u/PatchRowcester

F.E.A.R. 3 is easily one of the most disappointing games I have ever played. What makes its failure so baffling is that it actually starts off quite strong. Visually, the game is excellent, with early levels showcasing top-notch lighting and atmosphere that make you think you are in for a worthy entry in the series. Unfortunately, rather than capitalizing on those atmospheric strengths, the game proceeds to abandons the “less is more” philosophy that made the original F.E.A.R. a masterpiece. Instead, it attempts to transform itself into a generic 2010s achievement shooter, chasing trends made popular by games like Call of Duty and Gears of War.

That shift in identity brings with it frustrating mechanical choices. Chief among them is a poorly implemented cover system that regularly gets you killed. You end up velcroed to walls, and moving away isn’t as simple as navigating away; you have to explicitly press the cover button again to detach. In the heat of battle, if a grenade lands at your feet and you forget to manually unstick yourself, you are dead. Compounding this clunkiness are constant, immersion-breaking achievement pop-ups that completely ruin the tension of otherwise well-designed levels, pulling you out of the horror atmosphere the visual team worked so hard to build.

As the campaign progresses, the core combat devolves even further. The gunplay feels weak across the board, and even franchise staples like the shotgun are surprisingly not fun to use. Toward the end, the gameplay becomes unbelievably repetitive as levels devolve into mindless, wave-based shooting galleries where ammo scarcity becomes a constant nuisance. These later stages highlight how heavily the game was built around co-op play at the expense of the single-player experience. Playing solo as Point Man feels very unbalanced, especially in the final two chapters. The game assumes you will want to replay these disjointed levels as Paxton Fettel once you unlock him - a bold assumption, like I would want to play this slop one more time with a different character.

Holding all of these disjointed levels together is an absolute mess of a narrative. The story is so poorly narrated that it is almost impossible to figure out what is actually happening. Admittedly, I am not good at following story lines in video games, but in this case, the fault here lies entirely on the game itself for failing to maintain any level of engagement. I tuned out by the second level. I had no idea what was going as the campaign drunkenly stumbles toward its idiotic conclusion.

By the time the end credits roll, the game even attempts to hint at a potential sequel, but we all know that is not happening. F.E.A.R. was a masterpiece celebrated for its god-tier enemy AI and brilliant combat design, but corporate gutted its identity to chase mainstream trends. F.E.A.R. 3 serves as a tragic, pathetic end to a once-great series, leaving it dead and buried.

I just started playing Far Cry 5. The game is looking very good. So far, I think this is a better game than Far Cry 4.

I planned to write an extensive review of Red Dead Redemption 2, but before I do, if you somehow stumbled on my website, and never played Red Dead Redemption 2, let me just say that if you enjoy open-world games with excellent graphics, might as well stop reading this and buy it now, and play it. Take your time with the game. I would hate to spoil the joy of discovering what this game has to offer. Assuming you have a good enough PC, set everything to high, put on your headphones, start the game, and just enjoy the ride. Get lost in this excellent version of the United States 🇺🇸.

Introduction

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a sequel-prequel to the original game, and based on what I have seen, it surpasses the first game in every way. Unfortunately, Red Dead Redemption was never released on PC, denying PC gamers the chance to experience it. I am just happy Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC. They are notorious for not releasing PC versions of their games for a long time after the console launch, and even when they do, their PC ports can be a mess. GTA IV is a prime example of a buggy mess on PC.

I was not expecting much when I started playing the game. I fully expected Rockstar to release a half-baked PC port. It is not a terrible PC port, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a solid game, but my feelings changed when this happened in the game…

It was at this point I knew there was something special about this game.

Graphics

I played the Steam version of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2023 on a powerful machine with an i7 12700k processor, GeForce RTX 3080Ti graphics card, and 64GB of RAM, running at 3440x1440 at the highest graphics settings. The game ran smoothly at mostly 60-70 FPS with DLSS set to Quality. For those with less powerful machines, I recommend setting DLSS to Performance, as this game is resource-intensive.

The game’s visuals are stunning. Five years after its release, I don’t think there is any game that even comes close to the graphics quality. The open world is massive, and it spans different settings: snow-covered north, the great plains, redwood forests, swamps, and the desert landscape of the Southern United States and Mexico. The weather system is fantastic. We have come a long way from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, which was the first time I experienced a day-night cycle and weather effects. Riding your horse on the great plains during a thunderstorm, or slowly making your way through the Bayou at night—the atmosphere is top notch. In terms of art and visual design, Red Dead Redemption 2 surpasses The Witcher 3, which up to this point was the best single-player open-world game I had ever played.

