 Okay, so I haven't had much to play lately. I've been playing Dark Siders 2 and 3 and the game below which I'll be making a video about. But I was reminded in the comments in the last video that I'd said I would do a video on Red Dead Redemption 2. And I'll be honest about why I haven't until now. This is probably the first time I kinda sorta censored myself because my opinion is so wildly different than everyone else that it's kinda crazy. So today, let's take a look at Red Dead 2, a game that swings wildly from titanic achievement to frustration simulator at a moment's notice. We'll examine what it does well, what it does badly and overall why it left me so conflicted. And I need to give fair warning here, if this is the kinda thing that's gonna make you mad, don't watch, I guess, after the logo. A Brief History Rockstars are making high quality games for an awful long time now and they've settled into a very familiar formula. Now that's not a critique. This is an Assassin's Creed where the game settled into a homogeneous yearly addition nearly indistinguishable from each other. The open world mayhem sandbox has become nearly synonymous with Rockstar because they basically invented the formula and they've never released a game that didn't feel A. ambitious and B. like it was a labor of love. And before I go further, this one does too. So I wanna make it clear that my critique of Red Dead 2 isn't like my usual cranky critiques where I get pissed off at the laziness or safeness of a game. Red Dead 2 isn't a game where I ask, why does this even exist? It's a game where I ask, why is this annoying thing in the game? To really drive home, just how successful they've been, we should take just a minute to look at some of the previous games. The original Grand Theft Auto is interesting to look at as a game caught between eras. It featured GTA's core design ideals in its infant form. It was a top down 2D arcade style title in which players earned points to progress to the next map. And true to the enduring gameplay loop to this day, you earned those points by causing mayhem. The game reviewed poorly for something that would never happen to Rockstar again. Bad graphics. And for something that remains to this day a major gripe, a shitty control scheme. Either way, the late 90s was a period when games were just starting to push the limit on what they could get away with and GTA was right at the forefront of those discussions. When you think about the games controversy from McDonnell, you'll think of Doom, Postal, and GTA. Even though the game was panned for a variety of shortcomings, it was praised for the one thing that would become a staple of Rockstar's design. Player freedom. Right from the get go, one of Rockstar's core philosophies was allowing players to do the things they could not in other games. Want to steal a car? Yep. Want to run over pedestrians? Yep. You can do that too. Want to shoot police? Yep. You can do that. GTA 2 iterated on GTA by adding a bunch of quality of life improvements, dynamic NPC interactions, side missions like driving a taxi and generally allowing for even more mayhem and chaos. Though it still had the same top-down perspective, the game reviewed much, much better and sold extremely well, setting up the third game in the series. It's GTA 3 that is the first game in the modern series. It had every piece of what makes a Rockstar game what it is today. It had a real and compelling story, characters that you learned about through scripted, well-designed, linear missions with very strict fail states which remains today by the way. In between those missions you could roam the open world. It had third-person shooting, though no cover system yet, and it had a shitload of controversy about its depiction of sex and criminal violence as well as its treatment of women. It also sold 14.5 million copies and is still considered one of the most important video games of all time. It appears on almost every best ever list written. From GTA 3 onward, Rockstar would basically iterate and perfect the formula. Every game that followed, including the Red Dead titles, would follow these basic core design imperatives. Player freedom mechanically and crucially morally. Extreme violence, anti-social behavior as it means to progress the game, a disdain for established cultural norms, and very strong stories and characters who all work as anti-heroes. In 2004, Take 2 Interactive, aware that Rockstar was the most successful of their labels, bought a studio in California and renamed them Rockstar San Diego. The dev team there had been working on several games, including one that was going to be published by Capcom. Only one of the projects that Angel Studios had in the works was continued and finished under Rockstar. The game, a fairly linear third-person action title with a focus on story and featuring criminals in the Old West, was an easy fit for a dev team looking to diversify out from just the GTA games that have been releasing every year