Red Dead Redemption 2

Everyone (and I do mean everyone) is waiting for Rockstar to provide any more news on Grand Theft Auto 6. It’s the most anticipated game in several years, which comes as little surprise given the sales numbers and acclaim for Rockstar’s last two games, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and 2013’s Grand Theft Auto 5. But while most everyone has definitely played the latter, the former still feels like an acquired taste, and never took off as dramatically as the studio’s lead franchise. That feels like a shame because Red Dead Redemption 2 finally sees Rockstar in its absolute best shape.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is not only the studio’s most mature story, but it is far and away its best, too. Watching your band of thieves and crooks—who protagonist Arthur Morgan comes to know and love as family—fall apart is nothing short of tragic. As a prequel to the original Red Dead Redemption, it even successfully connects the two games and their overlapping casts, and makes more sense of John Marston’s motivations and regrets as he hunts down his former brothers-in-arms. It is also an absolutely astonishing technical marvel. It transforms the onset of metropolitan infrastructure and the downturn of the natural world into something equally beautiful and woeful. It is big, sometimes even too big, but it’s also a game whose head and heart feel in the right place most of the time, and I was shocked by how effective Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately was. If you bear with it through the painful opening stretch, there’s a hell of a tale in Red Dead Redemption 2, which you can pick up for about $30 on Xbox.