It’s hard to find anyone being critical of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2, and rightfully so, it’s one of the most polished, technically achieved games ever made. The amount of bespoke animations, dialogue, interactions, and open-world mechanics and shenanigans that you can get up to are almost insurmountable. However, it doesn’t make the game flawless. In fact, the game has a lot more flaws than I was comfortable with, and not in the “oh my horse glitched through a rock” sort of thing, but rather with the fundamental way the game is played and experienced, and I’m going to cover all of those here in this article.
No. 1: 30% of the Story Mission Content Is Either Walking With NPCs, Riding Horses, Or Doing Menial Tasks
Some of you might take umbrage with this assessment, but the first four hours of the game is basically just following NPCs around on horseback listening to dialogue. You have a couple of shootouts to tide you over, action wise, but majority of the first introductory part of the game could almost be summed up like a walking simulator. I expect as much these days from triple-A games especially of the Ubisoft, and EA variety.
However, it’s not just the first few hours of Red Dead Redemption 2 steeped in walking-sim antics. Majority of the story missions consist of a significant section where you’re just following NPCs on a path or riding horses on a set path. You could almost break down the contents of the story mission to 30% walking/riding sim, 30% talking, and 30% shooting.
Many of the story missions have this kind of layout where you spend a fraction of the time walking/riding, a fraction of the time listening to dialogue, and then there’s a big shootout to give you something to keep your adrenaline high. The structure of the missions this way wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so restrictive, which leads to the next point.
No. 2: Restricted Movement In Story Missions In Story Mode
If they were going to restrict you to walking/riding so often during story missions, it would have been nice if you had a bit more freedom in how you completed missions. After spending some time walking/riding to your destination, usually you’re tasked with defending or attacking AI NPCs. Now this in itself isn’t bad, but the fact that you have to basically stay glued to their side and not leave them during combat or venture too far away makes a lot of the missions feel extremely restrictive.
One mission in particular that comes to mind (Spoiler alert) is when John and Sadie are on a bounty and they have to capture this guy who breaks out of jail and attempts to flee via boat. Now this seems like a cool mission, and it could have been cool but once the shooting starts if you attempt to go up on the outer ridges of the gorge and snipe or attack enemies from outside the choke-point, Sadie will instantly get shot and killed…. over, and over, and over. Basically any pathway leading away from where they want you to go results in Sadie catching a stray bullet, every single time.
It’s not just that mission, there are a ton of missions where if you attempt to veer from where they want you to go, the NPC you’re supposed to be protecting gets randomly shot and killed instantly, even if they’re behind cover. You basically have to play through the missions the way they want, or otherwise you have to restart from the last checkpoint.
And how we know this was designed this way on purpose is because the multiplayer missions give you far more freedom in how you complete missions. Instead of having to be tethered to NPCs, they basically give you a radius where you’re to stay within and so long as you don’t leave that radius you can complete the mission anyway you want, which makes the missions feel a lot more versatile and fun. You’re not punished for playing the missions the way you want. It’s a shame because due to the restrictions in the single-player story it makes me dread ever replaying the game from start to finish due to all the walking-sim moments and restrictive gameplay associated with the story missions.
No. 3: Single-Player Story Doesn’t Make Use Of A Lot Of Gameplay Mechanics
Another big problem is that the single-player story mechanics, while sometimes fun, are so limited and restrictive based on what you can actually do in the game. For instance, there is a lighthouse in one section of the map, and you only have an opportunity to use it once throughout the entire single-player portion for a mission near the end of the game. Why? Well, that’s just how it’s designed in the single-player.
Features like hogtying people is also only used a couple of times throughout the main story, mostly for the handful of bounty missions they have. You can also make use of various melee weapons, but none of them have in actual use throughout majority of the game, and you only have to use them like two or three times total throughout the 100 hours or so you’ll likely invest into the single-player mode.
In many ways it feels like a major letdown on what could have been. For instance, there is one portion of the game that teases a fight club, similar to Assassin’s Creed 3, but there is no fight club. In fact, there are a ton of many useless mini-games like dominoes, poker, and blackjack but knife/hatchet throwing tournaments, no dueling tournaments, and no underground fight clubs.
It’s just weird how many awesome gameplay functions they have that they just completely abandon or under-utilized in the single-player story. It’s weird because you had all these awesome mechanics in games like GTA IV, and they found uses for them all throughout the story, from underground fight clubs, to darts, to bowling, to storing things in trunks, to changing your clothes, to making use of the subway system, to exploiting features like picking up and throwing random objects.