or two up until that point. Red Dead Revolver like GTA 1 had the seeds of what would come, but it wasn't until the sequel, which was heavily modeled on GTA, that it really took shape as what it is today. And GTA with Horses ended up being a much better fit than anyone could have imagined. Red Dead Redemption is, in my humble opinion, one of the best open-world story-based action games ever made. GTA has always had good stories and moments of serious emotion, but it's also always been ready to trade that on a moment's notice for cynicism and satire. It's impossible to talk about Rockstar's titles without acknowledging the strongly libertarian themes within the games. The violence and the sex in the games is a sort of statement that they will not be restrained by cultural values. And this in general works pretty well most of the time. GTA V is excellent social satire at times, even if it occasionally veers into cruelty or misanthropy. But by placing GTA in the end of the Old West, Rockstar was able to examine the last era of wilderness liberty and contrast it to today better than GTA ever could. And without the easy targets that modern consumer culture affords and our familiarity with all of the obvious hypocrisy in our society to lean on, they were able to focus less on harsh critique and more on sincere examination. And to be honest, GTA V's anti-consumerist libertarian values often come up kind of schizophrenic, because this is made by a tremendous publicly traded company that wants to get all the money in the world. So you know, eh. The first Red Dead featured a fantastic and thought-provoking story, wonderful for its time graphics, solid for its era third person shooting gameplay, and a more immersive experience in general because Goofy Mayhem wasn't its main selling point. It was an outlaw simulator, and much closer to an RPG than GTA is, and it did that unbelievably well. And of course, it probably has the greatest ending of any game ever. Actually, the epilogue with his son was kind of stupid and annoying, but John Marston's ending was painful and memorable. It was a triumph in almost every way, and its universal praise made a sequel all but certain. Red Dead 2, the game says no. When Red Dead 2 was announced, it was met with universal excitement from players, including me. Red Dead 1 remains one of my favorite games ever, including its really great zombie DLC. It was a nearly perfect game with incredible production values, graphics, sound design, music, art, direction, all of it combined for a deeply immersive setting, and it paired that quality with really good gameplay. It's easy to forget now, but at the time of its release, the horse riding mechanics in Red Dead were a tremendous step forward from everything that had come before. If you're going to do a game in the Old West, you need to get horses right, and Red Dead 1 pretty much has set the standard for a horse control scheme. To this very day, it remains one of Rockstar's most playable games with a relatively intuitive control scheme and a large, but not obnoxiously large map. Because horse riding felt so wonderfully fresh, and because the map felt so unique and alive, the game never felt empty. Red Dead 2 has officially reached the point where a map is too fucking big. The first game lasted dozens of hours, and had you traversing a map that was more than large enough to offer a ton of variety, while also being reasonable enough that it wasn't a chore to move around. Red Dead 2 has a map that is four fucking times larger than the first game. It's larger than GTA 5's map. Let that sink in for a second, man. GTA 5 has a ridiculously large map, and in that game you can use planes, and helicopters, and race cars. This is a map larger than GTA 5. Four times larger than Red Dead Redemption 1, and you will be traversing it basically on a horse. Except when it dies, or gets lost, or your mission takes you out of range of your horse's hearing. Then you'll spend 30 minutes walking to a stable or your camp. The fact that this is even possible is fucking mind-blowing to me, and we'll get into that a little bit later on, but for now just mull the fact, it is possible to have to walk 30 minutes of empty wilderness because the game's only traversal tool can die or run away. The entirety of Red Dead Redemption 1's map is in this game as a single zone. Now, I can easily imagine a way to have this big ass map and still make traversing it reasonable for someone like me who simply does not have the patience to backtrack through the woods for hours and hours. PS, if I wanted to do that, I would go camping in the real fucking woods. I don't want to do that. I've never wanted to do that. With a map this big, some systems need to be in place to make moving about it less toxically annoying for people, but the game says no. Want a reasonable fast travel system? No. You'll have to unlock it several dozen hours into the game, which is fine in and of itself, I guess, but then it will only take you to a few