Jacob Poller-Red Dead Redemption 2 Review

  *Major Spoilers*

  Red Dead Redemption 2 was released in 2018 as a prequel to the original Red Dead Redemption. The original game is set in 1911, and John Marston (main character) has to deal with the reprecctions of his previos life in the Van Der Linde gang. Red Dead 2 is set 12 years before that and shows the lifestyle of the gang through Arthur Morgan. 

    Coming 8 years after the original game, avid fans of the series had high expectations. Afterall the original game was heralded as a masterpiece, and from a story telling perspective it was, but it was severely limited by the technology. But with Red Dead 2, they took full advantag of everything this generation had to offer. Coming in at over 100 gigabytes, at launch, it took a serious toll on peoples console storage. Now I had extra storage on my console, but it was still a problem. After about 10 hours of downloading,  I was ready to launch the game.... it was worth every second of waiting. The very first thing  you notice in game is how beautiful the enviroments are. Every snowflake and blade of grass is beautifully rendered. The graphics, on console, are so unbelievably good. But with all of those beautiful graphics there are serious drawbacks. My console could not handle that amount of usage. In some cases there were severe frame drops and sometimes the game outright crashed. But with all the tech stuff out of the way, lets talk about the game itself.

    The first thing the game does is plunge you in the middle of the story. The first mission shows the gang after a robbery turnedsour. This robbery is the catalyst for everything in the rest of the game. I will say that it is the greatest opening mission I've ever played. Instead of a boring tutorial to show you the controls, it lets you learn them as you progress through the level. The level design, for the most part, is the standard RPG style (Go to this place, get this, get out, and then theres a shootout).  But the story that is told by the levels is amazing. It takes a diehard believer of the gang and shows his growth and how he starts to question the leader and his "plan."  And at the end of it all, after 106 hours of story, you see his redemption. He saves John Marston (his enemy turned best friend) from the gang, but dies doing it. 

    The whole game in my eyes is nothing short of a modern masterpiece. Having played both games, I see exactly what the devs wanted to do and they nailed it. Every mission offers a piece of new information about Arthur and the world around him, and I love that. By the end of the game, during the last cutscene I found myself tearing up, as the sun rises above Arthur for the last time.  Even despites its few draw backs, I will always recommend this gameto anyone who asks. In my eyes this is what every modern RPG should aspire to be.