I should have known better, as the whole cowboy genre is terrible as fuck. Westerns (as boomer Americans call the genre) have the slowest dialogue, the corniest patriarchal story-line, and are obviously filled with a heap ton of other problematic bits. Of course, I had to try as the game got great reviews. I thought I'd try it with the Steam summer sale.
Fuckkkkkkkk the long boring ass cut scenes. OMG pls talk faster and have dialogue that's interesting. The beginning of the game is just 30 minutes of video and riding your horse so slowly through the snow. I thought that my TikTok brain couldn't stand some old slow game from a bygone era, but I'm checking this shit and it was released in 2018!
If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with ~~good dialogue~~ a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.
It's mid, yeah. Which is horrifying to say due to all the labor that went into it. The ultimate result is mid.
I bounced off it twice and eventually stuck with it by not trying to play it like MGSV. The game doesn't actually give you any freedom. There is no connection between the missions and free-roam in the overworld. Once I stopped trying to struggle out of the shackles and just treated it like an on-rails movie it got a lot better, if you can handle that. But it is just so long.
The best time I had in the game was hunting to get all the camp & pelt upgrades. Being in some beautiful scenery hunting down particular animals is pleasant, even though the long animations and requirement to constantly bring your pelts back to camp irritated the shit out of me (even with fast travel).
The story just fuckin drags. I got to the end of the main story like a year ago and haven't got around to playing the epilogue yet. The fact that you murder 100 random people every mission in the game but the story is about how you are trying to redeem yourself for beating a dude over some debt is just fucking stupid.