spots and you can only travel from your camp, but never fast travel back to your camp. Why? Missions sometimes end in the middle of nowhere. Why must the game force me to ride back for 9 minutes 25 times? I get it. It's to make me marvel at the beauty of their maps, but you know what, fuck off, man. If I want to marvel at the beauty, I will make time to do that. Rockstar games have always had player freedom as a core tenant of the design, but many of these forced inconveniences for the sake of realistic immersion stripped that freedom away. The game is constantly saying no. You have to walk. No. Can't call your horse. It's too far away. No. You can't use the stagecoach because you have a bounty. The game is just always forcing you to ride or walk for 10 minutes to get back to camp to start another mission, and with a map this big, it's bound to be pretty empty most places. The random encounters in this game are okay. Nothing fantastic, mind you, just okay, but they are astonishingly rare. I would wager a full 60% or more of your playtime is spent riding your horse to and from your camp with literally nothing to do but stare at how amazing the game looks. You take on plot critical missions by meeting up with members of your gang. When they're in your camp or a fast travel location, it's great, but often they're in the middle of nowhere, meaning you've got to fast travel near them and then ride your horse. It'd be nice if I could simply fast travel to any story character to begin their mission, but game says no. It'd be cool if after a story mission I could fast travel to a town or the camp, but game says no. You will look at our scenery whether you want to or not. This forced traversal slows the game to a crawl and is a huge reason that the game finally feels like it picks up steam only in Act 4. Once you get to Santani, most of the game's missions are finally clustered in one area, but for the first 50 hours leading up to that, missions are spread five or 10 minutes of horse riding apart for dozens of missions. Let's think for a second about how GTA V paced its content. In that game you can fast travel with cabs to and from anywhere, and the player chose to engage in open world content between missions because the city was alive with things to do and missions to complete. Red Dead 2 has a story orders of magnitude better than GTA V, but insists on doling it out like a miser. It forces you to ride for two hours for every 20 minutes of story. It feels just arbitrary and it's boring. Now, sure, you can say that this is a petty complaint, so you have to ride your horse and can't fast travel, but I'm just getting started on the inconvenience this game mistakes for gameplay. Want to run? You'll have to repeatedly tap the A button. You can change this deep in the game's totally awful menus. But I played like 30 hours before I found this. 30 hours of impatiently tapping the button nearly constantly. And then once you do turn it on, you realize that the controls are so bad. It isn't possible to navigate anywhere if you're moving faster than a crawl. Want to jog through camp? Game says no. Let me explain something as a native New Yorker. If you walked this slow on a street in New York, you would get punched in the throat. Look at that. Are you fucking kidding me? Who walks like this? I go to the kitchen like three times faster than Arthur moves in combat, and conversation, and contextual dialogue, and camp, and town, and buildings, the game is constantly forcing you to walk like the most tired octogenarian on the edge of death. I get it that Rockstar thinks that this is how real men walk, but where I'm from, this is how great grandma walks. Let's go, Arthur. Let's pick up the fucking pace, man. Come on. Can I get a little hustle? Watching this clip is making my blood pressure rise. This shit is very hard for me to get past, man. This feels like the game is trolling me, or deliberately wasting my time to force me to appreciate your scenic vistas and amazing animations. Got it. Game looks great. Can I fucking move now? Oh, game says no. How about animations? Well, they are spectacularly good and infuriatingly realistic. I actually have not that much of a problem with the skinning and stowing of animals you've killed because it is so cool looking in, such an artistic triumph, and you never do it 11 times in 15 minutes, but opening drawers, picking up a can of fucking beans. The 631st time, I sluggishly meander over to a corpse, grab his shirt, pull him up, pat him down, and then do the little swipe motion. Yeah, it's a little fucking much, dude. Having to watch Arthur open a cabinet, pick up a can, inspect its label, open his bag, and put the can in the bag. Is the developer smelling their own farts? Does it look amazing the first few times? Yep. Is it a technological marvel and maybe the best animation work ever in a video game? Absolutely. Is it like fingernails on a chalkboard and do I bob my head and tap my finger and think, all right, dude, take the