Lizard_King wrote:

The in game challenges are somewhere between Saints Row 2's total user friendliness and the shithead country that 300 GTA4 pigeons inhabit. I just knifed a bear to death, and bears are sons of bitches in this game. It's probably the first game Rockstar has made in years that doesn't require self-loathing on the part of the player to continue. Not one real escort mission in any meaningful sense, very few timed events of any kind, and virtually every chase can be preempted or cut off quickly. And you can lasso people and drag them behind your horse.

The main thing that fucked me up is that it's definitely designed for people who want to speed through the storyline and enjoy the postgame. The tutorial is spread out very far, and sometimes the tooltip paragraphs are happening alongside very stressful events that make you miss one time only, absolutely vital information. For instance, if I hadn't looked up dueling online, I never would have found out that a couple of story/sidestory shootouts require you to kill the other person and fail you otherwise, with no clear indicator of why it happened when disarming worked fine every other time, and then I would have been stuck indefinitely. So I guess at key moments it can still be a Rockstar game. Also: no cell phones. No dates. No friends, and the clever humor is confined to the entirely optional newspaper and a few poorly chosen one-liners along the way.