Despite saying that I was going to pass on this one because I figured I’d had my fill of sandbox games for a while, and that I was going away for 2 weeks anyway and wouldn’t have time to get through it, I went ahead and picked this up anyway… I’m sure a couple of you would be interested to hear how it’s been going, so I wanted to throw some stuff out there before I left.

I’m about 20 hours in, I am an easily distracted player, so the amount of spontaneous quests that come up is a bit overwhelming, and my tendency to react to any blip on the map, or critter crossing my path, is getting to me and the animations to go through the motions of getting on and off the horse, skinning and looting kills and hogtying folks is all starting to feel too slow and tedious. I’m learning that most of these blips should be ignored entirely but it pains me to do it… it’s just less painful than actually doing the task.

I’ve got to say though, the atmosphere created through the audio and visuals is amazing, it really feels like the old west to a degree, I don’t think that there were as many fiends as there is in this game though. It really feels like you’re introduced to people and you help them along their own little sub-plot, while they entice you with their carrot on a stick to progress your own story… If John Marston is as bad ass as he is constantly made out to be through out the game, he would have murdered these folks long ago for their shenanigans, but alas, you must play along.

Its a pretty good game so far, but I’m not fully understanding the near perfect scores it is getting in the major outlets. Apart from the setting and story (again, you can make a case for perfect scores in those categories alone), nothing sets this game apart from a game play perspective. It’s really hanging its hat on the ‘Dead-Eye’ functionality for duels and combat in general, it is little more than the ‘bullet-time’ functionality we’ve seen in many games since Max Payne did it (I don’t think it was the first game to use the feature, but it was the first one that had a big audience I believe). It does go through a bit of an evolution, from manually pulling the trigger in standard bullet time, to auto-marking the targets as you hover over them, to manually marking the targets while in bullet time, and that was kinda of nice since it’s really the bit of character evolution in the game at all. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I don’t find this game nearly as good as everyone is making it out to be. What you do in the game really doesn’t change at all, you’re either going to kill or capture any bad guys you run into and thats about it. There are some gambling type mini-games, texas hold’em, black jack, liar’s dice, horse shoes… but frankly they all take too long to play in my opinion, and they’re not all that fun.

I think a lot of the scores were the result of a gut reaction to a setting that has not been over tapped yet, and sure it’s a good game, if you’re a fan of the open world sandbox model of game, you’re going to love this, everything else beyond that aspect is truly fantastic. If you can’t get into this type of game to begin with, this game isn’t going to change your mind, it suffers from the same problems other games of this ilk do. I’ll elaborate more on all this in my review when I return.