Ahead of Red Dead Redemption 2's release, Rockstar has confirmed a day-one update will be available at launch. Although it isn't technically required, it recommends you download the patch to receive "a number of last minute tweaks, bugs, and fixes." And with the game being so expansive, we've begun assembling guides and tips to help you make the most of your experience. Read on for our full Red Dead 2 review.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game about consequences where you have only the illusion of choice. Yes, there are some decisions to be made, and those decisions will shape your character and the world around you. But some of the most disastrous choices were made for you before the game even begins, leaving you to deal with the fallout. And because it's a prequel to Red Dead Redemption, you also (probably) know how the story ends. All that's left is discovering what happens in between and making the most of it. To that end, you fight against the repetitive nature of missions, frequent moral dilemmas, and the inconvenience of doing what's right. For the most part, the frustration that tension can cause is also what makes the story impactful, and when it all comes together, your effort is not wasted.
At the beginning of Red Dead Redemption 2, the Van der Linde gang is already on the decline we know from the previous game is coming. After a heist gone wrong in Blackwater, they're on the run, down a few members, and on the verge of capture, starvation, and succumbing to a snowstorm. There are familiar faces--Red Dead Redemption protagonist John Marston chief among them--as well as new ones. As senior member Arthur Morgan, you're in the privileged position of being Dutch Van der Linde's right hand, privy to his machinations and included in the most important outings. Once the gang escapes the storm and settles into a temporary campsite, you're also put in charge of the camp's finances, meaning you pick out all the upgrades and supplies. If Dutch is the center of the gang, Arthur is adjacent to all its vital parts at once, and that gives you a lot of power.
With that power, you're encouraged to do as you see fit and at your own pace. A lengthy series of story missions early on introduces you to some of the ways you can spend your time, including hunting, fishing, horse-rearing, and robbery. There are a lot of systems, and covering the basics takes several hours. While they're not so cleverly disguised as to not feel like tutorials, the actual learning is paced well in its integration with the story, and the missions also acquaint you with the characters and the surrounding area. For example, the fishing "tutorial" has you taking young Jack Marston out for the day, since John is not exactly great at fatherhood. Jack is pure and sweet--and incredibly vulnerable to all the gang's wrongdoings--and the mission is memorable for it.
In addition to the mechanics of various activities, you're also presented with a few elements of semi-realism you need to contend with. Mainly, you need to eat to refill your health, stamina, and Dead Eye ability "cores," which deplete over time. Eating too much or too little results in weight changes and stat debuffs. Eating itself isn't a problem, and neither is maintaining cores in general, but eating enough to maintain an average weight is intrusive; despite experimenting with what and how often I ate, I couldn't get Arthur out of the underweight range, and eating any more frequently would be too time-consuming to justify. You don't have to sleep (though you can to pass time and refill your cores), and surviving hot or cold temperatures comes down to choosing the right outfit from your item wheel, so managing your weight sticks out as superfluous rather than conducive to immersion.
Limited fast travel options are the better-implemented side of Red Dead 2's realism, perhaps counterintuitively. There's next to no fast travel at the beginning and few methods in general, so you have to rely on your horse to get around. It can be slow, but there's no shortage of things to do and see along the way. Chance encounters are plentiful and frequently interesting; you might find a stranger in need of a ride to town or a snake bite victim who needs someone to suck the venom out of their wound. You can stumble upon a grotesque murder scene that sets you entirely off-track, or you can ignore someone in danger and just keep riding. And just as you can decide to rob or kill most anyone, you'll also run into people who will do the same to you. Even the longest rides aren't wasted time, and it's hard not to feel like you're missing something if you do opt for fast travel.
Red Dead Redemption 2's version of America is vast and wide open, stretching from snowy mountains and the Great Plains down to the original game's New Austin in the southwest. Further to the east is the Louisiana-inspired Deep South, which is still feeling the effects of the Civil War after nearly 40 years. There's a distinct shift when traveling from region to region; as grassy hillsides become alligator-filled swamps, Union veterans give way to angry Confederate holdouts, and good intentions and casual racism turn into desperation and outright bigotry. The variety makes the world feel rich, and it both reacts to you and changes independently of your involvement; new buildings will go up as time goes on, and some of the people you talk to will remember you long after you first interacted with them (for better or worse).