The ideal way to experience this game is on PC (even though it’s not made with PC in mind), preferably on an ultrawide monitor.

Gameplay

It’s not just the visuals that make this game great. There are plenty of Ubisoft open-world games that look quite good, but compared to any of that copy/paste slop, the world here is built differently. The approach to open-world design is fundamentally different compared to Ubisoft’s. If we were to take Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as the pinnacle of Ubisoft open-world design and compare that with RDR2, it’s very evident that Ubisoft was going for quantity over quality. Even if you enjoy the gameplay, there can be no denying that the design is done by the numbers. In RDR2, it feels like every part of the world has some purpose and care put into it compared to Odyssey, where it feels very repetitive.

Traversal is one detail that I’ve come to realize is very important. I never paid much attention to this until I played RDR2. In AC games you can easily teleport from one corner of the map to another and climb almost any surface like Spider-Man. Level design has less meaning if you can noclip through the entire map. There is no reason for developers to put real thought into how a player would reach a certain point on the map. In RDR2, there is fast travel, but it’s not as straightforward, and it costs money. In my 200 hours of gameplay, I think I used the fast travel system maybe twice. One of the reasons for this is the sense of discovery. I didn’t mind riding to a quest location on the other side of the map because I would often discover something along the way—a hideout, a rare animal, an insane Easter egg, or some random event. I enjoyed the changing terrains and the weather as the day progressed. I am yet to play a game where I experienced something close to this.

I thought the endless animations for almost all actions would drive me insane (because I hated them in Battlefield V), but I was surprised that they did not. Granted, after almost 200 hours of gameplay, watching Arthur skin an animal is not as fascinating as it was in the beginning, but I did not hate it. The slower and more methodical approach to gameplay actually worked. I am trying to articulate why I felt this way, because I am usually not a fan of slow and sluggish controls. There is a noticeable lag between when I press a button and when the character reacts on the screen, and in most games this would make me want to quit. The deliberate movement and well-crafted animations worked well for RDR2. Best I can tell, the reason I did not hate it is because I did not feel a disconnect with the game. The game tricked my brain into thinking this was normal. That’s the only way I can explain it. If a Ubisoft game had this kind of slow gameplay, I probably would have given up after an hour.

I guess that is Rockstar magic.

Story

I am finding it increasingly hard to care about story and dialogue in video games. After 20+ years of playing single-player games, there is a feeling of been-there-done-that when it comes to video game stories. Narrative lines are predictable and boring, dialogue is cringe, and characters are rarely interesting.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is different. Voice acting and dialogue are on par with a good spaghetti western. It would be worth watching if this was a movie—only if it is something not made by modern Hollywood, to be sure. I am not going to discuss any specifics, but this is one of those rare games where you can actually see the impact of the story on the world. They did as good a job as any game ever could showing how characters change as time progresses. You experience the gang starting a new life, get an idea of the group dynamics, and then watch all that change over time as life happens. It is so very well done.

I cannot think of a single bad voice actor. The casting is excellent. It’s very difficult for them to get everything just right, but they pulled it off.

I would love for a complete remake of Red Dead Redemption in the new engine so I can experience the older game.

Special mention has to be made to the ending. It’s an ending that sticks in my mind for many years to come. This is because they got me invested in the story. The plot actually sank in, and it makes sense. I can barely remember the ending of Cyberpunk or Witcher 3. I immensely enjoyed both games, but the story did not make an impression. It’s not so with RDR2.

UI/UX - Predictably Awful

As I expected, Rockstar does not make good PC games. When it comes to this platform, it feels like an afterthought.

The UX design feels subpar and gives the impression that it was created by someone who has never played games on a computer before. Navigating menus with a controller is fundamentally different than navigating with a mouse and keyboard—a simple fact that developers cannot seem to grasp. The menu navigation is frustrating and overly complicated. To switch between weapons, you need to hold Tab and press Q and E, which is a poor design choice. It would have been better to use an inventory option similar to that for items you are carrying instead of the clunky weapon wheel. This was purely to accommodate the controller.

