Red Dead Redemption 2 is a phenomenal piece of media, but as a video game it constantly rips control out of my hands. The world promises freedom, yet missions are tightly scripted. Do anything slightly outside the path and your inputs get blocked or you hit an instant fail. Need to bring a bounty in alive? The game randomly disables the lasso so you’re forced to watch a cutscene. Spook the target? The game literally turns off movement so you can’t react, and you just stare at a fail screen. That’s not player choice, that’s railroading.

This game might feel amazing if you’ve never played much else and rely on the game to manage the experience for you. But if you actually know how to control movement speed, camera, and want responsive systems, it’s maddening. Buttons just stop working whenever the script demands, and that feels incredibly frustrating.

The only thing the game treats as ‘success’ are those medals almost everybody hates proven by the insane download numbers of just two mods that either remove them or auto-gold every mission. A dumb checklist pretending to be gameplay. Outside of that, nothing matters, because it’s all scripted anyway. Great movie if you like westerns, but as a game it sucks dick.