P-Wing

Gamblor Reviews: Red Dead Redemption 2

• By Gamblor
• October 26, 2018
• 3 Comments

Gamblor hasn’t played Red Dead Redemption 2 yet, but he did just click the buy button and is qualified enough to write his review while the 15 terabyte game downloads.

Once every century or so, a video game comes along with such visual realism, such graphical immersion, such high production value, that it makes you say “Wow, this is automatically a great video game.” Red Dead Redemption 2 is such a game.

When Rockstar first kicked off the Red Dead franchise with Red Dead Revolver, it was full of over-the-top, colorful silliness like a fat guy covered in dynamite sticks and an undertaker who uses a coffin as a melee weapon. It was quirky and original, i.e. garbage.

Booooooooo.

Fortunately, Rockstar dropped that video gamey shit and gave us all the hyper-realism we’ve been frothing for in our video games.

Yeah, baby. That’s some good earth-toning.

The Graphics:

When you’re playing a video game, you want dirt to look like dirt and sand to look like sand. It’s incredibly important to me to see each individual bead of sweat rolling down my leathery face during cinematic closeups. Thank god they aren’t trying to port this over to Switch, because downscaling these amazing visuals would make it unplayable.

Jesus Christ, look at this game. Brayton, come look at this shit. Is this not the best game ever made? This is my roommate Brayton’s review:

DUUUDE…..YEAH-YEEEEYUHHHH [various positive dudebro sound effects]

The Graphics: 10/10

There’s no point writing anything else, but I guess I should.

The Gameplay

You can’t control what’s happening during 90% of this game. To a non-gamer, that might sound like a bad thing. “Don’t you want to PLAY a video game?” Oh, honey child. Ever hear of a little thing called artistic perspective™? Instead of actual gameplay, the player gets treated to gorgeous cinematic camera angles that pump you full of intense emotions like “whoa!” and “holy shit!”. Why walk from point A to point B with the camera behind your back when you can instead WATCH your character do a backflip off a train and onto a horse with the camera at ground level looking straight up? So much cooler.

The few parts that you do control also have a great feature: time slowdowning™! In most bad shooting games, you have to practice until you’re good enough to headshot people at full speed with actual skill. But in RDR2, you can just slow time and carefully click on everyone’s faces. Doesn’t that sound fun? Imagine how much better every game would be if you could slow time for precision. Do you keep falling in a hole in Mario? Just slow time so you can carefully land on the appropriate block! Congratulations, Nintendo. Now you have an AAA franchise.

The Gameplay: 10/10

The Story

You can’t have cinematic cutscenes without words coming out of the HD face animations. Let’s take a look at the original and well-written dialogue I copied and pasted from Reddit:

“You have to love yourself a fire. It’s one of the blessings. Sure, we can have fire and we can have the knowledge of fire, but with that comes the knowledge of everything.”

Wow. Deep.

“Listen to me, we don’t want to kill any of you. But trust me, we will. Wake ’em up a little!”

Terrifying.

“This whole thing’s pretty much done. We’re more ghosts than people.”

Ain’t that the truth.

“Where’s our money?!”

Ha, I’ve been there.

Only 12? You can do better than that, gamers.

Cool Keyword Checklist:

Fire
Kill
Ghosts
Money
Oof

Yup, it’s a western.

The Story: 10/10

Conclusion:

Some people argue that you shouldn’t base opinions solely on how something looks. I completely agree. You should also look at online reviews/metacritic to tell you if you like a game, and the internet has spoken. I’ve set up an infrared sentry turret that’ll automatically target and destroy any non-gamer who gives this game anything below a 10/10.

The Gamblor Bottom Line™:

1899 gunslinger bullseyes/10