tldr: enjoy it as a hiking/horseback riding sim, suffer through obnoxious hand-holding story, wish more more demanding survival mechanics
An impeccably pretty open-world western with disappointing gameplay. If you’ve played a Rockstar game, you know the drill: story missions consist of you sticking to the game’s script. If you deviate from your objective, the game will penalize you. The game is consistently condescending and presents you with boring tasks. Many times you will feel like you’re playing the world’s most elegant walking sim. Combat is still as boring as I remember from the first game. My main gripe with the game is that the survival mechanics are too lenient. You NEVER have enough incentive to hunt, rob, cook, or maintain your weapons. It’s all fluff to acquire new cosmetics that I don’t have the time/interest to put the time in. The game is extremely stubborn with what weapons you have on your back. Often it resets your loadout, or forces you to use certain weaponry. That being said, exploration still feels great because of the love and care put into the audio and wildlife of the game. While the itemization is extremely poor, and resource management is a joke, I maintain that this is the prettiest open world I’ve ever experienced. It felt like The Witcher 3 on steroids. I ran the game on a GTX1080 and tweaked the settings targeting 60 fps and I was in awe not just by the animations but by the lighting. These were my favorite moments in the game. When the game turns into hiking/horseback riding sim mode, I loved it. There are a plethora of wacky “WTF HAPPENED HERE” locations that are a joy to stumble upon.
I know Rockstar will never make the game I crave. I know that they will never adopt the kind of stringent mechanics that I hunger for, i.e. STALKER Misery type of resource management/survival mechanics. That being said, it’s always incredible to see how much love and care they put into their open worlds. Here are some mod ideas that would increase my enjoyment: have Arthur’s health core deteriorate faster if he doesn’t eat, have guns jam if they aren’t cleaned after being exposed to rain/long periods of time, for God’s sake sort the weapon loadout nonsense, more stringent Dead Eye, increases prices of all goods to incentivize robbing.
Story/Characters - Voice acting is great across the board, but the ambient and environmental sounds steal the show. The game has a lot of fat and didn’t need to be as long as it is. Dutch’s “decline” is milked and loses its impact by the end. That being said, it was great playing the role of Arthur and interacting with his compas.