Incidental moments as you explore make up a large part of the morality system, in which you gain and lose honor based on your actions. "Good" morals are relative--you're a gang member, after all--but generally, it's more honorable to punch up rather than down. Helping an underdog, even if they're an escaped convict and even if you need to kill some cops or robbers to do it, can net you good guy points. In these situations, it's easier to be noble than a true outlaw. Committing a dishonorable crime is hard to do undetected, even in remote locations, and usually requires you to track down and threaten a witness, run and hide from the law, or pay a bounty down the line. While you'll earn money more quickly doing "bad" things, high honor gets you a pretty discount at shops, and you'll make good money either way through story missions.
In many ways, you're nudged toward playing a "good" Arthur. The gang members he's closest to from the beginning are the more righteous, principled ones who are motivated by loyalty and a desire to help others, while he insults, argues with, and generally reacts negatively to those who are hot-headed and vicious. The most rotten of them is Micah, who's so easy to hate that it's hard not to follow Arthur's lead and take the higher road. Unlocking camp upgrades like one-way fast travel and better supplies also essentially forces you into being honorable; although everyone donates, you have to invest hundreds of dollars yourself if you want to afford anything, and that automatically gets you a ton of honor points whether you like it or not.
One of the best, most understated details in the game is Arthur's journal, in which he recaps big events as well as random people you've met and more mundane, everyday things. He sketches places you go, doodles the plants and animals you find, and writes out thoughts he barely speaks out loud. The journal changes with your level of honor, but at least for a relatively honorable Arthur, the pages are filled with concerns and existential crises--inner turmoil over being either good or evil, for instance--that make you want to see him become a better person.
Like any good prequel, there's an incredible amount of tension in knowing what happens without knowing exactly how.
It's a lot harder to feel like a good guy when doing the main story missions, though. Arthur, along with nearly everyone else, is loyal to the gang first and foremost. This means following Dutch into trouble, busting friends out of jail, and committing a number of robberies in the interest of getting money for the gang. Even if you're trying your hardest to be good, you'll inevitably slaughter entire towns in mandatory story missions--stealth and non-lethal takedowns aren't always an option, and the snappy auto-lock aim makes shootouts a far easier option anyway. The dissonance is frustrating to play through in the moment, but it's incredibly important to Arthur's arc as well as your understanding of the gang as a whole. To say any more would venture into spoiler territory.
That extends to the structure of story missions, which start to get predictable around halfway through the game. It's not that they're boring--the opposite is true, actually, and you see a lot of action from beat to beat. But after a while, a pattern emerges, and it's easy to figure out how any given heist or raid is going to unfold. This too becomes frustrating, partially because you often have no way of significantly affecting the outcome despite any decision-making power you thought you might have had. But your weariness is also Arthur's, and that's crucial. The mid-game drags in service of the narrative, which only becomes apparent much later. There's also enough variety between missions and free-roam exploration to prevent it from dragging to the point of being a chore to play.
Like any good prequel, there's an incredible amount of tension in knowing what happens without knowing exactly how. If you played Red Dead Redemption, you know who survives and as a result who probably won't make it to the end of the game. Even during the slower parts, you're waiting for betrayals and injuries and other events you've only vaguely heard mention of before. You're waiting for characters to reveal their true selves, and watching as everything unravels is riveting and heartbreaking if you know what's to come.
You can still enjoy the story in its own right without that background knowledge, though. Some of Red Dead Redemption 2's best moments have almost no relation to its predecessor. One mission takes you to a women's suffrage rally, and a painful side mission has you facing a woman whose husband you killed and life you ruined. The new characters are among the best, too; Sadie Adler is a personal favorite for reasons I won't spoil. Another, a young black man in the gang named Lenny, mentions how the Southerners treat him a little differently; Arthur says that he hasn't noticed anything weird, to which Lenny replies, "All respect, Mr. Morgan, you wouldn't notice."
Generally, Red Dead 2 tackles pertinent issues of the era with care. Rather than defining any of its characters by the bigotry they may experience, it allows them the room to be well-rounded individuals while still not ignoring that things like racism and sexism exist. One arc focuses squarely on a very serious issue, and here, the lack of real choice in the story's direction--and your resulting involvement in what transpires--will likely make you uncomfortable in a powerful way.
While Red Dead Redemption was mostly focused on John Marston's story, Red Dead 2 is about the entire Van der Linde gang--as a community, as an idea, and as the death rattle of the Wild West. It is about Arthur, too, but as the lens through which you view the gang, his very personal, very messy story supports a larger tale. Some frustrating systems and a predictable mission structure end up serving that story well, though it does take patience to get through them and understand why. Red Dead Redemption 2 is an excellent prequel, but it's also an emotional, thought-provoking story in its own right, and it's a world that is hard to leave when it's done.
