RDR2, a beautiful game with impressive locations and voice acting...some tedious activities and side missions and the pacing can be slow, but the realism and acting really wins the day.

The open world of RDR2 is vast and highly appealing. You can get lost in the mountains and brush or in the authentically designed old west towns complete with horse hitches and muddy streets. Visually the game is stunning and with the use of the vista camera I really feel like I've gotten lost in the wild west.

The game is not without bugs, or its share of frustrations (some my own fault). More than once I've had to restart from a checkpoint because of a mission failure - for me this breaks the continuity of the game. If I make a mistake and someone gets killed then I should have to live with those consequences, not just keep retrying the mission until I get it perfectly completed. There's no sense of decisions matter after the first 10 hours...perhaps (hopefully) this will change.

There are glitches here and there with horse movement and even a mission that I had to restart because the game didn't recognize that I had placed the lure exactly where it was supposed to go (legendary bear hunt). I'm willing to forgive a lot of that given how realistic the horse movement generally is, including how it behaves around predators (love this).

There are complexities which I think take too much time away from the story. Doing chores around camp is tedious and no one else seems to help...there are no consequences for forgetting about them. I'm not a fan of a game with too many weapons. I want a very small number of choice pieces that I can customize - don't need every style of rifle, shotgun, rope, knife, handgun, revolver out there. Having one good balanced horse seems much more useful than a stable full of them that I'll never swap around to. I could go on about the UI challenges and quick-wheel issues but I don't want to take away from how much I'm enjoying the game.

Compared to the absolute wreck of Death Stranding, which had SO MUCH potential, I am perfectly OK stepping back in time to RDR2, literally and figuratively since the game has been out for a while.

Well recommended for a good romp through the wild west, just may not be as deep of a story as you'd get from something like the Witcher 3 or Dragon Age: Inquisition.