I feel most reviews of this game came out too quickly after shock and awe of the incredible graphics, animations and physics this game has to offer.
But clunky and sometimes down right horrible controls, the typical cliché and worn out Rockstar formula to mission design, stupid cartoon characters and story telling seems to be scuffed under the carpet.
I too was amazed by how the world looked, and that everything flowed with smooth framerate either you were in a busy town or in a deep forest. You can see mountains hundreds miles away and knowing that you can go there without loading times feels amazing.
But we must not forget, we also could do all this in RDR1, which came out 8 years ago. Also in similiar Rockstar titles suck as GTA4. Games who also looked amazing when they were released.
Think of it as a RDR1, only with steroids. You can do a ton of more stuff here, all from cleaning your weapons, to personalize them down the the color, metal type, length of barrel. You get the picture. This game is all about details: you can be rude to towns folk, or nice to them. Rob them. Threaten them. Beat them up. Kill them. You name it. And the way they react to you are realistic and very varied. It's rarely you ever hear a person say the same thing twice. And finally the wanted system is more realistic now: Do a crime unseen and you have to wait for another NPC to see the corpse, then run to the law, then the law will come and inspect the surrounding area. If you are seen you can lie and say you had nothing to do with it and they let you go. But if you return to the crime scene after, and the law is still there they will arrest you for suspicious behaviour. It's quite deep and now it's more fun to run around robbing and looting people.
But sadly, it plays just like any other Rockstar game: The covering system is slow and clunky just like in GTA 4. The shooting also feels excactly the same. And you can forget about trying to play this without auto aiming. I tried free aim, but the controls are either way too sensitive or way to slow at times. I tried to set it up as good as the game allowed me to with removing deadzone and tweaking the sensitivy. No matter what I did it feels almost impossible to aim what you are looking at. I had no trouble doing this in RDR1 since I played it in hardcore mode, so I wonder what the hell happened? Maybe it's the PS4's controller who is the issue?
But is not the only thing that stands in the way of gameplay and cause irritations: You can set up what weapons your character wants to use. You can carry a limited amount of weapons, the rest is in your horse's saddle. So let say you want to carry a shotgun, rifle and two pistols. Well for some reason after some time; after a mission or if you are killed or restarts a save, you have to set up all this again. It's quite tedious and time consuming. Also numerous time I pressed the draw button and nothing happened. I thought it was something wrong with the game so I pressed a few more times, and suddenly he drew his gun. This got me killed many times. The game also forces you in situations where you have to make a choice before you can aim, which is super frustrating since you are pressing the draw button and nothing happends. It feels more like a clunky RPG games at time which does not work in an action scenario. Also buttons for doing sertains tasks changes making you many times pressing the wrong button or just have constantly check what the screens whant you to press. Rockstar: When I want to draw my weapon... just let me press one button and let the character do so, okay? Also another very annoying thing is that if you set your character to use the shotgun... later on when you draw, he draws his gun for some reason. Or again: not draw at all. Resulting in death or lot of damage.
Also the controller input is slow and sluggish. you press a button and half a second or up to a second later the animation takes place. This also occurs in shooting; I am at a guy, and the second I press it takes half a second for the gun to shoot. By this time the enemy might have moved slightly so the shot misses. Irritating and frustrating. Also, with the lock on shooting / auto aim and always a hitmarker popping up showing if you hit or killed an enemy is immersion breaking as hell. Here you have this gorgeous looking game who sometimes looks almost photo realistic and you get this childish old shooting mechanics. It doesn't blend well. Also for some reason they added grey tracers coming out of the guns which looks quite stupid and ridiculous. This is clearly done to make the game easier to see excactly where you are getting shot from. But with their excellent sound system and visuals it would not hard to tell where the shots came from. The guns do have smoke, remember? Speaking of smoke, I wished they would add more volumetric and realistic smoke pouring out of the guns in the direction they were shooting. Like it was in real life. Instead we just have a big muzzle flash with a bit of smoke puffs that disappear way too quickly. If they had manage to implement this, the shooting scenes would look way better and more fun. I must also mention the game has no bullet drop / ballistic physics. So if an enemy has you in his sight and pull the trigger he will hit you no matter what even if you change direction 300 meters awyay form him. Quite annoying and it also makes firefights too easy but also too hard some time. If the game had more realistic shooting mechanics, it would be easier to go back to the game and just have fun shooting. As it is now, you get very quickly bored of the shooting.
