It's been a very long time since the last Red Dead Redemption game was released but the sequel finally arrives tomorrow and the first reviews for the sequel have finally landed. Rockstar has been hyping the game up for months with trailers and gameplay videos and seeing them finally get to play around with a current gen system (Grand Theft Auto V was upscaled) is definitely exciting.
The question is, does it deliver?
Well, below you'll find a number of reviews from a huge variety of sources including video game websites, entertainment outlets, and even the Hollywood trades. While many gamers would like to see Rockstar focused on Grand Theft Auto VI, it definitely sounds like they've delivered an epic adventure here which could very well be one of the best video games of all-time.
So, to check out the reviews for Red Dead Redemption 2, click on the "View List" button below.
Red Dead Redemption 2 stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Grand Theft Auto V as one of the greatest games of the modern age. It’s a gorgeous depiction of an ugly period that’s patient, polished, and a huge amount of fun to play, and it’s combined with Rockstar’s best storytelling to date. Even after finishing the lengthy story I can’t wait to go back and play more. This is a game of rare quality; a meticulously polished open world ode to the outlaw era. Looking for one of this generation’s very best single-player action experiences? Here’s your huckleberry. [10/10]
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IGN
It's been eight years since the last Red Dead Redemption, and five since the release of Grand Theft Auto 5 - time that you can see and feel in every delicately crafted inch of a game of this scope and scale, yet time in which we've been spoilt by the likes of The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Rockstar's writers can't quite match the humanity and purpose of the former, nor can its designers match the integrity of the latter. It offers something else besides, though: a richness, detail and technical prowess that is breathtaking, and peerless. Is this Rockstar's greatest game, a new masterpiece alongside the original? There are one too many caveats, and one too many flaws at its heart, to leave me totally convinced. Is this its richest, most beautiful open world? Of that there's not a single doubt.
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Eurogamer
Across all of its games, Rockstar has aimed to make experiences that are both massive and lifelike, and in a lot of ways Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like the culmination of the developer’s long sought after ambitions. Even better, it does so with a level of maturity and care that has often escaped the developer. It’s still a game largely about fighting and killing, but also one that explores topics like racism and urbanization in a way that feels both natural and thoughtful. You can look at it as a Western take on GTA, but it’s also much more than that. Underneath its rugged, violent exterior is a story with a lot of heart and a world layered with details to uncover. It gives you a lot to think about over your morning coffee.
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The Verge
Fans of movies from Sergio Leone and the "Spaghetti Western" genre will perk up at every suspenseful chase or gunfight. While there's nothing quite as iconic as Ennio Morricone's instantly recognizable theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, all of RDR2's top musical moments capture that same spirit. It's perfectly fitting for what Rockstar delivers in this Old West story. So there you have it. I haven't even touched on the heavy spoilers (and won't!), but I can tell you that this sequel makes both the first game and John Marston's overall story better and more meaningful. Red Dead Redemption 2 is at once a startling evolution of the Rockstar Games formula and everything a fan could hope for from a Red Dead Redemption sequel.
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Mashable
“Red Dead Redemption 2” was the first time playing a Rockstar game where my reaction went past interest to investment. I cared about what happened to these people, I cared about their stories and their lives, and there were moments where I was genuinely saddened or excited by what happened to them. And as the story winds toward its various conclusions, I was completely invested in them, hoping for the best, and fearing the worst. For someone there for the story, who wanted a game to feel fun more than they wanted it to feel comprehensive, I was completely absorbed.
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Variety
Red Dead Redemption 2 — if I haven’t already made it explicitly clear — is the most astonishing game I have ever played, and that is in large part because of the details. Every little detail is a piece of an elaborate whole: The realistic body movement an enemy makes when they are punched, the creeping fog on an early morning hunt that slowly obscures your vision, the way an enemy slumps out of their harness when shot off their horse, the casual dialogue overheard when you’re crafting in camp. It’s these details that turn the game into something special and make the world seem real; it’s these details that make Arthur’s story that much more enjoyable and emotional; it’s these details that fill me with equal parts amazement and trepidation at the hours and work it took to bring to fruition. What the developers at Rockstar have done with this game is nothing short of incredible and, if anything, I want this review to be a celebration of what all of those employees poured their hard work and souls into. It is a stunning, breathtaking experience, one that will influence — in some way or another — the industry for years to come.
