Recent reviews by tearsforagnes

Cool concept. Very poor execution.

There's a reason that only 3 of the 74 achievements have over 50% completion rates for this game. Even on the "story mode" setting, the kingdom management just steamrolls right over you with non-stop waves of attacks that your 4 advisors can't ever hope to keep pace with. While tied up in the *previous* battle, my military advisor isn't able to help defend from the next attack. This leads to cascading morale failures, and you lose at everything you try to do. The kingdom mode throws a million tasks at you per second, and requires superhuman micromanagement to deal with.

Literally unplayable. CTD after about a minute of play with no fix. I tried multiple work-arounds found on the help pages and Reddit. Nothing worked.

Don't waste your money.

Great game, with an ton of content - it took me around 90 hours to do all the main quest and faction quests) with a few side quests - shipbuilding, exploration, and outpost management. All of the storylines are engaging.

My only real gripe so far is that the menus can be tedious or counter-intuitive (such as naming your ship under the corrections area in the shipbuilder.... huh? why? who would look for that there?). I'm sure that will be polished by the community modders, per usual. I really can't wait to see how much an already massive game expands once the mods start rolling out.

Cool aesthetic, but the game is practically unplayable on anything less than a supercomputer. My new gaming computer still gets non-stop stutters even on the lowest possible settings, and the resolution turned down to potato-cam status. The game could have done with a healthy does of optimization.

There's a lot to love about the game, like the art direction, and level design, but holy hell does the 'combat' punish the player to point of rage quitting. It's due to a series of poor design choices that stack on each other: 1) when you die, you can continue from a check-point with ONE hitpoint... 2) the enemies are next to impossible to hit with the tiny melee weapon, meaning they almost always hit you with their acid spit, while you can't even close range enough to fight effectively, 3) the check point is always before a cinematic. So, the gameplay loop becomes: spawn, push button, watch (unskippable) cinematic (again), get one-shot killed by an enemy, repeat. it gets insanely annoying that you can't even skip the cinematics you will have to endure over, and over, and over again as you keep getting one-shotted by the same enemy. FFS.

For a while, I skirted the issue by just running from everything I saw, but that tactic can only last so long.

An otherwise interesting game ruined by a few very poor design choices...

The game is fun, and I like the playstyle, however, I was almost tempted to leave a negative review for the ABYSMAL menus, and some of the design choices. I haven't even found a way to exit the game other than alt-tabbing out, right-clicking the icon, and closing. Who does that? The text can be VERY slow, even on the fast setting, and it's impossible to skip entire conversations - even ones you are seeing for a second time playing in Game+, which leads to just spamming the "next" button ad infinitum (yes, you are forced to unlock every. single. part. of. the. story. again. FFS. - and, of course, you can't get certain achievements until the end of the second playthrough, so, you're going to waste an unbelievable amount of time if you're a completionist).

Overall, the art, music, gameplay, and story are all at least decent, if not good, but those menus, and the text speed, along with not being able to easily skip some of the more tedious portions can make the game drag on unnecessarily.

This is a really tough review for me to write.

I'll start with saying that this game does almost everything very far above par (particularly since this appears to be a first-time developer). The world design is interesting, the art is beautiful, and the music is very evocative. The levels/regions are all pretty interesting, and the quests can be completed in multiple ways.

What just feels like a huge "♥♥♥♥ you" to the player though, is the final boss. It requires you to beat a series of bosses in a row, and if you die, contrary to how the rest of the game operates, you have to start over and fight ALL of them again. FFS. I can't imagine having the patience to do that over and over again; which you most likely WILL have to do, as it can take a while to figure out how to be a couple of them.

Overall, amazing game, and I *do* recommend it, but with a caveat that the end feels really punishing, and unfair. This is probably underscored by the fact that almost all of the achievements have less than a 5% completion rate (and half of the achievements deal with the ending). If not for the end, which ruined the experience for me, this would be a slam-dunk "yes" recommendation.

I wish there was a "neutral" review option. I would like to provide a counter to the overwhelmingly positive reviews, however.

