Red Dead Redemption 2: The Kotaku Review

Kirk Hamilton writes: From tip to tail, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a profound, glorious downer. It is the rare blockbuster video game that seeks to move players not through empowering gameplay and jubilant heroics, but by relentlessly forcing them to confront decay and despair. It has no heroes, only flawed men and women fighting viciously to survive in a world that seems destined to destroy them.

[UltraNova]

Wow, wow....this is easily THE best review I've ever read and some of the best all encompassing writing ever.

Well done Mr Hamilton, well done sir. I wil certainly go through the whole 34 minutes worth of Credits.

Edit: If you want to really appreciate the second part of this review you guy's need to read this https://kotaku.com/inside-r... about Rockstar's working conditions first.

[DarXyde]

You're calling it the best review before playing and beating the game?

A little preemptive, don't you think?

[spicelicka]

To be fair he's he seem to be referring to best written review. You don't need to play the game to appreciate good writing.

[DarXyde]

Spicelicka,

"this is easily THE best review I've ever read and some of the best all encompassing writing ever. "

Keyword: "and"

Unless UltraNova does not know what exactly they are trying to say, they are saying 2 things:

1. This review is easily one of the best reviews ever. (Which is what I'm calling attention to)

2. This is one of the best written reviews. (The part you focused on).

[Gr8saiyaman88]

Don't worry, people will also do the same for TLOU Part 2, but worse. They'll get angry when someone like Gamespot doesn't give it a 10/10 before they themselves even played the game. : p

[Nitrox]

@DarXyde- take your pedantry elsewhere. I think most of us understood the point he was trying to make. He was impressed with the quality of the review. Not the accuracy.
smh

[deafdani]

You're understanding it wrong.

He says that:

1. It's the best written review he's ever read and

2. It's one of the best written anything he's ever read. Not just reviews, but generally speaking.

[rainslacker]

Shouldn't a quality review also be accurate? Well written I don't care about as much as said writing accurately describing the game itself.

[UltraNova]

Oh man you guys need to relax....I was impressed by the quality of the writing, that's it. Do we really need to extrapolate to death on everything we say here?

No this is not the best review in terms of the game's merits and deficiencies. The author even goes exceedingly far into the whole crunch thing over at Rockstar but the way he ties everything up(his experience with the game and his colleague's crunch article) in a whole is some of, if not the best written piece about games I have ever read.

Common guys...

[DarXyde]

Nitrox,

"@DarXyde- take your pedantry elsewhere. I think most of us understood the point he was trying to make. He was impressed with the quality of the review. Not the accuracy.
smh"

So I'm being pedantic because I read it as it was written?

Okay, son.

You focused on the latter part, but I'm only drawing attention to the former. I only elaborated to explain myself, just as I am doing now, apparently.

[angelsx]

@ultra
Yeah and they get extra pay for that

[Christopher]

Not necessarily. Salaried employees are not held to overtime laws the way hourly or contract-based work is. There's much we don't know and what we do know is from the employees themselves, who are not saying they do get paid enough for the time worked as compensation as well as a heavy reliance on bonuses based on the game's success that is a flat amount for them with an tiered and more open result for upper management (as well as a larger disparity of gain from management to actual workforce).

[william_cade]

I'm a serious reader and while this review was well written - it was a bit much. I found myself just reading the 1st and last sentence of every paragraph about half way through. This review reminded of the "Yelp review" episode from South Park: "can't right now honey, I got a five pager on Ruby Tuesdays" (Gerald S19 E4) paraphrased of course.

At any rate, the writing was well done, it's just the application of purpose was lacking.

[Orionsangel]

I don't like reviews that don't end with some kind of review score.

[Born2Game83]

Why? because you need it to satisfy your fanboy needs? or like or hate the score based on how you feel about it?

How about you read it and others and make your mind up. Instead of just seeing the score and being blind.

[Orionsangel]

Yes I need the satisfaction. Remember there's no demo. You buy a game and have no real idea what to expect. I have to rely on critics. They help us make up our minds whether it's worth purchasing. I need to know what I'm dealing with here before I fork over a lot of money. A 1 or a 10?

[SegaGamer]

@Orionsangel

You buy your games based on a number? So just stick the number 10 on it and you will buy it anyway?

