It’s 2025, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of available games that you can download and play as of this moment of writing. Whether you prefer indie titles, AAA blockbusters, or even the good old nostalgia that comes with replaying old-favorite titles or their remastered versions, you can find right about anything.
But today we’re putting everything else aside and we’re talking about the best game I have ever played in my 30 years of living.
I’m not sure why I’ve never given Red Dead Redemption 2 a chance as a game series, but once I started a gaming blog along with one close friend, the title was part of the to-do list. I started by watching a few trailers from both the first and second titles, and the second one looked like the best choice.
It’s also a prequel to the first installment, so I didn’t quite miss anything with Red Dead Redemption’s first story. But here’s everything in my previous review:
Steam also had a huge offer, giving the Red Dead Redemption 2 for only €14,99 – which was a price I couldn’t resist. So I bought the game and I started playing it as soon as it was downloaded (119,46GB the current total size).
Red Dead Redemption 2
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Even from the very beginning, the stunning environments, the amazingly good-looking graphics, the characters, and the dialogues had me hooked. I knew that it was a very popular title, but I didn’t have any expectations – even when I knew Rockstar Games was the developing company behind this masterpiece.
Imagine this: You’re on horseback, climbing higher into the freezing mountains as snow falls heavily around you. The cold bites deep, and the situation is dire – you need shelter, food, and money. With you are men, women, and children, all relying on your leadership. To survive, you must hunt, steal, and do whatever it takes in a ruthless world that shows no mercy. After all, these are the final days of the Old West.
The high-quality graphics and the tremendous environments make each scene feel more realistic and well-thought-out. The world is filled with trees, flowers, animals, and people, making it feel more alive and closer to reality. As a new player, you’ll quickly learn the truth about the world you just joined: It’s cruel.
From the very beginning, you’ll learn how to hunt animals, skin their bodies, and cook them to eat food and survive. Along the many different animals that game features, there are wolves, bears, and other species that can easily become a threat, and among them, enemies from other gangs, robbers that want your money, and cold weather that can kill you if you don’t wear the right clothes.
It’s all about surviving in a vast world that’s filled with enemies and other dangers. It’s the Old Wide West after all, and if history has reached us anything, that would be how cruel the world used to be for people.
But it’s not just Red Dead Redemption 2’s vast world, Rockstar Games has implemented way too many things that players can do, including discovering and unlocking a few necessary things. If you rush through the game, it should take you approximately 40-60 hours to complete the campaign. If you’re going for all the side quests (which you should), it should take around 100 hours to complete them all.
But if you want to fully unlock everything and experience the environment at its fullest, you should expect more than 150 hours of gameplay – and that’s just for the campaign mode, online not included.
For new players, here’s a list of all the things that you can unlock in Red Dead Redemption 2:
- 90 Challenges (to complete)
- 178 Animals (discoverable)
- 77 Equipment Items (discoverable)
- 30 Fish (discoverable)
- 6 Gangs (discoverable)
- 43 Plants (discoverable)
- 19 Horses (discoverable)
- 64 Weapons (discoverable)
- 144 Cigarette Cards (discoverable)
And yes, you’ll have to discover them all simply by progressing through the storyline and as you explore the old Western world. To discover an animal, for example, you’ll have to get close to it and keep the Q button pressed (for PC players) until it finished examining it – or simply use your binoculars to unlock them from far away.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, how’s the actual storyline?
In the campaign mode, you play as Arthur Morgan in the year 1899. You are a member of the Van der Linde gang which is being led by Dutch, a guy dreaming of money, freedom, and adventure. After a failed heist in a town called Blackwater, you find yourselves running away from another gang, trying to stay hidden while surviving the harsh cold weather up into the mountains.
The game uses chapters, and as you progress through the storyline, new chapters will be unlocked. In the second chapter, for example, your gang will find a warmer place far away from the mountains, and the whole scenery will dramatically change – which is good news for players getting easily bored by being in the same place for long periods.
Once the second chapter is unlocked, this is where your character is free to discover the whole world and unlock the map. This is where you start taking side quests, finding random NPCs, getting robbed, and basically where all the fun begins. This is also where you start seeing all the differences between Red Dead Redemption 2 and all the other games that you could possibly compare with.
Speaking of NPCs, did you know that they actually remember you? If you antagonize or help an NPC, they will remember you the next time you see them. NPCs are also reacting to gun smoke, so if you fire in a confined space, the smoke lingers, and some NPCs will cough or cover their mouths. Then again if you stare at them for long, they will call you out or get aggressive. If you commit a crime without a mask, witnesses can identify you.