The game has some mechanics that are quite unusual, especially the weapon system. As a player, you have two slots for long guns—the shoulder slot and the back slot. However, when you are riding a horse, the character puts away the weapons, and they become “horse weapons.” When you dismount from the horse, the weapons should teleport back onto you, but sometimes that doesn’t happen. This can be frustrating, especially when you need to quickly engage enemies and realize that you no longer have the weapons you previously equipped. It would be easier if the weapons stayed on your person all the time. It’s unclear why this feature was added to the game in the first place. Why was so much effort put into stowing away long guns while riding a horse? Very bizarre.

Customizing your outfits is another clunky mess of navigating multiple menus, and then having to store these outfits on the horse. Why? Other games have solved this problem. There was no reason to try and reinvent the wheel here—no pun intended.

There is also no quick save. Thankfully there is a manual save option, but that doesn’t quite work the way one might intuitively think it should. The lack of a quick save option is unacceptable for an open-world game. They could have kept the exact same save mechanics where regardless of where you save, the game will always resume at the nearest campfire, but just let me bind this to a key—something you could do on PC by pressing F5 since the dawn of time. The same goes for the lack of Quick Load. I wrote many years ago why having a quick save option would be fantastic for single-player games—Dark Souls fans are going to be mad at me for saying this, but giving people the option to save a single-player game wherever they want is not going to make their game any better or worse. In fact, it has no impact whatsoever.

Rockstar Account - The Anti-Consumer Cherry on Top

You need to create a Rockstar account to play the game, which launches via the Rockstar Game Launcher after launching the game via Steam. This double DRM process needs to be eliminated. There is no good or ethical reason for game companies to require paying customers to jump through hoops to play a single-player game. Pure corporate greed.

To add insult to injury, there is no point in playing Red Dead Online because it is dead.

I’ve long wondered why professional PC game journalists almost never advocate for a better experience for paying customers. These outlets have repeatedly shown they can pressure publishers into bending the knee on all kinds of performative politics and social issues. Yet when it comes to genuine consumer grievances — aggressive double DRM (Steam + Rockstar Launcher), always-online requirements, bloated launchers — the outrage is nowhere to be found.

No sustained campaigns from PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, or PCGamesN. No think pieces. No social media pressure. Tyler Wilde at PC Gamer writing a condescending slop piece scolding the PCMasterRace subreddit for its name. They also offered zero support to Ross Scott’s (Accursed Farms) StopKillingGames campaign.

That tells you everything. At this point, PC Gamer functions less like a consumer advocate and more like a corporate communications department. If PirateSoftware ran a games media company, this is exactly what it would look like. Rock Paper Shotgun barely deserves mentioning.

To sum it up: these same outlets stayed silent while Rockstar forced players to create an account and install a second launcher just to play the single-player campaign of a game whose online component they’ve largely abandoned in favor of GTA V’s microtransactions. All the money in the world still can’t buy basic ethics.

Closing Thoughts

I stand by my criticism of Rockstar. They are not pro-consumer. If this were any other game, I would not have recommended buying it–I will make an exception with RDR2. This work of art deserves to be experienced by all PC gamers.

I played this game for over 190 hours, and I am still not done yet. There are more places to explore, more animals to hunt, and bounties to collect. Despite Rockstar’s best efforts, this turned out to be a fantastic game. I look forward to playing Red Dead Redemption 3. Maybe in 2030.

I planned to write an extensive review of Red Dead Redemption 2, but before I do, if you somehow stumbled on my website, and never played Red Dead Redemption 2, let me just say that if you enjoy open-world games with excellent graphics, might as well stop reading this and buy it now, and play it. Take your time with the game. I would hate to spoil the joy of discovering what this game has to offer. Assuming you have a good enough PC, set everything to high, put on your headphones, start the game, and just enjoy the ride. Get lost in this excellent version of the United States 🇺🇸.

Introduction

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a sequel-prequel to the original game, and based on what I have seen, it surpasses the first game in every way. Unfortunately, Red Dead Redemption was never released on PC, denying PC gamers the chance to experience it. I am just happy Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC. They are notorious for not releasing PC versions of their games for a long time after the console launch, and even when they do, their PC ports can be a mess. GTA IV is a prime example of a buggy mess on PC.

