The most hilarious thing I can point out about RDR is that it's a sequel to game, which doesn't exist. Or more like, it didn't exist before, since RDRII is a thing now. But that doesn't really excuse the story structure of this one.
The majority of the game is spent on you hunting down some guys who you don't care about, to save your wife and son you also don't care about. Or more like, the protagonist surely does care about all that, but you as the player couldn't give less of a shit. What doesn't help is how most of the story you're just running in circles, with John Marston being treated like a naive schoolboy for most of the game. He constantly gets lied to and treated like a fool, and never even once we see an actual reaction out of him, with him just going along with doing stupid, life threatening and pointless jobs just for a chance to get a lead on some bandit who, again, the player doesn't know or care about.
The gameplay isn't much of a help either. Most of the missions are you just doing repetitive, boring things. Get ready for the same "ride shotgun and shoot waves of attackers", or "keep up an npc and shoot waves of attackers" or "shoot waves of attackers while hiding behind a rock". Not to mention that here Rockstar really likes to place mission markers sometimes in the opposite part of a map from where a mission actually takes place. You can imagine my frustration and annoyance, when I bothered to ride (or fast travel) from the opposite side of the map, only for a mission to start with a long shotgun ride which takes me exactly to the place I had to walk from. Rockstar just needed to insert their classic car talk here, even if it means actively hurting the game. And most of the Mexican missions are like that.
And oh yeah. The map. Is this just me, or did Rockstar overcorrect in their attempt to shrink things down to accommodate that there are no drivable cars in this game? Because honestly, all my immersion kind of disappears when I can travel between 2 widely different locations in just 2 minutes with barely any transition. And Blackwater? It's a joke, how could that ever be mistaken for anything resembling a city? And that while the story likes to treat it as such, meanwhile in my gameplay it's just 5 houses surrounded by nothing.
I honestly feel like all those glowing reviews and praise come from an alternate reality, where RDRII came out earlier than this, and all the boring missions got hotswapped with exciting setpieces that Rockstar was previously known for. Because this is just heavily, agressively mid.
P.S. fuck you Microsoft for bundling the HD versions of the games with the golden guns dlc which you can't turn off. they look ugly and unfitting.