i liked it, but i didn't even touch the previous games, so i lacked a lot of context. I wanted to like red dead online a lot better, being able to play as a lady was really cool - the character creator was robust enough that I made someone who looked like a genuine ancestor to me, and that was cool, if only because one side of my family genuinely went west in the 19th century but managed to be as unproblematic in deed as was possible for a white person, and it was cool to larp that experience.

but the main game is like.... "i'm an old man now" subgenre of Thing, like the God of War games - that shit sucks - and it's also like, broadly about the closing of the frontier, which could've been interesting, but because it's such a direct parallel of the "i'm an old man now" subgenre, just for worldbuilding, it's pretty much only cool if you have some kind of ability to relate to that, and are comfortable doing so.

personally i'm a really gay trans woman, so it's hard to wanna pick that shit up and finish it because aside from the janky and micro-transaction-expensive online portion of the game, there's nothing in this game for me.