I was not expecting much when I started playing the game. I fully expected Rockstar to release a half-baked PC port. It is not a terrible PC port, and I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a solid game, but my feelings changed when this happened in the game…

It was at this point I knew there was something special about this game.

Graphics

I played the Steam version of Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2023 on a powerful machine with an i7 12700k processor, GeForce RTX 3080Ti graphics card, and 64GB of RAM, running at 3440x1440 at the highest graphics settings. The game ran smoothly at mostly 60-70 FPS with DLSS set to Quality. For those with less powerful machines, I recommend setting DLSS to Performance, as this game is resource-intensive.

The game’s visuals are stunning. Five years after its release, I don’t think there is any game that even comes close to the graphics quality. The open world is massive, and it spans different settings: snow-covered north, the great plains, redwood forests, swamps, and the desert landscape of the Southern United States and Mexico. The weather system is fantastic. We have come a long way from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, which was the first time I experienced a day-night cycle and weather effects. Riding your horse on the great plains during a thunderstorm, or slowly making your way through the Bayou at night—the atmosphere is top notch. In terms of art and visual design, Red Dead Redemption 2 surpasses The Witcher 3, which up to this point was the best single-player open-world game I had ever played.

The ideal way to experience this game is on PC (even though it’s not made with PC in mind), preferably on an ultrawide monitor.

Gameplay

It’s not just the visuals that make this game great. There are plenty of Ubisoft open-world games that look quite good, but compared to any of that copy/paste slop, the world here is built differently. The approach to open-world design is fundamentally different compared to Ubisoft’s. If we were to take Assassin’s Creed Odyssey as the pinnacle of Ubisoft open-world design and compare that with RDR2, it’s very evident that Ubisoft was going for quantity over quality. Even if you enjoy the gameplay, there can be no denying that the design is done by the numbers. In RDR2, it feels like every part of the world has some purpose and care put into it compared to Odyssey, where it feels very repetitive.

Traversal is one detail that I’ve come to realize is very important. I never paid much attention to this until I played RDR2. In AC games you can easily teleport from one corner of the map to another and climb almost any surface like Spider-Man. Level design has less meaning if you can noclip through the entire map. There is no reason for developers to put real thought into how a player would reach a certain point on the map. In RDR2, there is fast travel, but it’s not as straightforward, and it costs money. In my 200 hours of gameplay, I think I used the fast travel system maybe twice. One of the reasons for this is the sense of discovery. I didn’t mind riding to a quest location on the other side of the map because I would often discover something along the way—a hideout, a rare animal, an insane Easter egg, or some random event. I enjoyed the changing terrains and the weather as the day progressed. I am yet to play a game where I experienced something close to this.

I thought the endless animations for almost all actions would drive me insane (because I hated them in Battlefield V), but I was surprised that they did not. Granted, after almost 200 hours of gameplay, watching Arthur skin an animal is not as fascinating as it was in the beginning, but I did not hate it. The slower and more methodical approach to gameplay actually worked. I am trying to articulate why I felt this way, because I am usually not a fan of slow and sluggish controls. There is a noticeable lag between when I press a button and when the character reacts on the screen, and in most games this would make me want to quit. The deliberate movement and well-crafted animations worked well for RDR2. Best I can tell, the reason I did not hate it is because I did not feel a disconnect with the game. The game tricked my brain into thinking this was normal. That’s the only way I can explain it. If a Ubisoft game had this kind of slow gameplay, I probably would have given up after an hour.

I guess that is Rockstar magic.

Story

I am finding it increasingly hard to care about story and dialogue in video games. After 20+ years of playing single-player games, there is a feeling of been-there-done-that when it comes to video game stories. Narrative lines are predictable and boring, dialogue is cringe, and characters are rarely interesting.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is different. Voice acting and dialogue are on par with a good spaghetti western. It would be worth watching if this was a movie—only if it is something not made by modern Hollywood, to be sure. I am not going to discuss any specifics, but this is one of those rare games where you can actually see the impact of the story on the world. They did as good a job as any game ever could showing how characters change as time progresses. You experience the gang starting a new life, get an idea of the group dynamics, and then watch all that change over time as life happens. It is so very well done.

I cannot think of a single bad voice actor. The casting is excellent. It’s very difficult for them to get everything just right, but they pulled it off.

I would love for a complete remake of Red Dead Redemption in the new engine so I can experience the older game.

