Those smart enough will be able to track down their man, hogtie him, and take him to the Sheriff, picking up a $20 reward for their effort. Not monumental, but certainly an experience worth undertak

As the game heads to Mexico, Marston has the unreliable Irish take him on a raft and sneak into the regions of South America’s capital. On the way, Irish waxes on about how much he loves Mexico; things are cheap, the women beautiful

After running endless chores, Marston is able to gain enough equipment and aid to take the fight to Fort Mercer. By the time you arrive, one of Marston's allies—the clearly insane Seth—has already made his way inside and is humoring the outlaw gangs ins

If Rockstar set developers to work on male horse parts, you just know that they also set them to work on other bodily functions. Case in point, if you hover around certain non-playable characters, they will occasionally let loose with a f

On a similar note, Red Dead Redemption 2 fails to engage with bad actors in this period properly. While the ideals of Cornwall and the Pinkertons are destructive and villainous in their own ways, the game romanticizes the Western lifestyle and ignores that lifestyle's part in the intense hardships of indigenous people at that period. While this game doesn't go the Spaghetti Western route in completely ignoring sensitive issues, it bungles its attempts to be more modern and self-aware, while falling into old, "classic" narrative tropes with the Rains Fall story arc. In a moment when the game attempts (with bare minimum effort) to make some form of commentary involving a group of Ku Klux Klan members accidentally catching themselves on fire, the scene doesn't register in a satisfying way. It's the equivalent of depicting Adolf Hitler slipping on a banana—a farce with nothing substantial to say, while trying to make it seem like a statement.

I can't imagine what an inevitable Red Dead Redemption 3 would even be about. If the first game was about the death of the West and the second about how the West died, would a third go further back in the timeline in the early days of Dutch's gang to depict a time of the West... close to dying? Perhaps Rockstar will try to go contemporary, maybe attempting to remake Hell or High Water about ten years too late. Regardless of what any of these plans may be, the experience of playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 Achievements Dead Redemption 2 's collage of the misunderstood is one that makes the Western a genre that I will want to take the most extended break from.

The visual connections stack up when you compare transition scenes with Arthur Morgan having a blurry, dream-like quality that resembles the film's cinematography from Roger Deakins. Thematically, both Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Assassination of Jesse James focus on a commune of criminals and gang members, led by a charismatic leader who the rest of the gang eventually become disillusioned with. There's even the same devotion to realism—Dominik's film attempts to be as authentic in portraying events, dialogue, and action the same way it would happen, with shootouts happening at point blank range with both combatants missing each other. It's slow, deliberate, and honestly, a bit boring—which is how I felt about Rockstar's game every time I was told to search a room.

Smoking and Other Hobbies is a collector's dream, but a nightmare for more casual players. Arthur encounters a man named Phineas T. Ramsbottom outside Flatneck Station, who tells Arthur that premium cigarette cards are worth good money. There are 144 of these cards to collect throughout the map, and they're scattered all over the place. Finding them all is really monotonous work, and it takes forever. After finding all 144, you are given a mere $200. This may sound like a lot, but finding all the cards takes HOURS of work. And yes, you can buy premium cigarettes and amass the cards, but this isn't ideal for a cash-strapped player. At a hefty $5 a pack, you would be spending more than you would be making, and that's just bad busin

[pullquote]"This is a game that tries to desperately to show its maturity, that it's past the simple morals of fantastical and escapist gunslinger movies, and more along the lines of a "prestige" film."[/pullquote]

In the early quarter of the game, you assign the help of Nigel West Dickens, a snotty and theatrical man who is literally a snake oil salesperson. West Dickens suggests you connect with his colleagues Irish and Seth to help in your mission to break into Fort Mer

But that wouldn't go with Dutch Van der Linde's positions against industrialization, modernization, and technology. Dutch, who I couldn't help but see and hear as a more handsome Matt Foley from SNL , finds a rival in Leviticus Cornwall, a captain of industry and one of the many banes of Dutch's existence. He may as well have ended every encounter him by shaking his fist at the sky and screaming "Cornwall!" in anguish. Using Cornwall as a target, Dutch fashions himself as a man of the people, wanting to go back to a time before "law and order" and attempting to score cred by helping some local angry indigenous folks. As Arthur Morgan discovers later, this is all part of Dutch's plan to exploit this tribe's conflict with the U.S. Army for his own gain.