fucking beans? Yes. After the 10th time in a single room, a thousand times, yes. This design style is everywhere. Want a shop? Okay, well you will need to slowly leaf through a literal fucking catalog. Page by page. Want to take a bath? You need to take a bath, scrubbing each individual part of your body. If I added up every moment of tedium, it would be like dozens of hours, no exaggeration, easily a dozen hours. I've read people saying that this is immersive, but it is exactly the opposite for me. It rips me right the fuck out of the game and has me getting angry as I mull the hundreds of possible ways to make this less horrifically boring. But all these things are in there to show off how good the game looks, right? So let's get at least one positive section and talk about that. Visuals. Yep. Red Dead 2 is the best-looking game ever made. Period. End of sentence. The map is insanely detailed. The towns look real. Lighting, weather, animations, models, textures. It isn't good. It's mind-blowingly insanely good. It's like looking into the future. It's so good. You'll spend several total hours of your gameplay saying, holy shit, that looks good. If you pick up a carcass, you'll get blood on your clothes. Going the water, the blood comes off, and the blood will be visible in the water. Dear carcasses bounce up and down on your saddle. Ragdoll effects are ridiculous. Your clothes wrinkle. Your beard grows. Your shirt gets dirty. It is insane. End of section. Personal hygiene simulator. So how's the gameplay? Oh my god, it is so nightmarishly bad on many levels. We've come a long way since the last game, and gameplay has gotten very tight and snappy in Triple A titles, but Red Dead in its insatiable desire for realism plays kind of like Resident Evil 2, with the most aggressive auto-aim in history. It's a strange combination of systems, so let's get to the game's biggest problem, controls and game feel. Red Dead 2's control scheme is so fucking bad, it like had to be on purpose. Either that or every single action was assigned to a different team, and when they got together at the end, they realized they'd all use the same buttons for different actions. And not only is the game's control scheme ridiculously unintuitive and out of step with other games in its genre, it isn't even consistent with itself. It's left trigger to draw, except when it's right trigger. It's like six inputs to get my hat from my horse. May they combat? Since all combat actions are mapped to triggers, it makes sense that you just do right trigger to hit and left trigger to block, but game says no. It's B to punch and X to block. Running requires tapping A, looting requires a button hold, not a button press, one of my least favorite designs ever. Equipping weapons is the left bumper, unless the weapons have suddenly and automatically unequipped themselves again and stored themselves on your horse. Again, then you go to the horse where you check the horse cargo with the d-pad, but get your horse weapons with the left bumper. Bumper hold, not press. Then you navigate to the weapon type you want, use right trigger to switch through all the specific ones you have. Unless it's one of the many times the game decides you can't interact with your horse, then it's nothing because the game says no. Getting into cover? What's the least intuitive input we can think of to map that to? Right bumper? Yeah, that's it. Throwable weapons? Having games pretty much decided that the bumpers are for throwable weapons? Oh shit, we mapped cover to that. Oh, well, you've got to specifically equip that item in the God awful weapon and item wheel, then switch back to your gun when you're done. Picking things up is X, unless it's your hat, then it's Y. Imagine playing Doom without knowing what any input did. Guess what, you would figure it out in like three minutes. Red Dead takes dozens of hours to get comfortable with its terrible mapping and control scheme. Very few things frustrate a player more than not being able to complete an action because the input scheme is unintuitive or annoying. On its own, this might be a small issue, but it is not on its own. Everything about playing Red Dead Redemption 2 falls between annoying and perplexing. Arthur controls like a tank or a survival horror title. His turn radius is worse than the pickup and trailer combo I use at work. I can back that thing between two trees easier than I can negotiate Arthur up a flight of steps. Why? Why does the player character control like this out of combat? Is it to simulate realism? Because I don't control like this. I have no problems making a full 180-degree turn and easily navigating small steps in my real life. In combat, things aren't any better. Does it feel good to shoot things in slow motion using dead eye? Hell yes, best feeling in the game. But the meter depletes very quickly. So you'll either have to negotiate a frustrating items menu in the second of the three weapon wheel sub menus during combat or go without