Special mention has to be made to the ending. It’s an ending that sticks in my mind for many years to come. This is because they got me invested in the story. The plot actually sank in, and it makes sense. I can barely remember the ending of Cyberpunk or Witcher 3. I immensely enjoyed both games, but the story did not make an impression. It’s not so with RDR2.

UI/UX - Predictably Awful

As I expected, Rockstar does not make good PC games. When it comes to this platform, it feels like an afterthought.

The UX design feels subpar and gives the impression that it was created by someone who has never played games on a computer before. Navigating menus with a controller is fundamentally different than navigating with a mouse and keyboard—a simple fact that developers cannot seem to grasp. The menu navigation is frustrating and overly complicated. To switch between weapons, you need to hold Tab and press Q and E, which is a poor design choice. It would have been better to use an inventory option similar to that for items you are carrying instead of the clunky weapon wheel. This was purely to accommodate the controller.

The game has some mechanics that are quite unusual, especially the weapon system. As a player, you have two slots for long guns—the shoulder slot and the back slot. However, when you are riding a horse, the character puts away the weapons, and they become “horse weapons.” When you dismount from the horse, the weapons should teleport back onto you, but sometimes that doesn’t happen. This can be frustrating, especially when you need to quickly engage enemies and realize that you no longer have the weapons you previously equipped. It would be easier if the weapons stayed on your person all the time. It’s unclear why this feature was added to the game in the first place. Why was so much effort put into stowing away long guns while riding a horse? Very bizarre.

Customizing your outfits is another clunky mess of navigating multiple menus, and then having to store these outfits on the horse. Why? Other games have solved this problem. There was no reason to try and reinvent the wheel here—no pun intended.

There is also no quick save. Thankfully there is a manual save option, but that doesn’t quite work the way one might intuitively think it should. The lack of a quick save option is unacceptable for an open-world game. They could have kept the exact same save mechanics where regardless of where you save, the game will always resume at the nearest campfire, but just let me bind this to a key—something you could do on PC by pressing F5 since the dawn of time. The same goes for the lack of Quick Load. I wrote many years ago why having a quick save option would be fantastic for single-player games—Dark Souls fans are going to be mad at me for saying this, but giving people the option to save a single-player game wherever they want is not going to make their game any better or worse. In fact, it has no impact whatsoever.

Rockstar Account - The Anti-Consumer Cherry on Top

You need to create a Rockstar account to play the game, which launches via the Rockstar Game Launcher after launching the game via Steam. This double DRM process needs to be eliminated. There is no good or ethical reason for game companies to require paying customers to jump through hoops to play a single-player game. Pure corporate greed.

To add insult to injury, there is no point in playing Red Dead Online because it is dead.

I’ve long wondered why professional PC game journalists almost never advocate for a better experience for paying customers. These outlets have repeatedly shown they can pressure publishers into bending the knee on all kinds of performative politics and social issues. Yet when it comes to genuine consumer grievances — aggressive double DRM (Steam + Rockstar Launcher), always-online requirements, bloated launchers — the outrage is nowhere to be found.

No sustained campaigns from PC Gamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, or PCGamesN. No think pieces. No social media pressure. Tyler Wilde at PC Gamer writing a condescending slop piece scolding the PCMasterRace subreddit for its name. They also offered zero support to Ross Scott’s (Accursed Farms) StopKillingGames campaign.

That tells you everything. At this point, PC Gamer functions less like a consumer advocate and more like a corporate communications department. If PirateSoftware ran a games media company, this is exactly what it would look like. Rock Paper Shotgun barely deserves mentioning.

To sum it up: these same outlets stayed silent while Rockstar forced players to create an account and install a second launcher just to play the single-player campaign of a game whose online component they’ve largely abandoned in favor of GTA V’s microtransactions. All the money in the world still can’t buy basic ethics.

Closing Thoughts

I stand by my criticism of Rockstar. They are not pro-consumer. If this were any other game, I would not have recommended buying it–I will make an exception with RDR2. This work of art deserves to be experienced by all PC gamers.

I played this game for over 190 hours, and I am still not done yet. There are more places to explore, more animals to hunt, and bounties to collect. Despite Rockstar’s best efforts, this turned out to be a fantastic game. I look forward to playing Red Dead Redemption 3. Maybe in 2030.