Thank god the euphoria engine is back though: Many thought it would be dumbed down like in GTA5, but it's back and better than every. You will never see a body fall the same thanks to the physics a.i. Blood and particle sputters as you shoot people. You can even blow off their heads and limbs if you have a powerful weapon. It looks quite amazing. The bodies sound and physics all have a proper weight and feel to them. Good job.
The story is as you expect from any other Rockstar game. Especially from RDR1: Main quest has a more serious tone, while the sidequests and stranger events you just meet corky weird persons who doesn't feel believeable. Also Rockstar humour sometimes fails thinking that if a character is acting silly and have weird body emotions we should laugh. I didn't. I just got annoyed. That being said, there are some funny moments, but they are far in between. And many times you just know what is coming next, so it gets very predictable.
The main story had three main characters I liked: Dutch, Micah and Arthur. Dutch is psychopath, Micah is pure evil and Arthur is just being himself, which is sarcastic a bit fed up and tired of this gang life. The rest of the characters in game is easy to forget since they are quite boring.
I won't give any spoilers but I was disappointed with the ending. Dutch choices didn't make any sense due to the way he behaved during the entire game. Felt like logic was thrown out the window.
I both love this game, and hate it at the same time. I wished that somebody else had made this game, except Rockstar. That understood better story telling and gameplay. Maybe Rockstar should have provided the graphics and physics engine and let someone else do the rest. I say this because I love Western games and movies. I feel this was a missed oppertunity to create something new and inique. Instead we just got a standard Rockstar game with updated graphics and physics. Leaving nothing new in therms of gameplay and storytelling.
So should you get RDR2? Tough question. If you love Western movies, attention to details, just walking slowly, or take your horse on a nice walk up the mountains, hunt some animals, kill some bandits, rob a train or stagecoach. Yes, you should. I had more fun time in free roam than doing the boring missions. Sadly varied free roam options only unlocks when you do missions. Walking around in a town, interacting with people, seeing the incredible graphics, animations and sound design was more of a game to me than all the rest the game had to offer.
I too was amazed by how the world looked, and that everything flowed with smooth framerate either you were in a busy town or in a deep forest. You can see mountains hundreds miles away and knowing that you can go there without loading times feels amazing.
But we must not forget, we also could do all this in RDR1, which came out 8 years ago. Also in similiar Rockstar titles suck as GTA4. Games who also looked amazing when they were released.
Think of it as a RDR1, only with steroids. You can do a ton of more stuff here, all from cleaning your weapons, to personalize them down the the color, metal type, length of barrel. You get the picture. This game is all about details: you can be rude to towns folk, or nice to them. Rob them. Threaten them. Beat them up. Kill them. You name it. And the way they react to you are realistic and very varied. It's rarely you ever hear a person say the same thing twice. And finally the wanted system is more realistic now: Do a crime unseen and you have to wait for another NPC to see the corpse, then run to the law, then the law will come and inspect the surrounding area. If you are seen you can lie and say you had nothing to do with it and they let you go. But if you return to the crime scene after, and the law is still there they will arrest you for suspicious behaviour. It's quite deep and now it's more fun to run around robbing and looting people.
But sadly, it plays just like any other Rockstar game: The covering system is slow and clunky just like in GTA 4. The shooting also feels excactly the same. And you can forget about trying to play this without auto aiming. I tried free aim, but the controls are either way too sensitive or way to slow at times. I tried to set it up as good as the game allowed me to with removing deadzone and tweaking the sensitivy. No matter what I did it feels almost impossible to aim what you are looking at. I had no trouble doing this in RDR1 since I played it in hardcore mode, so I wonder what the hell happened? Maybe it's the PS4's controller who is the issue?