If you thought police in GTA 5 were well-designed (which I don’t), in Red Dead Redemption 2 Sheriffs investigate crimes by checking bodies, talking to witnesses, and making arrests, and paying off a bounty in one state, it doesn’t clear your crimes in another.
But as far as this game goes, riding your horse will be something that you’ll be doing for as long as you’re playing. This is where you start to understand how much time Rockstar Games put into this game to make it even more realistic.
Your horse’s testicles shrink in cold weather, and they also pee, poop, and eat. Horses also get scarred by gunfires, predators, and even sudden movements.
You must manually pat and calm your horse if it gets spooked, you can upgrade its equipment, and even upgrade the horse itself or adjust its hair. The realistic horse mechanics are very enjoyable as you ride, and because of that, you may have to spend a lot of time riding and learning how your horse behaves in different situations.
But the realism of the game goes way further. Weapons rust and degrade over time, requiring cleaning for optimal performance. If you fire through a cowboy hat, it will leave a realistic bullet hole, and Arthur actually loads each bullet into a revolver instead of magically reloading.
Snow accumulates on Arthur’s clothes and gradually melts, while mud sticks to your character and dries over time – and if you step in blood, you’ll leave bloody footprints for a while.
Arthur’s facial hair and hair grow naturally, and you must visit a barber to style them. If Arthur is malnourished, he becomes thinner; if he eats too much, he gains weight. After getting shot, Arthur winces in pain and can be seen clutching the wound.
Predators hunt prey dynamically, meaning you can witness wolves taking down deer and birds fly away if you fire a gun nearby. If you skin an animal and return later, scavengers like coyotes may have eaten the carcass.
By the way, those are just a few of the details that you can find while playing the game, with many others that I’d like to see (and enjoy) yourself.
For lone wolves like myself who prefer playing solo rather than joining online, Red Dead Redemption 2 has surely much to offer. There are so many players out there reporting that even after spending over 300-500 hours playing the game, they still haven’t unlocked everything and many of them are still learning about all the secrets that the game has to offer.
As a new player, completing the whole campaign and trying to become as good as I can be before joining Red Dead Online is crucial. The game has been active for over 8 years now, and there are way too many players who can bury you in a second or less.
What’s even weirder is that the game currently has almost 100 thousand active players each month, and those are only counting the Steam players and excluding Xbox, PlayStation, and Rockstar Launcher players. And if you think that you already spent lots of hours playing the campaign, wait until you find out how many more things the online mode has to offer.
In my 30 years, I’ve never been more fascinated by a game as much as I have been with Red Dead Redemption 2. There are other great titles out there, of course, including The Last Of Us: Part I, Dying Light (1 and 2), and Grand Theft Auto (all the series, which have also been developed by the same company), among many others – but none can really compete with what Rockstar Games has created here.
It’s the kind of game that you can play in so many different situations. Feeling like running and killing? The game has lots of that action! Maybe want to take some stealthy kills and play it more silently? You can do that! How about maybe simply riding your horse, discovering the whole world, and maybe having a drink of wine or some cold beer? I’ve done the latter pretty much each time I was launching the game.
I love it when I play a game and my mind can get lost in other thoughts that I am having – all of them which have nothing to do with the game. It relaxes me, and when it needs to, it immediately brings me back into the action. That’s not something many games can do, and none with the way that Red Dead Redemption 2 does.
Both the story and the gameplay are not for the faint-hearted though, as the game constantly reminds you of the brutality that existed in the old Western world. You kill an animal? You’ll have to cut its skin if you want to use it for craft later.
Women? Let’s just say that they didn’t live as happily. Strangers? Anyone could try to rob and kill you at any time – and many times they try.
It’s the closest thing we have to truly experience the old Western world, even if it’s an imaginary world developed by a gaming company.
The dynamic lighting and the weather system it’s an absolute perfection, as you’ll get to live both day and night, enjoy the sunset, get wet because it rains, and ride your horse through storms. When it’s raining, everything gets wet, including your character, and the same goes when it’s snowing.
Rockstar Games has indeed focused on the smallest details – and that’s what makes this company the best of the rest.
Unfortunately, though, Red Dead Redemption 2 has a huge problem: Rockstar Games has stopped supporting it with new updates. The company is currently focusing on the development of Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6), and they officially acknowledge that RDR2 is not in their plans for now.
So why would people keep on buying a game that has stopped getting any further updates? Well, the truth is, it’s so vast and well-made, that it’s worthy of every single penny you spend on it even in 2025. Even the newest AAA titles can’t be compared with Red Dead Redemption 2, and when they do, they typically lose the battle.
Wrapping this up, if there’s any game that changed the gaming industry and given all gamers an experience so unique and well-made, that would be, hands down, Red Dead Redemption 2.