it. And the game uses the same snap auto aim as all the other Rockstar games which makes the combat so easy. Ridiculously easy. Hold left trigger, shoot, let go. Hold left trigger, shoot, let go. Hold left trigger, shoot, let go. Over and over for hundreds of dudes. It's fun because the music is insanely good and I like shooting dudes, but it's less good than shooting dudes in almost any other game. Turn the auto aim off then, Pliny. Yeah, I did that and it demonstrates why the system is defaulted. The aim acceleration is so wonky and slow and there's like no aim assist at all if you turn off the snap aim. It's pretty clear that almost zero effort went into the actual gameplay systems here. They are the same as they've ever been and they were never all that good to begin with. It's showing its age badly with combat that is uninspired and pretty bland and controls that are downright hostile. What do you end up doing most of the game? Well, you ride your horse, you look at the scenery, you auto snap onto dudes and kill them with zero effort and you attend to the myriad small inconveniences that are required to keep Arthur in good working order like bathing and cooking and slowly kicking out your campfire and shaving and patting your horse and feeding your horse and brushing your horse and cooking fish and shopping for shirts and pants something I literally haven't done in real life in several years mind you. I haven't had someone else cut my hair in like 16 years because it's annoying and a waste of my time so I just shave it myself. I have a beard because I'm not wasting time every day shaving. If my wife fails to buy me clothing and shoes they will rot off of my body because shopping is tedious. Having all of these chores gamified is basically kind of like hell for me. Bathing isn't fun. Shaving isn't fun. Buying shirts is not fun at least not for me. Riding a horse is fun. Brushing is coat digitally? Not so much. Brushing is coat digitally 78 times? Not at all. I can bathe and buy shirts in real life. I can marvel at the sky and the trees in real life. The game is only intermittently fun because for every time I snipe a deer or shoot a generic dude there's three hours of riding my horse or crossing the camp at a snail's pace or holding X to scrub my left arm and then holding X to scrub my right arm. Red Dead clearly spent half its time creating the world and hundreds of tedious systems centered on personal hygiene and mind-blowingly slow ambulation and the other half on the story and none on making the gameplay you know fun and shit. How's the story? Yeah, it's great. All of the characters in dialogue in Red Dead 2 are of the very highest quality. Writing is fantastic. Voice acting, second to none. Rockstar San Diego should be lauded for not only some of the most powerful cutscenes the game has ever had but also for its judicious use of them. Games often struggle at making the important story moments interactive but almost all of Red Dead 2's most important story moments are gameplay missions. There's one mission at the end of Chapter 3 that's about as powerful and cinematic a gameplay experience as I have ever had with some of the most intense acting and direction ever in a game happening while you actually play the level. And that's not rare for the game. While, yes, like any game most of it will be shooting dudes a bunch of it isn't and the actual gameplay is so damn cinematic that it feels like playing a movie a lot of the time and it's not just the visual presentation. It's that a lot of design went into creating missions that allow players to play the most important plot moments rather than simply watch them. There are several examples of this that surpass anything else I've ever played in a big budget action game but they're so good I don't want to spoil them and for people who've played it already you almost certainly know which ones I'm talking about. People like to talk about which games would make a great movie and they are almost always wrong because most games don't actually have two hours of powerful enough story content to carry a film but Red Dead 2 would work just as well if not better as a movie. It's narrative and direction is that damn good and to its credit you actually get to play quite a bit of the parts that would work just as well cinematically as they do in a game. All of the characters are unique and interesting and make you both care about them deeply and want to get to know them better. The only problem is to get to know them better I've got to ride my horse through the woods for 11 minutes. The game's pacing is so off that a story keeps losing its power as it fades from your memory between missions. It's the rare game that would have been significantly better if it was significantly shorter. Each of the main story missions is straight fantastic with varied mission design great character development real tension and power as well as stunning cinematic art direction. The story and all of the missions are in and