Recent reviews by J_Squatch

TL:DR
RDO$ = grind, Gold = mega grind or actual money. Beautiful scenery, fantastic action, lots to explore, and a suprisingly chill player-base. The Story is fun and the strangers add some variety to the roaming around. The careers apply to basically every play style.

Let's get this out of the way: Online is 5 dollars and that's what I have and am reviewing. Everything that could be said about the story already has been by every game journal in creation.

Now for the review:

Good:
+ Beautiful. The scenery is simply fantastic.
+ Well balanced fast travel points. You can go to most major locations and spend a few bucks to warp to the other end of the map. However, this is not available for free-roam missions. This lets you get where your going while still giving challenge where needed.
+ Load out cards allow for a boost for certain play styles, and you can only have a set number of perks active at any time.
+ Activities like hunting and fishing are engaging and rewarding.
+ Career paths allow for certain play styles to thrive. Moonshiners and Traders are nice and grindy, Bounties are a great source of action (and gold), and Collectors... are there too.
+ Dead eye works like an ability meter. You can choose what your dead eye does in your card loadout. It can heal you or give you aim bot, whatever you need. It also shows you critical areas when using scopes so you get clean kills while hunting, both people and animals.
+ Crafting and cooking only require things that are fairly common and let you make things that give you an upper hand right away. Certain items are level locked, but those are fairly niche.

Bad:
- (See edit for more info) Reliability is the big sticking point for me. I've lost connection to Rockstar servers so many times, causing me to fail missions or loose progress.
- Hackers, while not NEARLY as abundant as GTA, are a relatively uncommon occurance. While I've not met many that were actively hostile, their presence is still disconcerting.
- Price gouging certain aspects of the game. Several weapons and most wagons are prohibitively expensive, costing several hundred dollars or at least a dozen gold.
- Gold. For as much time as you put in, you get very little out. Bounties and story missions are the best source for it, but while you could get a couple Million in GTA in a week if you know exactly what you're doing, you could barely get enough gold to start a business in that same time.
- Controls can be kinda clunky some times. Most of the time they work great, but certain tasks can be more of a chore than they aught to be.

Final verdict: This game is great. Online is the most fun you can have for $5. That said if you want to go into the content out side of strangers and the story, you will need to do some serious grinding. Again, I recommend Bounty Hunting and story missions for the gold and Trader for RDO cash.

Also: I made this review at 69 hours. Nice.

Edit: Following an update, RockStar fixed the disconnection issue. In stead of forcing you to leave the game, you instead get put into a separate session. Considering that GTA online had this same solution from day one, it's frustrating. Regardless it is fixed now.

It's fun hunting Orcs. Then you get the ones that one stay dead.

Dumb fun sandbox game where the sky's the limit
You will need assets from other games to play it: CS source, HL2, and TF2. Either owning these games or downloading the assets will do it.

If you just want a good old fashioned murder fest, don't get this game. This game will say it loves you then break your face and steal your wallet at the drop of one of its many hats.

9/10 would get dropped again

Oh boy, this game. It's fun. It's terrifying. It can go from soul-rendingly tedious to pant-soilingly good in an instant. For example:

I was chopping down trees and putting them on my log sled. Some cannibals ran up to see why I was ruining their forest. They kept running up and shouting at me then scurrying off. I grab my sled and start hauling off away from them. They keep running up to me. I see the island in the river and rush off to it. The sled points down and I start running up into the air. "I'm flying" I say to myself. Then the sled drops like a stone into the river, with me in tow. I'm stuck ontop of the water and the sled is tantilizingly close on the bottom of the river, full of logs. The cannibals on the river bed have stopped shouting and are just standing there on the shore, looking at me. I check my inventory, all I have is pebbles. I start throwing them at the savages, who I swear started laughing at me. So I sit down on my bench,tired, wet, hungry, and humilated and start to munch on a choclate bar I grabbed from a suitcase.

10/10 Would get traumatized again