I hate to have to disagree with you all but I don't love this game.



Widely accepted as maybe the greatest game of the PS4 era, I'm meeting RDR2 for the first time with some preconceived notions. To be honest, I don't see it. The landscapes are beautiful, I'll give you that. Riding a horse? Pretty sweet. The characters are well acted, there's plenty to do, and it has all of the little minigame features that gigantic open-world games of the modern era need (hunting, fishing, base building kind of, etc.).

There are small things that knock it down a peg, sure. Let's start with the sluggish pacing. Overall, I felt relieved to get to the end of the main story only to find out that the epilogue basically doubled the length of the game! And why do the main characters walk so slow through camp? Furthermore - and this is probably a me problem - I didn't realize there was fast travel until I was about 40 hours in, either. At any rate, the slowness was punctuated by the action scenes with all the shooting and, frankly, I wasn't that impressed with the gunplay bits. It moves a bit slow, the healing is weird, and maneuvering your guy through the world is somehow clunky feeling. Maybe that's just trying to be accurate to the timeline since the weapons were more primitive than those of other games? Despite the pretty world, I never felt inspired to wander around hunting or fishing and eventually gave up on side quests altogether just to finish up this story that everyone loves.

And that was really the part I struggled with. Sure, there were twists and turns and surprises along the way but the story was a slog through a culture I couldn't get into. Maybe it's my own teen trauma in taking the punk side in the battle between the punks and the hicks in the parking lot but I kind of wanted the gang to fail. I grasped for reasons to like any of the characters and found myself grasping all the way to the end. I just never clicked in with the drama, the struggles, or the successes of these people and by the end of tens of hours of gameplay, I didn't even try the online multiplayer before deleting the game to make way for something new. It was just of a time and maybe a target audience that didn't include me.

I did like raiding the factory, though. And murdering plantation owners.

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