of themselves so very good that it's the game's greatest failing that it only got to each one right at the very moment I was so bored and frustrated I was going to stop playing. Now I'm not saying the game would be better as a linear story based action game like the original Red Dead although frankly I think actually it might have been but I'm saying the map needed to be like one third of the size so that when I see Micah has a mission for me I don't go Jesus Christ it's on the other fucking side of the map forget it. This game doles out its story like Scrooge McDuck giving alms to the poor grudgingly and only if it has to you go hours hours in between significant plot points and there's no way to know which yellow icon will be plot critical and which will be hey I heard about a house with 19 dudes that you can auto target to death and steal their beans belt buckles and pocket watches want to come? At 45 hours I had not unlocked more than half the map and I had been to the game's major city twice to sell pocket washes instead the game seems to want you to spend 25 to 30 hours wandering in between every one of its truly spectacular moments the story that is here is powerful and interesting but it's also somewhat muddy philosophally and I don't want to overstate this but I do have to talk about it there's only so much sympathy and yearning for the libertarian ideals of the old west I can feel if those ideals mean stealing shit so you don't need to get a job rock stars always had a heavy dose and a heavy handed dose of libertarianism in all their games GTA is constantly poking fun and how overbearing the government is and the last red dead game painted the government as a corrupt means to manipulate honest thieves into farming this game is ostensibly more an excellent morality play about the dangers of vengeance but it's also trying to make me see the decisions these people are making as legitimate but why? why should Arthur and Crue be allowed to rob a train and steal everyone's money? why is it wrong for the government to say yo rob and everyone on a train at gunpoint and killing every person who rightly tries to stop you is fucked up was something lost some spirit of independence when the old west closed I guess but it's also kind of nice that it's less likely I have all my shit stolen by a gang of people who think it's their God given right to take whatever they can and create nothing of their own and you don't just rob as Arthur you straight murder field hands stable boys stagecoach drivers law officers it's one thing to murder outlaws and rival gang members and bounty hunters it's another to plunge a knife into a stable hands throat so that you won't be seen stealing horses you could argue that the game is attempting to illuminate the hypocrisy at work here but the game is also dead set on making you like these people and see them as honorable thieves trying to make their way outside of the system it's got a schizophrenic tone at times and seems unsure whether it wants you to like these characters or not what you do as Arthur Morgan is sociopathic and that doesn't jive well with the story being told sometimes similar to how in GTA 5 Franklin was portrayed as a likable everyman who one minute serves as the game's conscience and winks at the player about how crazy this all is while the next murdering 62 cops during a robbery if the gameplay is going to have me strangle citizens to death it'd be preferable if the main character wasn't also supposed to be a likeable and good guy deep down or at least make him morally conflicted about it much earlier in the game Red Dead One's story was about the loss of this independence but was also about the conflict that John navigated of having to hunt down his old friends to save his family this game has better acting and a much more thoughtfully plotted and deeper main narrative but it also muddies its ethics and doesn't really ever ask us to account for it Red Dead One left what John had done in the past to our imaginations and the story based violence in that game could all be seen as somewhat justified the man was trying to save his wife and child Arthur's violence within the main plot is stuff he should be hung for that one thing that I mentioned before there's a mission where you have to steal horses and as your friends are talking to a character clearly marked as stable hand you need to sneak up behind him but the only prompt I got was stealth kill this seemed ridiculously out of character for Arthur so I stopped the game and I looked up how to choke him out you can't you've got to murder him for horses now it doesn't ruin the game and it's not a crippling blow to the story but it does keep it from being perfect the game wants it both ways it wants Arthur to be a hero and a good guy with no racial animus a man who treats everyone equal and beats up racists on the street and will ride with women but it also wants him to be a dude who will knife a stable hand in the throat for a horse it's strange is