Whoever said “no good story is too long” should play this mess of a game. The story, its primary selling point, started FANTASTICALLY! It looked like it was going to have a nice, thought-out, original story and play out like an Old Western... Nope. This played out like almost every dramatic, over-sensationalized TV series, it continued to simulate conflict with a growing poor amount of care from both VAs and storywriters. The game has several dozen fake-out endings that make the drag out worse than it should feel so that, by the end of the entire campaign, you just don’t care anymore at all about the story. The real ending of this story was dead in the middle because there was absolutely no reason at all for it to continue from there: the events were perfectly set up for the first game, all loose ends were tied up nice and neat, and it was ~10-12 hours into the content. No, instead they dragged it out for 25 or so more hours because “they wanted to give the game more content than ever before.” I bought the game for an Open-World RPG and what I got was a third person western Dead Island.
The Open-World itself lacks all parts that made first game even remotely fun, numerous activities were removed to make space for story and side missions. On top of that, they gave us a massive map that gives absolutely no incentive to explore, once you’ve seen two or three random encounters, that’s it, that’s all for the area. They completely softened up the realism of the first game to the point where you can unload on an enemy and they’ll stand right back up and be fine. Realistic Injury was the shining star mechanic of RDR1, and seeing it gone in the prequel almost immediately turned me away.
Red Dead Online. Whenever you see something that ends in “Online” and there’s a Rockstar Logo on it, you know you’re gonna have a bad time. An RDO server is essentially Communist Russia, players are forced to grind cash that they can never actually have enough of in activities like hunting and... PvP. These are the only two reliable sources of money, and neither reward you all that much anyway. If you LOSE a PvP match, the difference between the Winners’ and Losers’ cash is appalling. No matter how well you do personally, you are a loser and always will be because you came in second place. The game actively punishes you for not being good enough (or rather, rich enough in real life). The low rewards, micro-transaction cash, and the excessively overpriced equipment make for another joyless grindfest where we’re all just pigs for the rich 7-year olds to slaughter.
Overall, 10/10, this game is everything wrong with the video game industry rolled into one, and that was clearly Rockstar’s intention because no company would really actively sabotage their reputation by unironically giving us such a terrible waste of tenth of a terabyte. Surely this has to be some form of political commentary on what snakes the gaming industry has become.