If your relationship with 2K's pro wrestling series has been as fractured as a bickering tag team over the past few years, WWE 2K19 is unlikely to patch up old wounds. All of this to say: if you didn't like how it played then, you're probably not going to like how it plays now. Some minor quality of life refinements improve upon the in-ring action in a couple of specific match types, but beyond this the core system of strikes, grapples, and reversals has remained relatively unchanged. Instead, WWE 2K19's most notable additions appear outside of the squared circle; developers Yukes and Visual Concepts introduce a deluge of new content and game modes to satiate an aspect of the series that has been sorely lacking in recent years.
The first of which is a redesigned MyCareer mode. It ditches the grindy, glitch-ridden, personality vacuum of the series' previous career modes in favour of a linear storyline akin to those found in 2K's own NBA games. Your created wrestler begins his rollercoaster journey with a fictional indie promotion known as BCW, competing in front of roughly 30 people in high school gyms and parking lots. It doesn't take long before the WWE comes knocking, but this isn't the typical rags-to-riches tale we've come to expect from a sports game's career mode. You immediately blow your shot at the big time due to outside interference and a little sabotage. This forces you back to the indie scene for a short while before you eventually return to the WWE via some unconventional methods that earn you more than a few enemies.
It's far fetched and more than a little corny at times, but the writing by former WWE writer Sean Conaway is self-aware enough to poke fun at the frequent ridiculousness of pro wrestling, and every story-driven aspect of MyCareer is elevated by full voice acting. Each WWE superstar (with the exception of John Cena) lends their vocal talents to the game, while indie wrestler AJ Kirsch brings your created character to life with an enjoyable level of authenticity. There are more than a few wooden performances that reveal these guys are much better at playing off a crowd than they are sitting alone in a recording booth, but just having the likes of AJ Styles, Braun Strowman, and Triple H cutting promos and interacting with your character backstage injects WWE 2K19 with more personality and individuality than the series has ever had before.
The structured nature of this linear narrative also allows Yukes and Visual Concepts to delve into the tropes and familiar storylines that comprise a week's worth of WWE programming. You'll find yourself engaged in believable feuds and back-and-forth promos; you'll clash with authority figures, get screwed out of titles, form unlikely alliances, and win when the odds are stacked in your opponent's favour. The illusion of choice in certain scenes is an unnecessary facet, but this curated experience is much more enjoyable and reflective of the product we watch on TV every week. It's a substantial improvement over the dull, haphazard career modes of the past.
That's not to say MyCareer is without its faults, however. The lack of a women's career mode is still disappointing--a crudely ironic stance when you consider the three-man commentary team mistakenly spends the entire mode referring to every character as she and her. The women's division is large enough now to encompass all of the feuds and storylines you would ever need, so it feels like WWE 2K19 is still stuck in the past when it should be latching onto the recent resurgence in women's wrestling, particularly when the WWE itself is finally putting on its first ever women's only pay-per-view, Evolution, at the end of this month.
Character progression is also a tad too lethargic in MyCareer. By the time you're facing off against 80+ rated superstars in the WWE, your character will be hovering somewhere around the 50-rated mark. This doesn't make as much of an impact as you might imagine--there's never really a tangible sense that your character is substantially improving--but you do spend an awfully long time restricted to only two reversal slots that need time to recharge. For a game that's stringently built around its reversal mechanics, this is a needlessly frustrating decision, especially when you're forced to win three-on-one handicap matches and eight-man battle royals, leading to repetitive moments of trial-and-error.
The way you level up has at least been streamlined, with three different skill trees that pertain to your chosen fighting style, plus one extra sub-style. You can improve everything from strength, agility, momentum, grapple speed, and so on, but aside from choosing whether you want to be a high-flying cruiserweight or strong-style striker, among others, your customisation options are incredibly limited early on due to the much-maligned inclusion of loot boxes.
There are no microtransactions for purchasing loot boxes with real-world money--even with three different in-game currencies involved.