GTA IV had a lot of unique features you may not have even known about unless you played through the single-player story, whereas Red Dead Redemption 2 has a lot of features that are bypassed in the story and you may only discover them in the multiplayer portion. The whole herb gathering is more fleshed out in the multiplayer, and making different concoctions play a big part in Red Dead Online, but you can basically ignorance it in the single-player story for the most part, other than a couple of random NPCs who will ask for specific herbs infrequently while you travel around.
I would have thought there would have been more missions involving herb-gathering to heal sick people, or a focus on combining different herbs/meats/etc., to create combat/health/horse buffs like in Monster Hunter. I mean, you can create some of those meal buffs, but it’s neither important nor does the game require it at any point. Killing and looting raiders/bandits will you usually suffice in the single-player story without ever having to craft herb mixtures.
Another example is that you never have to defend any of the towns in the single-player campaign. You do get to defend towns in the multiplayer portion, and you even get to direct where NPC companions are stationed. It feels like such a hugely wasted opportunity that could have tied in perfectly with the camp maintenance feature they had in the single-player story.
No. 4: Wanted System Is Completely Broken In Single-Player
A lot of systems are very well designed in Red Dead Redemption, especially all of the bespoke animations they have. However, some of the systems are just completely broken, like the wanted system. A lot of times I tried playing like a good guy; not killing people, not robbing people, avoiding the pathway of the bandit. However, sometimes I would get waylaid by bandits and roadblocks put in place by the raiders, as well as people pretending to need help but actually being thieves in disguise.
All of these features are really cool, and the emergent element of these instances created some unique moments to experience throughout the game. However, if you attempted to play in a non-violent manner, shooting the guns out of people’s hands and hogtying them, you actually end up racking up more evil points than good points that way. Why? Because the game’s wanted system is completely broken.
On a few occasions I found myself being waylaid by bandits – one in particular was a woman pretending to need help. I stopped to help her and she and her fellow ruffians held me up at gunpoint. Fair game. Instead of killing them all, I hogtied her and killed her accomplices. I proceed to loot them all, but some random NPC guy from outside of the play area sees me and attempts to run to the authorities because I was “Kidnapping” people. It’s because I had hogtied the bandit woman, and so the NPCs reacted to this as if I was kidnapping. Ugh. Fine. Whatever.
I chase down the witness, tackle him and threaten him not to go to the authorities, another NPC on a wagon sees this and goes to report me to the police for “Assault”. Ugh. I try to chase him down to explain, but it’s no use… he’s too fast. I use DeadEye and snipe him and his passenger from reporting me to the police before they’re too far out of range. Oh, what’s this? Some other completely random NPC from way outside of the play area on the other side of the road behind a swampy thicket somehow saw me snipe the guy and the passenger in the wagon, and goes to report me for “Murder”.
I chase the guy down and was going to hogtie him, but thought better of it and just used DeadEye and sniped him as well, because it was easier to kill and loot people than to hogtie and loot people by leaving them alive.
That was just one example of the wanted system being broken, though. Another time I tried completing a bandit challenge by robbing four stores in one day. Not a problem, right? Just mask up, aim the gun at the shopkeepers, take the coin and leave out of the back door, right? Wrong. I managed to successfully rob the fence shopkeeper in Saint Denis, and then I head to the gun shop to rob him. I mask up and point the gun at him, he acquiesces and I take the money from the register. Oh, but some NPC from across the street and behind a fence somehow witnessed me robbing him, and reported the crime to the police, and despite wearing a mask, they had a warrant out for “Arthur Morgan”.
So even wearing a mask, and robbing the gunshop owner at night, it somehow still resulted in some random NPC from outside the play area once again witnessing the crime and even with a mask on to conceal my identity, they still knew it was Morgan. What?!?!
Those were just a few of the many times that happened; usually I would be out in the middle of nowhere, and kill or hogtie bandits robbing or attempting to kill someone else, and some random NPC would witness the crime and report it. I started just killing and looting people and it somehow resulted in less crimes being reported than if I had hogtied people or physically wrestled them to the ground. It just made zero sense, especially since it’s made difficult to subdue people and keep them alive, you think this would result in being less susceptible to police behavior, but that’s not the case at all.
GTA IV still had the better system, where NPCs would physically have to see you commit the crime and then physically call the police, either on their cell phone or a payphone or by interacting with the police nearby. That just made sense to me. But then again, that leads into another massive problem with Red Dead Redemption 2.
