Red Dead Redemption 2

Red dead redemption 2 was one of the biggest releases of 2018. It was a sort of prequel to the previous game "Red Dead Redemption." RDR2 (Red Dead Redemption 2) was highly praised by everyone and most reviewers gave it a perfect or nearly a perfect score. A lot of people have also praised the story of the game as one of the best there is, but a huge open world game like this is much more than a story and a review should look at all of the aspects of the game from gameplay to the comparison of the previous installment.


Story

This part will obviously include some spoilers. I will try to keep them to a minimum but if you still haven't played the game just skip this part. The story is the biggest part of RDR2 and there's a lot of it. Only the main story takes tens and tens of hours to complete and the game also includes plenty of side missions. At the beginning the game might story wise feel like a regular wild west story but it will get more and more intense as the story goes on and just as you think you've completed it, it offers you even more excitement and a very satisfying ending. In short the story is the best part of the game and one of the best original stories in video games.


Gameplay

The gameplay can be tweaked in the options in many ways, but most important is setting the aimbot to a max so that someone like me who isn't used to a controller can actually hit something. This is very important in a game like this that is very focused on the gun play. There are of course several other aspects to the gameplay such as riding a horse, the menus and the map in general. Most of these work just as they should. The only problem being riding the horse, especially galloping. The many times that I ran the horse into a tree that the horse just seemed to be magnetized on, or galloping over a small stone that the horse trips on and falls over to the ground dying. This was especially nice during horse race side missions that you would instantly lose if your horse died during the race and these horse racing characters were not easy to find in the wast world.


Sound design

The music and the voice acting in this game is brilliant. Other sounds are quite nice as well.


Open world

The world that you play in is massive. Maybe even too massive. The world is full of empty space that of course looks amazing but doesn't really add anything otherwise. Especially the forest areas that as so full of trees that it's almost impossible to get through them without the horse aiming itself into at least one of the trees. It would be nice if I could at least get to the next town before completely running out of horse revivals. Huge worlds have their own good sides but in this case I wish that it were a bit more compact. Spending most of your time travelling in almost empty areas is not fun.


Comparison to the previous one

Red Dead Redemption was released in 2010. So 8 years before the release of RDR2 but in the end not much has changed in those 8 years. The biggest difference you can see right away is of course the graphical improvements. The gameplay is a little bit improved but mostly the same. The game obviously has a different story but other than that it isn't much different. Even the map is partially the same which is nice in it's own way. Seeing some of the places what they were a decade earlier and in improved graphics is cool but I wish they would have spent some of that time actually making a different game.


The review

After all the hype that surrounded RDR2 I expected it to be the next coming messiah and changing the way we perceive  open world games. But instead we pretty much got the same old game with a new story. It isn't all that bad that the game is similar since it is of the same franchise but still. As previously mentioned, the story was amazing and the best bit of the whole game but I don't think that just the story justifies the high scores the game has been getting thus far. I still think that it is a good game just not that good.

Overall thinking about all the aspects of the game I would give it a solid 7/10