★★★★★

Rockstar’s Magnum Opus.

A fittingly simple, beautifully-written story filled with enthralling characters and nuanced literary tropes. Red Dead Redemption 2 is captured in an absolutely breathtaking display of the Old West armed with a fresh take around familiar gameplay mechanics.

This masterwork is one of the strongest video game specimens to date, substantiating the medium as a significant revolutionary mean for modern storytelling. A contemporary peak in video game direction, writing, scoring, acting—anything cinema, in actuality. Mechanically, it's an out-and-out embodiment of unparalleled attention to detail; an astonishing simulation in reactivity and realism. Such a degree of combined gameplay excellence, technical prowess, and cinematic brilliance in the open-world genre is relatively rare, but after immersing oneself in a carefully-crafted 1890s American Frontier, I could not be more thrilled to see what the future of cutting-edge story-driven sandboxes holds.

As with any type of real life experience, there’s simply no substitute to it. The Red Dead Experience is that Wild Wild experience every Wild Wild gamer should have securely holstered in their ever-expanding video game bandolier. Like the greatest outlaw in video game history, Mr. Arthur Morgan, Black Lung himself, once said, I'm afraid I have to insist.


♪ They come from Rhodes, Strawberry, Valentine
♪ Singing a song and drinking wine
♪ Across Bayou Swamp and over the sea
♪ We're heading down to Saint Denis