[dumahim]

"You buy a game and have no real idea what to expect. I have to rely on critics. They help us make up our minds whether it's worth purchasing. I need to know what I'm dealing with here before I fork over a lot of money."

Gosh. If only there was some sort of collection of words that could explain how good it is and what you'd be dealing with. Oh, wait...

[PlayableGamez-]

Yes love scores.
They are fun.

[PlayableGamez-]

PS a lot of these written reviews are supper corny.

[Tetsujin]

I have to respectfully disagree. I prefer no scores because one person's 9-10 can be another person's 5-6. I prefer what the review likes and dislikes, and leaves the score to the reader.

[starchild]

I fully agree. This obsession with numerical scores and comparisons has gotten way out of hand. I truly don't care what score someone thinks a game deserves, but if I can read their thoughts on what the game offers and why they feel the way they do about it then it can help me to get a better idea of whether it will be something I will enjoy.

[Imortus_san]

". I need to know what I'm dealing with here before I fork over a lot of money. A 1 or a 10?" - damm, soo many games that get a 9 out of 10, and when I play them I'm like "wtf did this people smoke, it's a clear 6 or 7 to me, pontuation is subjective to people's personal tastes.

[Orionsangel]

I'm cute this way.

[PhantomS42]

Aw, you have to actually read in order to understand someone's opinion...Gen Z problems.

[Orionsangel]

Yeah but they spoil it.

[deafdani]

Kotaku has never done numbered reviews. Are you going to complaint every time a Kotaku review is posted here? It's just the way they do it. If you don't like that philosophy, it's fine; there's hundreds of gaming websites out there that have, in fact, numbers in their reviews. Why complain about the outlier?

[Orionsangel]

You shouldn't be so uptight. We're here to have fun.

[MadLad]

Yeah.
All of that sensory input needed to create an idea out of the written opinion is just asking too much.

Just throw an 8 or above up so I know to be happy. Or a 7 and below so I know to call the reviewer stupid and claim they wanted clicks.

[Orionsangel]

You just need a headline and a score. The whole review gives away too much information about the game anyway. I wanna go in fresh! Because you're not fully clean unless you're zestfully clean!

[carcarias]

Ach, you're getting some downvotes but I know where you're coming from. In an ideal world we wouldn't need a score but peoples writing isn't always as clear as it should be.

After all, I'd imagine we've all experienced the same thing; you read a review that seems to praise all the important stuff and then it gets a 6 or they list a whole bunch of niggles or frustrations but then shove in an 8/10 anyway. It's no wonder people go to metacritic to see what the average of the scores is.

In addition to that, it's just convenient. You can spend an hour+ reading several reviews and still have 20 more to read....or you can look at the average of 40+ scores in just a few moments. If you're like me, you might then read a couple of the worst to see if the problems match up and if they would be something that would bother you. It's just quicker all round.

[Orionsangel]

Played for 3 hours. Loving it! But now I gotta sleep. I'm tired.

https://www.twitch.tv/video...

[rainslacker]

I think the content of the review is more important than the score a reviewer gives it. A score doesn't depict the true nature of a game, and through the written review, you can actually see what the author thought was important, and how the game implemented those things. Through the reading, you can decide if the authors placed the same importance on things that you do, and through the review, its usually easier to see if the author was biased, or fair in their rating scale.

[LucasRuinedChildhood]

Wholeheartedly agree. Who has time to read 100+ reviews? I'd rather spend that time actually playing the game. Many of the people who are rallying against scores at the end of a review really are a load of pretentious knobs

[william_cade]

I do. Not having a score leaves it up to me. Even though numbers are not actual either when it comes to reviews.

[UnHoly_One]

If you can't read that review and figure out whether or not you want to play the game then you are beyond help.

That is quite literally the best game review I've ever read.

Putting a score on the end of the review would have been a crime.

[Orionsangel]

No, it's not that it's that I don't wanna know anything about the game. These reviews give away too many details. I just want a simple, good or bad?

[nucky64]

THAT was a long and convoluted "review".

[Mulletino]

Grandiosity

[nucky64]

next time you look up a word to use, try to understand it's meaning first and to what you are responding....... i made a STATEMENT OF OPINION. that is HARDLY coming from my feeling superior to anyone - it's just an opinion.
why are you so sensitive - you work for kotaku?