But is not the only thing that stands in the way of gameplay and cause irritations: You can set up what weapons your character wants to use. You can carry a limited amount of weapons, the rest is in your horse's saddle. So let say you want to carry a shotgun, rifle and two pistols. Well for some reason after some time; after a mission or if you are killed or restarts a save, you have to set up all this again. It's quite tedious and time consuming. Also numerous time I pressed the draw button and nothing happened. I thought it was something wrong with the game so I pressed a few more times, and suddenly he drew his gun. This got me killed many times. The game also forces you in situations where you have to make a choice before you can aim, which is super frustrating since you are pressing the draw button and nothing happends. It feels more like a clunky RPG games at time which does not work in an action scenario. Also buttons for doing sertains tasks changes making you many times pressing the wrong button or just have constantly check what the screens whant you to press. Rockstar: When I want to draw my weapon... just let me press one button and let the character do so, okay? Also another very annoying thing is that if you set your character to use the shotgun... later on when you draw, he draws his gun for some reason. Or again: not draw at all. Resulting in death or lot of damage.
Also the controller input is slow and sluggish. you press a button and half a second or up to a second later the animation takes place. This also occurs in shooting; I am at a guy, and the second I press it takes half a second for the gun to shoot. By this time the enemy might have moved slightly so the shot misses. Irritating and frustrating. Also, with the lock on shooting / auto aim and always a hitmarker popping up showing if you hit or killed an enemy is immersion breaking as hell. Here you have this gorgeous looking game who sometimes looks almost photo realistic and you get this childish old shooting mechanics. It doesn't blend well. Also for some reason they added grey tracers coming out of the guns which looks quite stupid and ridiculous. This is clearly done to make the game easier to see excactly where you are getting shot from. But with their excellent sound system and visuals it would not hard to tell where the shots came from. The guns do have smoke, remember? Speaking of smoke, I wished they would add more volumetric and realistic smoke pouring out of the guns in the direction they were shooting. Like it was in real life. Instead we just have a big muzzle flash with a bit of smoke puffs that disappear way too quickly. If they had manage to implement this, the shooting scenes would look way better and more fun. I must also mention the game has no bullet drop / ballistic physics. So if an enemy has you in his sight and pull the trigger he will hit you no matter what even if you change direction 300 meters awyay form him. Quite annoying and it also makes firefights too easy but also too hard some time. If the game had more realistic shooting mechanics, it would be easier to go back to the game and just have fun shooting. As it is now, you get very quickly bored of the shooting.
Thank god the euphoria engine is back though: Many thought it would be dumbed down like in GTA5, but it's back and better than every. You will never see a body fall the same thanks to the physics a.i. Blood and particle sputters as you shoot people. You can even blow off their heads and limbs if you have a powerful weapon. It looks quite amazing. The bodies sound and physics all have a proper weight and feel to them. Good job.
The story is as you expect from any other Rockstar game. Especially from RDR1: Main quest has a more serious tone, while the sidequests and stranger events you just meet corky weird persons who doesn't feel believeable. Also Rockstar humour sometimes fails thinking that if a character is acting silly and have weird body emotions we should laugh. I didn't. I just got annoyed. That being said, there are some funny moments, but they are far in between. And many times you just know what is coming next, so it gets very predictable.
The main story had three main characters I liked: Dutch, Micah and Arthur. Dutch is psychopath, Micah is pure evil and Arthur is just being himself, which is sarcastic a bit fed up and tired of this gang life. The rest of the characters in game is easy to forget since they are quite boring.
I won't give any spoilers but I was disappointed with the ending. Dutch choices didn't make any sense due to the way he behaved during the entire game. Felt like logic was thrown out the window.
I both love this game, and hate it at the same time. I wished that somebody else had made this game, except Rockstar. That understood better story telling and gameplay. Maybe Rockstar should have provided the graphics and physics engine and let someone else do the rest. I say this because I love Western games and movies. I feel this was a missed oppertunity to create something new and inique. Instead we just got a standard Rockstar game with updated graphics and physics. Leaving nothing new in therms of gameplay and storytelling.
So should you get RDR2? Tough question. If you love Western movies, attention to details, just walking slowly, or take your horse on a nice walk up the mountains, hunt some animals, kill some bandits, rob a train or stagecoach. Yes, you should. I had more fun time in free roam than doing the boring missions. Sadly varied free roam options only unlocks when you do missions. Walking around in a town, interacting with people, seeing the incredible graphics, animations and sound design was more of a game to me than all the rest the game had to offer.