all just kind of strange I could do some deep long analysis of the story but that would be a waste of everyone's time the story is very good it was a good entertaining two to six hour story told over the course of 70 hours it has some amazing moments and a lot of shooting deer and taking a bath in between and to be fair those amazing moments are so damn good that it saves the game and makes it worth playing but the pacing keeps it from being some kind of game of the generation masterpiece and the fourth act the game really picks up steam and hits its stride hard from st. Dignion the game has a momentum it was lacking for the first 45 hours because shit finally focuses itself and the story missions come quicker and are more relevant to the plot and once it gets that momentum yeah it is a total masterpiece but I mean if I have to wade through 45 hours of shitty controls and taking a bath and wandering the wilderness don't I have to ding the game for that? can you really say a game that has some of the best characters in story missions ever but also the most hostile gameplay controls and dozens of hours of annoyance as a masterpiece? how much do you dig a game for this stuff? The Witcher 3 took me well over 150 hours to finally save Ciri but in that game in between each important plot story were dozens of intricate discreet stories and missions and never felt like it was dragging and never felt like I was just wandering an empty wilderness there was a tremendous variety not only in narrative but in gameplay and combat and exploration and everything it had its UI issues yes but they were pretty quickly patched to respond to feedback the control scheme was a little clunky but nothing like it is here and it didn't weigh on me and the game didn't feel this arrogant I guess like it's just taken for granted that I'll forgive its controls and decade-old gameplay because the main story missions are so good I don't know maybe I should but I just can't get past the fact that until two-thirds through the campaign this game has the masterful main story missions and then 35 hours of a few side missions that center around playing cards or fishing or robbing raiders for their belt buckles the Witcher 3 never had me say Jesus can I get to the story now this game had me doing that its pacing is really terrible its story has spread way too thin across a map that is way too big in conclusion wow that came off pretty negative once I actually got to writing it I've seen that many reviewers and youtubers and sites have this game as the best of the year which I just don't agree with it's like I played a different game God of War is so much better than this game and everyone who didn't have it as their best game has it as their second best game which Spider-Man God of War Monster Hunter Subnautica Yakuza Dead Cells Hollow Knight The Missing JJ Macfeld Hitman 2 Gris all of these games got releases this year and while none of them aside from God of War hit the highs that Red Dead hits when it's firing at all cylinders none of those games takes 35 hours to hit their stride I enjoyed every one of those games more so by my reckoning this is probably the best most proficient game released in 2018 but somewhere around like the 13th or 14th most enjoyable game released this year it's a technical marvel and an artistic masterpiece in animation and world design it is a quantum leap forward in graphics and amongst the best written and performed dialogue ever to appear in a game it features some of the best designed missions and story beats in recent memory and it pairs it with music and direction and production values as good as any film you will ever watch but it mixes that 10 to 20 hours of awesome into a 70 hour game I love film and when I was a little younger I used to buy lots of DVDs and watch the director's cuts and you know what I never once saw a director's cut that was better than the movie that was released and almost all of them were significantly worse than the movie that got released movies books poems they're at their best when they are as edited as possible skimmed of all of their fat with every second feeling needed and nothing that feels like filler Red Dead 2 is like 30 hours of fat it's dozens of hours of filler it is several hours of watching Arthur put beans in a bag it's gameplay is so deeply unfun its controls are just inexcusably shit its input mapping and contextual commands are a recipe for repeated frustrations like accidentally shooting a shopkeeper or punching a dog or punching your horse and the level of tedium and boredom required to get to the end of its really great story meant I felt like the entire game was spent waiting for something to happen its artistry meant that it didn't feel like I'd wasted my money but its problems felt like I was wasting my time it is a technical, artistic and narrative triumph of the highest order it's too bad it's spent so much time being a bad game alright see you next time thanks for coming bye take two get it?