RDR2 is an open world game with the caveat that you are pretty much prevented from doing anything in said open world, in favor of doing the linear story. The game punishes the player with atrocious design choices left and right.

- If you get caught doing anything wrong, you are fined an exorbitant amount (often hundreds of times more than you gained by doing the bad deed in the first place, making it pointless to do anything, since you regress by doing so). Even in the most remote wilderness, being detected is almost guaranteed for some reason. If you so much as fart in a cave by yourself on a mountaintop, it will be reported.

- The AI does some truly game-destroying things. One example is when an old lady threw herself under my horse (suicide by player?) in the middle of town, giving me a murder charge, and getting a dozen villagers to gang up on me. The act of fighting free cost me MORE bounty charges (for a crime I very visibly did not commit). In another case, a woman I saved from under a fallen rock leapt out of my carriage after taking several minutes of my time to take her to her home town (she literally belly-flopped out of the moving carriage into the woods, and said she could make it home from there. I'm glad I wasted my time, I guess?).

- The systems themselves are super punishing. Without your horse, you lose access to your gear, which at first seems sensible... The problem arises when you spend several hours bonding with your horse only to get T-boned by another horseman in the wilderness, have said horse die, saddle fall into the road in the middle of nowhere, and lose your gear (until you can lug your saddle back to camp, and but it on a fresh horse, now that the horse you wasted your time grooming has been instantly killed through no fault of your own).

- If you die, you are transported to a random spot, without horse (and accompanying weapons), which essentially renders your helpless. Oh, AND you are fined money for dying. How dare you?

- Quality of life options are pretty much non-existent. It's fun to have one's hair grow, and to have the *option* to shave, however, I couldn't find any option to toggle this off if I didn't want to micro-manage that aspect of the game. That's pretty sub-standard for a game of this scale.

- It is extraordinarily hard to target items for picking up, which combined with unnecessarily slow indoor movement, makes gathering resources an extremely tedious task (as many things in the game are). It makes a lot of the "fun" content in the game turn into a chore.

- Very long-winded cutscenes (and I say that as someone who used to work in television). I get that they want to show off their graphics, but some of the cutscenes REALLY drag on. Combined with the other things in the game that slow the player down, it makes me wonder how many hours I could shave off a playthrough if all these things were edited down a bit?

- The key-mapping changes. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to make the "R" key sometimes be the one for picking up items... but, wait, maybe we'll randomly use the "E" key sometimes, instead? What? Inconsistencies like this make for an extremely aggravating experience. I'm not sure why they over-complicate simple mechanics like this.

- A VERY clunky interface. It takes clicking through multiple slow menus to do very routine things such as checking progress, or even saving the game. Why? It's like something from a game made 20 years ago. Things are in places that don't even make sense. Why is the "Save" option under "Story"? That was literally the last menu I checked.

The graphics, story, and characters are all phenomenal, but the punishing nature of basically everything in the game almost makes me want to not play despite it's strengths. It amounts to an "open-world" game without the option to do any of the open-world content, due to being too tedious, and wasteful of the player's time, and poorly optimized for an enjoyable playing experience. No, I do *not* want to spend eternity hunting for "perfect" rabbit pelts just to increase my satchel size ever so slightly. I'll pass wasting hours doing that for negligible impact on my abilities.

The combat is incredibly unfulfilling. The shield moves in particular felt unnecessarily awkward.

I'm not sure why they bothered to change little stuff like the UI which wasn't really an issue. A small thing, but I do prefer having a consistent look throughout a series...

Small irritations aside, I'm loving this game so far! The towns are extremely well done, and feel like full communities. The Crater, The Depot, and the Grotto are all so fun to explore. There are some really neat involved questlines like the one with Skibor which takes you all over the map. I also enjoy that the base-building aspects start early in the game.

The combat feels 100x better to me than in the previous installment, and there are many small quality of life tweaks that make things less tedious (such as having to hold the mouse button to open chests, sit down, or sleep, which was far too easy to accidentally do while exploring in the first game).

I'm sure I will update this in a few dozen hours with a more robust review.