The PS5 game RDR2 is really growing on me. Here is why.
Unlike other games I have played, it has an incredible variety of gameplay. You can really do a wide variety of things, and you feel like you have a choice in the game. There is an open world, and they give you the choice in the dialog to choose your actions. Your actions and choices do have consequences and you see them later in the game.
For example, one of my missions was to steal a stolen stagecoach. I could do it during the day or the night. When I did it during the day I got caught and died and had to redo the mission. When I did it at night, however, they were sleeping and I was successful in the mission.
The game although about criminals and having you do criminal activity, really is more nuanced than that. It is not just a crime game like GTA. It actually puts you in situations where you can do kind things, and often you get rewarded for them. For example, I saved a German man and it turns out that he was rich and gave me a gold bar. I made more money by being kind, than every illegal thing that I had done to that point.
One downside is that the game crashed once and then started up almost exactly where it crashed and didn’t crash again. I played the mission again and it didn’t crash the second time. I was asked if I wanted to submit a crash report and I did. God of War never crashed, but complex games often crash like Civilization and I accept that. It is a challenge to program complex games. This isn’t a negative in my book. Nothing is perfect. Now if it crashes all the time, that is a problem and will affect my future opinion.
I didn’t think I would like this game because I grew up in a cowboy rural culture and I had enough of that. However, I must admit that this game has given me new insight into the difficulties that early pioneers had. It can be cruel like the famous game The Oregon Trail, but it can also be kind. Life is like that.