Here are some thoughts after 20-25 hours in. I think I would call the game a flawed masterpiece.
The visuals, animations, sounds and voice work are simply outstanding. In these aspect, the game is near flawless.
That help creates one of the best "world" in a video game, the setting and general world building again is absolutely amazing. It truly feels like you're in 1899 in the old west.
The story so far is great. As I said before I love that they put you in the middle of it, shit went wrong, you're on the run trying to survive. The story and cast of characters are all awesome. They each have very different personality and reasons to be there. Their relationship with you and with each other are great, and believable. The voice work and great writing helps with that.
The story mission and other side mission have all been fun so far. They are for the most part very varied. Again the thing that makes them so much fun is the banter between the gang members, which have such great voice work and writing.
All the little side activities like poker, dominoes etc are a fun distraction.
The controls, a lot have been said about this. First it's an odd control scheme if you never played GTA or Rockstar games. That you will eventually get used to, and at the end of the day it works fairly well. The thing is, for the most part the game isn't extremely responsive, the goal of having realistic animations for each action taken cause the game to feel sluggish at times between the moment you have enter your command and the moment it is executed on screen. Again, you somewhat get used to this, but it's still not great. For example shooting and reloading in Destiny 2 is way superior in how it feels than in RDR2, it might be more realistic in RDR2 but it doesn't translate to a great feeling.
I don't like the way the menu and information screen are setup. I feel everything is hard to access, requiring multiple screen to access information. It was mentioned by someone else, but when I go to the compendium from the game after discovering something, pressing back should take you back to the game but it doesn't, you'll have to go back to the compendium screen for the category you're in, then back to the main compendium screen, then back to the menu, and finally back to the game...way too cumbersome, it has led me to basically ignore all the compendium entries. It applies to other stuff to, access info about your character is 3-4 screen away. Overall bad design in my opinion.
This is probably just me because I am old, but I find the L2 contextual menu confusing. It's used for basically everything and there's so many options, and they often feel inconsistent. Like to sell/donate to Pearson it's right D-Pad if I remember correctly. But to sell to merchant, it will be a different button. So I end up having to read all the menu option and which button does what every time I use the menu which I find annoying...that might just be me though.
Bounties, wow that system is pure shit. Someone said oppressive and I think it's an accurate description, at the same time when you have a lot of money it's also totally meaningless as you easily pay your bounty. I went into town, and I was slowly trotting on my horse when I slightly bumped someone, he didn't even fall. Bounty for Physical Assault, I chase the witness, stop him, try defusing the situation and he starts shooting at me, I kill him bounty for murder. It's a stupid and dumb escalation of a situation. Then I do a mission where I end up killing half the city, I run away, pay up my bounty and go back to town and everything is ok, like nothing happened..hey I killed 30 people like 10 minutes ago, like literally the same in game day.
So the system is both oppressive and meaningless if you have money, I have fully upgraded my camp, and upgrading my weapons and I still have around $3000 so paying bounties right now mean nothing to me.
The cores, by the cores I mean the center part, not the circle around them are a stupid mechanic. While they are not tons of work to maintain to full, I have for all intent and purpose unlimited resources to keep them filled up, which makes the work rather meaningless. Now the circles around them, that you can instantly fill in combat with tonics...that's a different thing. It's part of combat, and there's a tactical feel to it, but the actual cores themselves feels like a useless system to me.
Shaving, OMG that was so cool the first few times. I'm tired of it right now. My beard grows way too fast...I mean it's realistic but it's really annoying to have to shave all the time. You should be able to lock in your look once you have it, and unlock it if you want to change it and let your beard grow.
Cleaning weapons, I'm kinda ok with this. It's rather meaningless again in the grand scheme of things, but they don't losing their condition too fast, and oil is cheap and easily obtainable.
Same for the horse cores, they drain rather slowly and hay fills them up completely making it easy to manage.
Now for me the biggest culprit the rewards, all the stuff from crafting either with Pearson, the fence, or the trapper. Pretty much everything feels kinda disappointing for the time and work required to get them. I like the hunting, but hunting for pristine pelts of stuff you can only carry 1 at time, and you need 3 different one for a minor upgrade feels like a lot of effort for very little reward.
I think a lot of their systems feel like they are almost semi optional, you don't need to spend tons of time on them, but you can't totally ignore them which creates a strange system that isn't as rewarding as it should, and even if you somewhat ignore them they are always in your face.
I may have listed a lot of negative stuff, but the thing is the good stuff is some of the best ever, and the bad stuff is just a list of minor annoyances, some of which can mostly be ignored. As I said, it is a flawed masterpiece. In my opinion it doesn't deserve the 97% on metacritic. 85-90% would be more accurate in my opinion, there's just way too many small issues to get a 10/10, it's like everyone is forgiving stuff that usually wouldn't be forgiven because the good is just so amazing.
Looking forward to finishing work and playing more.