[moomoo319]

Every time u withdraw at the ATM write a story about what kinds of hours those investment bankers are working 😬 for 100s of thousands $$$

[Pjuncaj]

I don't know how I feel about this. I see why one might write the review in this way, but I can't say I agree with it. Although, Kotaku's never really been the place to go for a straightforward reviews. So I suppose that if this was appropriate for this to be anywhere, Kotaku is the place. Regardless, it's well-written and I appreciate that it is different from a typical review.

[amiside]

Very nice writing

[Mulletino]

Winces at enjoying red dead because of crunch time labor, writes social justice review on his sweatshop electronic device.

[carcarias]

Heh, nice one :)

[LucasRuinedChildhood]

One issue doesn't negate the other. By that logic, we should never try to better society because some other aspect of it is bad. It sounds clever until you actually think what you're saying

[FPS_D3TH]

Are we seriously reviewing game’s based on crunch now? Like as if any of its new? This the most passive aggressive review of anything I’ve ever read. Kotaku, unsurprisingly.

[LucasRuinedChildhood]

Allegedly, AC: Odyssey was made without crunch. Crunch is acceptable for a short timeframe but not months or years. Given how recent that controversy was, it's not offensive or odd to address the issue and to provide more context in a review.

[ziggurcat]

I'll be "pre-ordering" this game just before the cut-off later this evening.

[Fluxour]

Lovely writing, this really has me anticipating finally playing the game.

[cruxito]

(with mouth wide open) I'm impressed at the eloquence singing off this review. The person who wrote this article is journalist-material for the likes of New Yorker, Atlantic, Laphams Quarterly writing level.

[MadLad]

Do you think the writers at polygon hurt their weak, girly little fingers through all of the SJW nonsense they spew out on the daily?

[lociefer]

I really hate most of kotaku's articles; i can't stomach their sjw shenanigens, but this, this is a very, veeery well written review. Kudos to the writer

[rainslacker]

OK. So at the many people saying this is a well written review...I have to ask....how is it well written?

This well written review is about as informative as those people saying this is a well written review. Lots of exposition about how grand and amazing it is, along with some mentions of how it also comes up short. All written with eloquent words that sound pretty, and make the reviewer appear intelligent, but ultimately giving not a single piece of supporting prose to exactly how it achieve or fails in any aspect that it deems necessary to mention.

Then it goes into a tirade about the working conditions of R* employees, as if that is in any way relevant to the quality of the game.

The author goes on at length about the story and characters in the game, and to his credit, does do some justice to describing what he likes about them, or how he felt about them at different points.

However, I question the author going on at length with spoilers, as if everyone would have played the first game. Sure, the author knows that, but the player may not. Very poor technique IMO. You don't review Lord of the Rings, by essentially giving away every plot point of the Hobbit.

Further, the author spends a generous amount of time on the story of the game. A significant amount more than the actual technical merits of the game. it's more like he's writing a book report sprinkled with some editorial, than he is writing a review.

The author goes into some serious criticisms of the game play mechanics, and how those mechanics are not up to standards for the modern age. Even citing that R* refuses to accept modern standards of "snappy controls". But never actually says how that affects the game overall. Just a bunch of vague mentions which I suppose the reader is supposed to just understand.

The author does do a good job at talking about the detail of the world, but it still doesn't really give you much indication how that all fits together, which is pretty much how the whole review plays out. It just seems like a bunch of random different aspect of the game being reviewed independently and without much concern of how it all fits together.

To that end, it is once again, not a well written review, but more of an exposition of generalities. In fact, most of the review fails to mention how it all fits together, outside the story and interaction, and when he does, it's just more vagueness. It's more like this review is written for people who already understand what the author is talking about with any given point, and that's not how you write a review.

Then a good chunk of the end of the review focused more on the developers plight of long hours and assumed oppressive work environment. I give props for the author taking the time to acknowledge the devs who worked so hard, but the topic should have been broached elsewhere instead of trying to turn this review into yet another agenda based piece that is typical of Kotaku.

I can't believe I'm actually reviewing a review.

[Harkins1721]

Do yourself a favor and watch Colin Moriartys review on YouTube. Not Kotaku or Polygon.