Is Red Dead Redemption 2 fun? Not really. Red Dead Redemption 2 scores 3/10 for fun. It’s one of the best-made games ever, but the fun starts late and the slow, realistic pacing never lets up.
Where this score comes from: Steam player reviews, last checked against the 300 most recent English reviews in September 2026. Red Dead Redemption 2 on Steam
Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s also, depending on your life situation, kind of a drag to actually play.
That’s the honest tension at the core of it. Rockstar built something genuinely stunning, a world that feels more alive than most real neighborhoods, and then surrounded it with so many slow, deliberate systems that a lot of people never get to the good parts. You can spend three hours riding through snow, cleaning your horse, and watching Arthur skin a deer frame by frame before anything that resembles fun shows up.
The world is the best argument for the game. Random NPC encounters feel genuinely unscripted. You’ll stumble into things that seem like they were written specifically for you, and they weren’t. The environment responds in ways open-world games rarely bother with.
Visually, it’s still hard to beat. The lighting alone is something. Even years after release, it holds up better than games that came out last year.
And if you stick with it, Arthur Morgan is one of the best protagonists in the medium. The story earns its emotional weight. You’ll care about people you met ten hours in without realizing you were getting attached.
The opening chapter is a wall. Multiple people report picking the game up, putting it down for six months, and trying again. That’s not a you problem. Rockstar intentionally paced the intro like a slow-moving river in January.
Every action has a full animation. Looting a cabinet, picking up ammo, searching a body, all of it has weight and time behind it. That’s immersive in a three-hour session on a Saturday. It’s frustrating when you’ve got 45 minutes before bed.
The ending hits hard enough that more than one player said it left them depressed. Great for the art. Less great if you wanted to unwind after work. And Micah. You’ll know when you get there.
On top of that, Rockstar’s launcher is bad, and their customer support is worse. Some players lost account access with no path to a real human to help them. That’s an external problem, but it’s part of the experience.
If you have 100+ hours and want to live inside a world for a while, this is a 10/10. If you’ve got 45 minutes after dinner and want to feel something other than frustrated, it’s going to feel like a beautiful chore.
It’s a masterpiece. It just doesn’t always remember to be fun.
Deciding between similar games? See how Elden Ring (9/10) and Cyberpunk 2077 (9/10) stack up.
See where it lands in our list of overrated games.
Red Dead Redemption 2 scores 3/10 on immediate fun. One of the greatest games ever made. One of the least fun games we've rated. Tedious realism and depressing tone.
Slow start. Tedious realism.
One question: did it deliver immediate fun? Graphics, story depth, difficulty and critical acclaim are ignored. Pick-up-and-play accessibility is rewarded; anything that makes you wait for the fun to start is penalized.
How we score: We don't care about graphics, story depth, or critical acclaim. One question — did it deliver immediate fun? We reward pick-up-and-play accessibility and penalize anything that makes you wait for the fun to start.