Few other games come close to the attention to detail put into every facet of this game.

An enormous amount of unique NPCs individually and expertly motion-captured for some of the best in-game animations and voice work ever made. The actors that worked on this game deserve much praise for the amount of emotion and animation they portray throughout this masterpiece.

Story is outstanding and capable of making most people cry.

Even the side-quests are incredibly detailed and can distract you for dozens of hours from the main story.

Features story choices throughout the game and has an honor system that can improve your store prices, makes your character have different mannerisms/voice lines, and leads to different endings as well as certain side-quests only being available if you're good enough.

Represents late 1800s/early 1900s America quite accurately with many time-appropriate political and social issues being present and/or mentioned.

Great amount of customization options and variety for clothing/weapons/saddles/horses. Your hair and beard will even grow over time, and you can get dirty and wash it off in a river or pay for a bath.
Many items to craft, cook, eat, and drink. Your character(and horse) will get skinny if they don't eat; and fat if they eat too often.

The variety and diversity in the wildlife and even flora is marvelous, as well as the detail in skinning animations. You even need to make sure to use the right type of weapon and go for clean kills when hunting as you can damage pelts when using the wrong ones.

Combat is pretty straightforward, you typically have to use cover and headshots on enemies matter. Every ranged weapon has a special melee ability that lets you instakill. Enemy difficulty slowly goes up as you progress through the story. Deadeye is a great ability that gets better and better as you progress. Melee combat is a lot of fun too, considerably better than witcher 3's.

Several fun different tools at your disposal such as the lasso, fire bombs, dynamite, and even explosive bullets.

Many fair challenges that unlock unique detailed gear and will improve your maximum stats once you complete each set.

The wanted system is quite thought out and there's almost always multiple ways to commit a crime and get away with it even without having to wear a mask.

The massive open world has many collectables and unique locations/items/weapons/hats/horses, legendary animals to hunt and fish to catch, plus treasure maps and changes over time as you play such as new buildings being built and forests chopped down, as well as random events like gang robberies, predator attacks, and more. Even on my fourth playthrough I'm finding new things.

Has the most realistic horse behavior systems seen in any game, and features a special horse bonding system that improves your horses the more you use them. Fortunately horses aren't completely realistic and you don't have to put your horse down every time it runs into a tree or falls off a cliff thanks to horse revivers, making for a perfect balance of gameplay and realism. And yes, horse testicles shrink in the cold...

Greet - Greet - Antagonize is one of the most hilarious ways to interact with random NPCs.

LENNY!!


Best played with a controller as this was made for consoles originally and the keyboard controls are quite unintuitive.

Unfortunately online mode (RDO) is ruined on PC thanks to cheaters. You can still play it with a file trick to put you in your own private lobby where you can set a password and still play with friends, but genuine online interactions with non-cheater strangers is pretty much impossible anymore. The main purpose of this game is the story mode however, so online mode is ignorable.