There are no microtransactions for purchasing these loot boxes with real-world money--even with three different in-game currencies involved. But everything from hairstyles, beards, wrestling tights, single moves, entrance music, taunts--right down to incremental cosmetic items like eyelashes and eyebrows--are stuffed into various kinds of loot boxes. This is disheartening because the creation suite is as comprehensive as ever, allowing you to create almost anything you put your mind to, but it's been needlessly limited in MyCareer due to this focus on randomised loot. You can spend one of the in-game currencies on any of these items directly--casting further bemusement over the inclusion of loot boxes--but the prices are so extortionate that you're better off bowing to the gods of the RNG. Maybe this strategy makes sense in other sports titles, but pro wrestling games have always been highly customisable, and limiting your options with a game of luck just feels wrong. No one wants to spend hours with a character they're not happy with.
Outside of MyCareer, the beloved Showcase mode makes its return after a two-year hiatus. WWE 2K19's charts the endearing, heartbreaking, and triumphant story of fan favourite, Daniel Bryan. You couldn't pick a better superstar for Showcase's return: he's not only a phenomenal wrestler, but an incredibly likeable guy with one of the most fascinating stories in the sport. Before each match, Bryan himself will set the stage and provide context for why each match is so noteworthy, taking you on a journey from one of his earliest contests against an up-and-coming John Cena, to his recent return to the ring after miraculously coming back from an early retirement. The matches themselves revolve around completing objectives to set up the moves and big spots that comprised each match. This can be fiddly at times when the AI doesn't want to co-operate, but the joy of Showcase mode has always come from recreating memorable moments in WWE history, and it achieves that here.
2K Towers riffs on Mortal Kombat X's Living Towers, challenging you to complete a series of themed matches that chart a rambunctious course through various opponents, with myriad match types and modifiers keeping things fresh. You might find yourself in a gauntlet involving British wrestlers that culminates in a match with the British Bulldog, before moving onto another that pits you against supernatural characters like Bray Wyatt and The Undertaker. It's a fun way to run the gamut of match types, and the modifiers keep things interesting by occasionally altering the way you would usually play. There are also some outlandish twists like big head mode and an 8-bit filter to contend with.
Of those match types, both steel cage and Hell in a Cell matches have seen some welcome tweaks. The latter introduces more options for escaping the cage, including yelling at the referee to simply open the door, and new animations let you scale the structure and navigate across it in ways that make for more exciting matches. Meanwhile, Hell in a Cell has been reworked so that it's much easier to break through the steel edifice to the outside, with context-sensitive actions removing a lot of the awkwardness.
Beyond this, Payback is a new mechanic that gives each superstar two powerful abilities. These might grant an immediate finisher, offer the ability to utilise dirty tactics like low blows and poison mist, or let you play possum to catch an opponent off guard. On paper, each ability sounds like a potential game-changing move that can alter the flow of a match, but WWE 2K19 is still far too dependent on reversals for them to have a significant impact. The timing on reversals is a little easier this year, but it would still be nice if there were more dynamic defensive options on-hand. The only other mechanical change comes from an incremental increase in speed. This isn't immediately palpable, but the faster animations do give each hard-hitting move some extra heft and impact.
The net code, while not always perfect, is good enough that your timing for reversals and pins is never compromised, while commentary is as egregious as it usually is. The interactions between the three-man booth are stilted and regularly out of context. During Showcase, for example, they regularly reference events years in the future when you're playing matches from the past. There are also some notable absences from the roster, which can be rectified to some degree by downloading the community's fantastic creations. Yet you're currently out of luck if you didn't pre-order and want to play as Rey Mysterio or the current Raw Women's Champion, Ronda Rousey. Glitches are a semi-regular occurrence, too, though they're not as bad as in previous years, often resulting in moments of physics-based hilarity rather than anything game-breaking.
Despite its flaws, WWE 2K19 is a step in the right direction for the long-running series. After two years toiling away with a dearth of interesting single-player content, the introduction of an engaging career mode is a welcome sight that finally captures some of the personality pro wrestling is partly built upon. The in-ring action is still inconsistent and will be as divisive as ever, but it's easier to stomach when the game surrounding the wrestling action gives you more reasons to play. WWE 2K19 might not reach the lofty heights of wrestling video gaming's heyday--or maybe that's just the nostalgia talking--but it's 2K's best effort so far. Maybe next year we'll be on to a true title contender.
Like Lucas Pope's previous game, Papers, Please, Return of the Obra Dinn is primarily concerned with processing information. In the latter, you play as an insurance clerk assessing claims on a mysteriously abandoned ship rather than a customs agent assessing documents at the border of a totalitarian country, but in both games, you are presented with fragments of data and asked to check their veracity through cross-reference and deductive logic. Both games are also grim in their own ways, but while Papers, Please forces you to consider your personal moral compass and where you're willing to see it compromised, Return of the Obra Dinn leaves you in a more detached role as the time-traveling observer of a naval journey gone horribly wrong.
