Introducing game mechanics 30+ hours in is the playground equivalent to 'my shield blocks your invincible laser.'
This game is not timeless. This game is forgettable. The gameplay occupies the same futility as all the vehicles that became between the bicycle and the car. Or better yet, between Da Vinci's flying machine and the Wright Brother's plane. They all were improvements on an original design but truly accomplished nothing. Efforts at creating yet another way to remap controls to do something stupid like move a barrel of TNT in the last 2 hours of a game is beyond dumb. I'd prefer if you deployed cutscenes for anything that does not have me using a gun or riding a horse. I don't need a QuickTime event for the wipe should you decide that a bathroom scene should be a part of your gameplay.
Red Dead is a slog. As i write nearly 200 game reviews that encapsulate my last year of college where i was taking 1 class and had so much free time but needed to keep my ass parked in front of a computer 24/7 for research; a broken arm that was about 6 months of recovery; and now COVID-19 which is about 4 months young you will see a theme. I hate a slog.
The cinematic quality is really good. The amount of characters is overwhelming. Having recently played Last of Us 2 having less than 10 characters in your main story arc means i can visualize, even now, who people are. I really can't do that for Red Dead 2 or Red Dead 1. There are way too many characters. The Hateful Eight has just enough characters if you think long and hard enough you can remember all 8.
Auto Aim kind of ruins the game but is necessary if you don't want to multiply the game's length by 5. I couldn't even imagine some of the horseback sequences without auto aim.
TLDR: The game is absolutely too long. There are new mechanics introduced too often as a one off. It looks beautiful but truthfully I'd much rather play LA Noire. La Noire proves that the between stuff in games is absolute fluff. Play that instead.