No. 5: AI Is A Massive Downgrade From GTA IV
Yes, the AI in Red Dead Redemption 2 is such a massive step backwards from GTA IV. In GTA IV the AI had different personalities and behaviors for those personalities. So sometimes during a shootout, you could shoot the gun out of someone’s hand, and if they had a coward personality, they would just run, hide, and cower after losing their firearm. The more brave NPCs would attempt to require a weapon or charge at you if they didn’t have a weapon and attempt to fight you hand-to-hand.
I remember one-time I shot a gun out of a fat cop’s hand and then shot him in the hip; he staggered, fell over, and crawled over behind a car. I went over to him with the gun out and he was begging for his life. He was bleeding out and injured, still alive, but didn’t want to fight anymore. I always thought about that encounter – this random cop just trying and failing in the shootout and then begging for his life after he was disarmed and injured.
You don’t get those moments like that in Red Dead Redemption 2. If you shoot a gun out of an AI’s hand, if it’s not specifically scripted for a story mission, they will just pull out another gun and keep shooting. If you shoot the second gun out of their hand, they may charge you or just die. They never stop and react differently, they never contemplate their situation, beg for their life, or change their behavior. It’s always the same thing.
Shoot someone in the leg and they’ll hobble around, but it won’t change their personality or behavior, because all enemies who are tagged as enemies in the game behave the same way.
Yes, the AI have some impressive animation scripts for their daily routines, but they’re unfortunately tied to those routines. There’s nothing organic or unique about their behavior like in GTA IV, where someone with a short temper might bump into someone else eating a hot dog, get into a fist fight, and then have the cops come break it up. The only time AI attack other AI in Red Dead Redemption 2 is due to pre-scripted open-world scenarios. There is no random bandit AI who may or may not attempt to stick someone up and fail – the one scenario where the bandit holds up the couple, it always ends the same way unless you intervene.
After 100+ hours in the single-player game, I also discovered that there are only a set number of random open-world encounters, and then eventually they begin to repeat. Once again, the AI reacts the same way every time, because it’s a pre-scripted moment rather than the completely organic AI characteristics that were featured in GTA IV, where you could play the game 100 times and get 100 different results and interactions from the AI each time you played.
No. 6: Unintuitive Combat Systems
One of the things that also makes the AI stand out so much for not being very good is the fact that the combat is not intuitive at all. As mentioned, the melee combat is highly under-utilized in the single-player portion of the game, and even though it’s cool to have the option to buy hatchets and machetes, you literally never need them for anything in the single-player portion of the game. There are no moments where you have to just fight with knives for any extended period of time, or have to rely on tactical knife throwing or hatchet lobbing.
This is probably because the combat system is one of the most unintuitive I’ve ever experienced for a game of this caliber.
So first of all, it’s awesome that the player-character reacts and automatically dodges when on a horse while being fired upon. That’s cool. But then why don’t they do the same when you dismount from a horse?
The most frustrating moments for me is whenever raiders would blockade the road and I would have to dismount the horse to fight them, because I died almost every time during the dismount. The characters dismount very slowly in the single-player game and then just stand there. There’s also an input delay with moving the characters, and their default movement is always to walk. So I made run to toggle, but if you toggle it too quickly before they’re fully dismounted they get stuck on the horse and you have to walk away from the horse first to then run, all the meanwhile the enemy AI are peppering you and your horse with bullets.
And dare you not dismount near a thicket, trees or rocks, because Arthur/John will get stuck on the geometry a lot of times and then you find yourself fighting to get free before fighting to stay alive while being shot at by multiple foes.
The movement is extremely slow and stiff during combat for no discernible reason.
Aiming is also unintuitive, as you can fire from your hip but obviously it’s inaccurate. However, iron-sighting results in the aiming becoming super slow. So you not only move slow but also have slow aiming while trying to shoot, so basically if you aren’t instantly behind cover when the shooting starts, you will die if you try to shoot while trying to get to cover.
Why did they make moving the characters so cumbersome? No idea, but the least they should have done is make it where suppression fire works. Firing from the hip should at least force NPCs to react to give you an opportunity to get to safety, sort of like in Max Payne 3, which Rockstar also made.
In Max Payne 3 you could just fire at enemies and they would react, which was great because it created this back and forth strategy between the shootouts so that you could use suppression fire strategically to maneuver throughout the level.