In 1802 the "good ship" Obra Dinn set sail from London to "the Orient" but never reached its destination. Five years later it is found drifting into the port of Falmouth in southwest England with no one left alive on board. As a clerk at the East India Company it's your job to explore the ship and find out what happened. You're given a nifty book--which includes a full crew and passenger manifest, annotated deck maps, a glossary of basic sailing terms, and a group sketch of the people on board drawn by one of the passengers--into which you are expected to record all the relevant details.
Like most insurance clerks, one suspects, you are also equipped with a magical pocket watch that, when opened and activated in the presence of a corpse, allows you to travel back in time to the moment of the person's death. It's almost literally a single moment, too, as the screen fades to black and you hear but a few seconds of speech or other sounds leading up to the fatal incident before you find yourself inside a scene that's been frozen in time, and the investigation begins.
In this space (which, like the entire game is explored in first-person) you can walk around a confined section of the ship but you cannot interact with anything. You can only zoom in for a closer look at any object, and beyond the immediate surroundings, the background just fades out into nothingness. The entire game is presented in a starkly beautiful monochromatic color scheme, a graphical style described by the developer as "1-bit". When still, it resembles something from an early '80s PC, albeit displaying at a much higher resolution. But in motion, when you're walking around the decks, it looks quite unlike anything seen before--a startling retro throwback that is as alien as it is familiar, and that inherent strangeness works only to enhance the sense of mystery.
Once inside an investigation space--or memory, as the game refers to them--the first thing you're compelled to do is examine the now-deceased body in front of you, matching their face to the artist's sketch in your book to commence the process of identification. You still don't know their name, but perhaps there was something you heard just before they died that could be a clue? Maybe there's something about what they were doing or wearing or where they were on the ship or who they were with? You also need to determine their fate--were they shot or stabbed or poisoned or crushed or worse? And, if they were murdered, then by whom? Which likely means having to identify someone else through another series of clues. Or maybe you'll need to find the answers in another memory instead?
At first, you won't have enough information to draw any firm conclusions about the fate of the ship. However, as you explore the ship and find more bodies, which in turn open up new areas of the ship and reveal yet more bodies, the gaps in your knowledge will start to close. Soon you'll have access to a series of memories that, by the time you're done identifying everyone and discovering their fates, come together to tell the story of the Obra Dinn and the sixty people on board. It's at this point, as you stand over an unknown corpse with your trusty notebook in hand, that Return of the Obra Dinn solidifies into an exceptionally compelling representation of detective work.
Unlocking a person's identity requires you to pay attention to every last detail across multiple memories. To narrow your search you can bookmark a specific person and revisit only the memories in which they appear, letting you focus on their individual story in an attempt to clarify their actions and link them to a particular role on the ship. Further, the Obra Dinn had a fairly multicultural crew so you'll do well to note the different languages spoken and the varying accents of the English-speaking majority, as well as the details of each person's physical appearance.
At any point, you can pull out your book to pencil in a detail. Perhaps you think this chap is the First Mate or this fellow with the beard got shot by the ship's surgeon. Correctly identify three people and their fates and the game will let you know by properly typesetting your penciled notes. Some will be obvious, most will not, and many will require keeping track of multiple scenes and threading together numerous what-at-first-seemed-inconsequential pieces of information. When a clutch of clues fall into place and you crack the case, as it were, it feels immensely satisfying.
Plenty of games promise to make you feel like a detective only to have you checking boxes, but here it's different. Return of the Obra Dinn gives you all the tools you'll need to solve its puzzles--the book interface is a masterpiece of connected design--and then trusts that you'll be capable of arriving at the correct answers by yourself.
But it's more than that. Your magical pocket watch and its time-traveling, corpse-identifying mechanic offers far more than just an exceptionally clever puzzle game--as if that wasn't already enough. It also delivers a wonderfully evocative method of storytelling as you gain glimpses into the lives of each person on board at vital moments along the Obra Dinn's journey and piece together who they were, what they had to deal, what motivated them, and how they responded when tragedy struck. You may only see them in scratchy monochrome stills and hear them in brief snatches of urgent conversation, if at all, but if you're paying attention then you should feel like you know (almost) every one of these sixty people intimately by the end of the game.
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