Review Red Dead Redemption 2 & # 39; (PS4): In search of meaning | Entertainment

Then there is the time and effort needed for Morgan to perform the simplest tasks. Looting a corpse takes five seconds, so it's not worth searching through everything you can from a field of dead bandits. It takes more time to skin the deer, wolves and other animals you are hunting. The rapid movements being limited, most missions are preceded by a horse ride of several minutes. Naturally, it tires Morgan and his ride, and stopping to set up his camp and cooking game or feeding his horse oat cakes is another laborious series of entries. And if you do not find yourself immune to the hiss of your horse, even more daunting minutes scatter through the immense desolation of the game map.

After riding, the most common action in "Red Dead Redemption 2" is to shoot. And Morgan is more slippery with a gun than he is with anything else. The game loads with a sight that guarantees a whim almost every time you lock with the left trigger and you push the right joystick up. Removing from this strategy, or ending the snap of the fingers, means managing both the swing of Morgan's goal and the head of his enemies. But more adventurous players could dig the challenge. Then there's the big equalizer, the dead eye, which slows down time and allows you to paint targets. You can refill your eye meter with consumables such as moonlight, but simply reloading it will give you a reasonable degree of difficulty. Nevertheless, despite all the optional challenges and the minimum of frustration, shooting for 50 hours on waves of rival gangs and Pinkerton agents is rather superfluous.

So playing "Red Dead Redemption 2" requires patience. It takes patience with Morgan's heavy movements, patience with his methodical manners. The question, though, is whether this patience is part of Rockstar's design. Does this symbolize something? Maybe Morgan's stubborn way? Maybe the difficulties of survival in the west? Or maybe it's just an accessory to the studio's vision?

I am inclined to believe that the game's boredom is determined. Because everything else about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is certainly.

With a master hand, Rockstar may have created the world's most alive and studied open world ever dedicated to virtual space. From the compact foot of snow that covers its mountains to the effervescence of dragonflies above the swamps of the delta, the game lives and breathes like no other. Its willows and tobacco stalks blow in the wind, its rays of sun and the moonlight flicker in the mist. It's simply breathtaking.

Behind everything in the game, alive and otherwise, is an obsession with the taxonomic detail rarely found outside of Cormac McCarthy's books. You see it in the information menus on horse anatomy and gun parts, of course, but you also see it in the realistic movements of its animals: the way dogs shake their tail with so strong that their buttocks tremble, the alligators draw near to their prey with a thirst for blood so absolute that the sight paralyzes you with fear. Horses poop a little excessively, though.

Then there are the people Morgan meets. Whether it's aliens that it helps in side quests or passers-by on dusty trails, most players have stories. I am always moved by the homeless and one-armed civil war veteran, who so badly needed human contact that he urged Morgan to hold him in his arms. I am still haunted by the last breath of man on the shore who died holding a letter luring him to some character from the first "Red Dead Redemption". The credulity of the game world is undermined by the way all these people gravitate around Morgan, their stories culminating at the second of his arrival, as in any other game world. But few games are full of worlds with stories so evocative and so submarine that they animate them even more.

The best story of "Red Dead Redemption 2" is perhaps the main one. Present in 1899 in five fictitious states on the US border, he installs the monumental western Rockstar in 2008 following the Dutch gang Van der Linde which escapes the law. Morgan, with his charismatic sled and his face like tender meat, is a magnetic presence as his lieutenant. And he has a complicated friendship with Dutch, whose voice Jeff Daniels confers a general quality that makes the insecurities of his cult leader even more terrifying. While Dutch struggles to guide his band through storms literally and figuratively, his judgment worsens. Towards the end, his behavior will seem familiar to anyone who has experienced the sadness of a friend who slowly separates.

The writing of the game is improved compared to the first "Red Dead Redemption" and in particular to the "Grand Theft Auto" series of Rockstar. It's less exposed, more elegant. And Morgan's formidable voice actor, Roger Clark, says more on tone than on words. This is as true of Morgan 's quarrels with Dutch as for his fireside conversations with other gang members, who can be fun to bond with in camps that migrate throughout the match. The plot is strong, too, weaving the disparate threads of Morgan's life through casual encounters and sudden but spectacular turns.

Some moments in the game allow you to define Morgan 's moral compass, while others do it for you. I played honorably and the rewards brought to those moments were almost always rewarding. At times, I was able to see first-hand the positive impact that Morgan had had on the life of someone else, at other times, I was congratulated for my decision by a continuous line of contextual dialogue. Still, there were times when I had no choice but to be disgusted by Morgan, namely a series of missions that would charge him to steal money from people. people in debt by the gang. But do not skip them – in the end, they are worth it.

The same push-and-pull sets "Red Dead Redemption 2". Its rough-form systems come up against a refined narrative, allowing you to reconcile the extremes. This may mean interpreting its lead controls and tedious commands as a symbol of Something. It may mean believing that the game is slowing you down so you can stop and enjoy the beauty around you. Indeed, in the absence of role-playing mechanisms such as XP or a more enjoyable action, there is no feedback loop in the game but a simple act of discovery of its wonders and mysteries.

Or reconcile "Red Dead Redemption 2" can mean reconciling the economic aspects of the game itself. It has been widely reported that Rockstar Games had almost forced its employees to work up to 100 hours a week to develop its 300,000 animations and other maximalist indicators of the size of the game. No world, no matter how beautiful, does worth this human cost. And in light of this, at the very least, the majesty of "Red Dead Redemption 2" deserves to get stuck in the mud several times.