The environmental reactions and shooting effects themselves look fantastic in Red Dead Redemption 2, but there is no suppression fire reactions from the AI. This goes back to the problem of the AI being too braindead and restricted to match the quality of the game’s animations and world-building. AI being more reactive to nearby gunfire instead of just continually firing away with pinpoint precision would have made the shootouts feel far more dynamic and engrossing.
Also, player-characters should have reacted to fire both suppressive and when hit. Instead of just standing there stiffly, the characters should have automatically covered their head or attempted to do a slight duck, just like what they do when on a horse. Also, being hit should have seen both player-characters and AI reacting like the AI in GTA IV.
I died a lot of times in Red Dead Redemption 2 because Arthur would just slowly move toward cover without reacting to the gunfire. So if you got shot in the shoulder or the leg, Arthur would just keep moving in the same direction you pointed him in while the bullets zipped into his body. If the game was more like GTA IV or Max Payne 3, and Arthur fell when being shot in the leg, or stumbled when shot in the hip or back, it would have made for far more dynamic and reactive gameplay. Because being shot and falling actually saves you from being hit several more times just standing upright and straight, or slowly moving in a direct line to a location.
Now I know some people will say, “But you can dodge!” and yes, you can dodge, but it actually does more harm than good, because the Call of Duty-style AI will just aim at the location where you land when dodging and shoot you while your dodge animation is still playing and while you’re standing up. Once again, it’s just not very intuitive. If you could dodge and stay on the ground and shoot enemies or at least shoot near enemies and force them to move, then it would make the feature 100 times better, since that’s how it was in Max Payne 3. You could shoot-dodge and then stay on the ground and keep shooting, which worked great if you need to suppress enemies before making a run to another hiding spot.
The upside is that at least in the multiplayer the player-characters move a little bit more nimbly than Arthur and John, but it’s still a cumbersome affair when it comes to the shooting mechanics. It’s baffling because Rockstar already has Max Payne 3 as the template for great third-person shooting, and they already have GTA IV for great AI reactions during shootouts. It’s a shame they couldn’t have combined the two for Red Dead Redemption 2, and instead we ended up with a molasses-moving, cumbersome shooting system that feels both dated and shallow, which is unfortunate because I love the gun model designs so much.
No. 7: Clunky Melee Combat
I keep bringing up how poorly utilized the melee combat is in Red Dead Redemption 2, but it could be that Rockstar didn’t focus any specific loops around the melee combat because of how clunky it is.
The fighting animations are disjointed and truncated when transitioning between punching, blocking, and countering. Also the grabbing system is really hit or miss, literally sometimes working and other times not working at all. Also, there is no way to redirect opponents when you grab them to throw them around or move them about the environment like you could in The Godfather or even in Rockstar’s own The Warriors.
This is once again a baffling design decision because they could have utilized the mechanics from The Warriors for the melee and it would have made the melee 1,000 times better. I was really waiting to be able to get into a bar fight in Red Dead Redemption 2 and throw someone through the glass like in an old John Wayne movie. But alas, it was not possible as the game doesn’t let you move people around while grabbing them, nor actually throw them. It’s such an odd thing because even The Godfather let you grab people hold them close and then swing them around and let them go, forcing them to be thrown in the direction you fling them. EA even made it where if you did this near banisters or windows, you could fling enemies through store windows, or force them to fall and tumble down the steps, or fall over railings. You could even use it to toss them off the roof, which was awesome.
The Warriors also let you do similar antics, allowing you to throw enemies off stairs, over platforms, into objects, or throw windows. Yet Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t let you do any of that. Games that are almost two decades old somehow had more intuitive and fluid melee combat than newer games. It’s just… baffling. Every time I managed to grab someone in Red Dead Redemption 2 while inside a building or near a window, I would desperately try to throw them through the window with no luck. And even when I did manage to punch a guy back up against the class on a staircase, he just bumped into the broken window but didn’t fall through. Major bummer.
I also would have liked smoother blocking and counter transition animations. I just don’t understand why punching and blocking looks so disjointed in the game, especially when so many other animations are smoothed out and look so good. The blocking/punching animations are so jaunty that it’s distracting. I will say, to the game’s benefit, the hunting/tracking mechanics, and combat for hunting animals actually works surprisingly well, but that’s because when hunting animals they aren’t shooting back at you.
No. 8: Multiplayer Restricts All The Fun Modes Behind Paywalls
One thing that is a major bummer is that even though you get to do a lot more in the multiplayer of Red Dead Redemption 2 than what’s available in the single-player, a lot of that content is locked behind expensive paywalls.