Rockstar Games has outdone itself again with Red Dead Redemption II. The up-close portrayal of the outlaw Van der Linde gang’s unraveling is a compelling companion story that blends seamlessly with the original game, and depth and breadth of the open world is a technical triumph that every gamer should experience. [10/10]
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Game Informer
The hype being created for Red Dead Redemption 2 and the expectations of the passionate fan-base made a part of me believe that Rockstar Games could never deliver on all of their many promises. They did, and then some. From the feeling of a realistic living world they’ve created to the emotional bonds you build, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the video game experience of this generation. [10/10]
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The Sixth Axis
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the epitome of ambition and like most things Rockstar, will meet the expectations associated with it. With all of the advancements since the last Red Dead and everything they've learned from Grand Theft Auto V under their belt, the series is in a better place, able to provide a more natural and less gamey world to explore.
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Destructoid
Just like any Rockstar game, Red Dead Redemption 2 comes with its fair share of bugs and glitches, though fortunately I only noticed a few that really impacted my time with it. At one point, the game was stuck on a loading screen for over five minutes, before I had to close the game and restart it to get things moving again. Other glitches were mostly harmless, but noticeable nonetheless, as corpses merged with living characters and Morgan moving extremely fast when in the special kill screen. Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately surpasses its predecessor in every way. Rockstar has created a world and experience that feels truly lived in, populating it with locales and characters that turn the game into an epic. It is the best game the famed developer has ever made, offering a level of detail that stands amongst its contemporaries, with a journey that I won’t soon forget. [9.5/10]
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CG Magazine
While Red Dead Redemption was mostly focused on John Marston's story, Red Dead 2 is about the entire Van der Linde gang--as a community, as an idea, and as the death rattle of the Wild West. It is about Arthur, too, but as the lens through which you view the gang, his very personal, very messy story supports a larger tale. Some frustrating systems and a predictable mission structure end up serving that story well, though it does take patience to get through them and understand why. Red Dead Redemption 2 is an excellent prequel, but it's also an emotional, thought-provoking story in its own right, and it's a world that is hard to leave when it's done.
What the game’s acknowledgement of these struggles does most of all, though, is make Arthur and his problems feel small by comparison. He’s not a terrible character. In fact, there’s a certain charm to his exasperation with everything, and it’s interesting how he’s resigned about who he is as someone who’s not made for any other line of work. But he’s weaker for being in the vicinity of a player-character blank slate, whose outfits, facial hair, and haircut may be changed. He seems written mainly as a snarky mouthpiece for the game’s well-worn themes, as if they aren’t explicitly conveyed elsewhere. Like Red Dead Redemption 2 itself, he looks the part and can even be enjoyable, but there’s distressingly little going on beneath the surface. For as adept as Rockstar is at placing you within a wonderful, lavish world and letting you move within it, they’re still figuring out how to say all that much about it. [3.5/5]
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Slate Magazine
In other words, Red Dead Redemption 2 succeeds on all the levels you’d hope it would. As Rockstar’s first game built for this current gen of consoles, it’s consistently a technical marvel. But while this open world opus meets pretty much every lofty expectation, its greatest achievement is what it dares to do differently. Thanks to both its shocking cruelty and its awe-inspiring potential, this stunningly well-realised recreation of the Wild West is the first game world that truly mirrors our own. Rockstar’s latest playground is a place that’s equal parts brutal and beautiful, and somehow, like in our own reality, the weight of your decisions in this game world have just as much potential to delight you as they do to terrify.
But there is a pulse pumping through this techno-artistic marvel. This game has heart; the kind of heart that is difficult to pin down but impossible to deny. It is a wonderful story about terrible people, and a vivacious, tremendously sad tribute to nature itself. There is so much beauty and joy in this expensive, exhausting thing. Somehow that makes it even more perfect—a breathtaking eulogy for a ruined world, created by, about, and for a society that ruined it.
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Kotaku
he original Red Dead Redemption was about the future: how the colonizers of the West themselves couldn’t escape the encroachment of U.S. law, that the state would claim monopoly on violence. Red Dead Redemption 2 is about the past — how it was never what it seemed; how it can be weaponized against the present; that reality is nasty, knotted and often deliberately obscured by the oppressors. From the start, Calloway’s biographer plans a hagiography not of the intoxicated man at the bar in the middle of nowhere, but of a gunslinger who never existed and a place fondly reimagined. Along my journey, I make time to visit his gang members. I don’t find heroes; I just find folks hustling out a life in a country that has no interest in whether they live or die, unless it’s published in a page-turner. I can talk with them or antagonize them or shoot them. It doesn’t really matter. Calloway’s book will end up the same. And it will sell a million copies.
SOURCE:
Polygon