilians that a violent activity. The blood is not visible for most of the gunshots when displayed from far.

In the game, we see occasional use of strong language, and in multiplayer, there is little involvement of the language. While sex is not present overall in the game and an incidence of sex occurs at a level when you interrupt a couple having sex, but that is up to you.

Alcohol is present throughout the game, and characters get drunk and smoke frequently. You get several events when you go to a bar and drink and talk to friends.

Final Verdict

Red Dead Redemption 2 is undoubtedly a fantastic game, and we can declare it the best game of the last two decades due to its immersive story and gameplay. It carries stunning actions and realistic graphics.

If you have time and appetite for the story-based open-world game, then Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best you can play. It gives you gameplay that mesmerizes you and satisfies your gaming needs.

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Mathew Bradford

Hey! Mathew Bradford Here, A proud member of GamingExpert Team. I love playing games with new gaming gadgets. Our team is here to help you find the best gaming products, reviews of videos games and to help you decide which one is best for your. You can contact me if you need further assistance.