Want to be a Bounty Hunter? Well, you either have to pay up some money or grind out the gold for a couple of months to get the dosh to be a bounty hunter. Want to be a collector? Same thing. How about a naturist? Same thing.
Basically all the cool loops are locked behind paywalls or grind-walls. It’s pretty disappointing.
I think if some of the foundational mechanics were a bit more fleshed out or smooth, it could have justified the high cost of entry. For instance, Assassin’s Creed 3 basically has many if not all of the loops of Red Dead Redemption 2, but they leave little to be desired and you actually want to partake in them. For instance, Assassin’s Creed 3 has the hand-to-hand fight clubs I mentioned earlier, along with hunting and skinning animals, and even finding treasures. If Assassin’s Creed 3 attempted to lock those features behind multiplayer paywalls, it still wouldn’t be acceptable, but the quality of the loops could make it somewhat justifiable.
Bounty hunting in Red Dead Redemption 2 is fun, but it’s not enough to make me want to fork over $20 real-life dollars for it. And even if they did have a fight club, would it be worth paying for? Well, one of the problems I mentioned was the unintuitive mechanics, for instance, if you switch to a melee weapon like a hatchet or cleaver and then tackle someone, the player-character automatically unequips the melee weapon for some bizarre reason. Also even if you have a melee weapon equipped, if someone tackles you and then attacks you with a knife, you will no longer have your own melee weapon equipped. It’s just really unintuitive.
But even still, locking these features behind paywalls just makes already unintuitive features seem even less appealing.
No. 9: Sociopolitical Commentary
This is the thing that actually stood out to me even before all the other issues, mostly because this became apparent about 20% of the way into the story. I noticed that once the gang headed south all of the dialogue that included whites was disparaging. Every single time any character talked about whites, it was about them being “racist”, “hillbillies”, “rednecks”, “inbreds”, “ingrates”, “degenerates”, “animals”, and “monsters”.
No one had anything positive to say about whites throughout the entire story, but there was incessant praise – especially from Arthur – about how special and good the black characters were, about how empowered and brave Sadie Adler was, and about how upstanding and strong Ms. Grimshaw is. This is a trend throughout the game, though.
Arthur is surprisingly aligned with current day Liberal Progressive ideas, anachronistically so. He’s completely on board with the women’s suffrage movement, completely indignant at the idea of slavery, and is fine with women maintaining typically male-oriented roles. Arthur berates a former plantation owner who has lost everything and is now destitute, and mocks and kills the leader of a Klu Klux Klan rally, for no reason other than that he doesn’t like white nationalist. Why? The game never bothers to explain why Arthuer’s viewpoints align with modern day Liberal Progressives even though this is during the end of the 19th century, where those kind of views were not only not common but were actually illegal in some parts of the country.
It was jarring because there was nothing really realistic about Arthur’s sociopolitical position. Maybe if he started one way and ended up another after certain life-changing events, I could understand, but from start to finish, Arthur’s sociopolitical views stayed consistently… Left-leaning. The game also took opportunities to throw in these sociopolitical commentary moments even when they didn’t really fit, such as Arthur having to slowly drive a feminist carriage into town so players had no choice but to listen to their ravings and you had no choice in how these missions played out.
Arthur was also exceptionally distressed about the plight of the Native Americans. Once again, we ask why? The game never really explains. It’s as if we’re to assume that everyone shares Liberal Progressive views about Native Americans, and therefore Arthur represents those views and those views are just because the game says so. There are no alternative viewpoints presented, such as the more ravenous tribes like the Comanche or the Apache. Instead there’s only a subplot about poor Native Americans being mistreated by whites. The game goes out of its way to only depict certain people and groups in specific ways that align with modern Liberal Progressive views without even giving players an alternative to decide for themselves how to view the situation, opposite of other games that took more middle-the-road approaches to those scenarios, like the original Red Dead Revolver, or Activision’s one-word Western title Gun.
In short: Red Dead Redemption 2 is a well-designed game from a technical standpoint, for the most part. But it has some glaring shortcomings that make it difficult to want to return to for casual play, mostly involving the unintuitive combat system. It’s a real shame, because there was a lot that Rockstar got right with the game, but a lot that also shortchanges its potential. Right now a lot of people will defend the game to the death, but with more time separating them from the rose-tinted viewpoint, many will begin to see the flaws creep through the cracks of what could have been a generation-defining masterpiece.