(More honesty, however upsetting, on my Curator page.)

Reckon this'll be a long one, pardner. Point-form descriptors for the self-explanatory, but I'll have some longer explantions in there, too. Points in no particular order.

Do I need an introduction? How about this:

Looking for an atmospheric game with a massive world you can explore on horseback, picking plants & hunting animals for resources, spending your days fishing, building your reputation with civilians, engaging in lucrative trading of wagons filled with rare goods, & battling your foes from the comfort of your horse's saddle?

Then play Black Desert Online, which feels better than Red Dead Revolver 3 in just about every possible regard.

• Presentation
  
• Atmosphere
  
• Terrain deformation
  
• Compelling singleplayer story
  
• Online missions tell a story (albeit short)
  
• Connection to Red Dead Revolver 1 (however small, & the scorpion pistol grips are a particularly deep cut!)
  
• First-person mode (helps alleviate some of the terrible gameplay)
  
• Horse autopathing in Cinematic Camera mode (helps to make bad horse gameplay & traversing the empty, boring world somewhat tolerable)
  
• You can finally gib enemies again (about damn time, R*)
  
• Red Dead Online's intro cutscene kind of mirrors the opening of GTA III (a nice throwback)
  
• You can drive the train, San Andreas-style

• Title (it's set before Red Dead Revolver 2: The Redemption, so it should be Redemption Zero or Alpha, or, third game in the brand, Red Dead Revolver 3, since RDR2 would be the last game)
  
• Terrible gameplay, including character/horse/vehicle movement, & gunplay, all of which felt better in Red Dead 1 on PS2 (characters handled better in the GTA III era; horses and wagons handle better in BDO)
  
• Awful UI
  
• Boring setting
  
• Gunplay extremely clunky & unsatisfying
  
• Cores System irritating (ten meters to manage, all require different items, refilling them irritating with awful UI)
  
• PC-style toggle aim doesn't work despite being in the options; must use console-style hold aim
  
• Navigating the world is a chore & a bore
  
• Horse-mounted combat feels terrible
  
• You won't get your items/currency from R* promos
  
• Unbelievably tiny amount of Online content: less than GTA Online had at launch
  
• Rampant, unchecked anti-consumerism
  
• Deliberate design decisions not governed by gameplay but potential for profit through the sale of microtransactions this game somehow has
  
• Pay-to-grind "pass" system
  
• No private RDO sessions (they were in RDR2, GTA 4 & 5)
  
• Emphasis placed on microtransaction currency even though you're grinding out in-game money through gameplay, which SHOULD be enough (it is in singleplayer & GTA; why the hell not here?); it is practically necessary for RDO; not nearly enough can be earned through gameplay to be worth a damn unless you grind literally every day for months
  
• Dailies more irritating & less rewarding than GTAO's new Dailies (designed for player retention, not player rewarding): "Congrats, here's 0.2 microtransaction money -- you need 25 to buy that thing you want. Grind for a month, sucker."
  
• Roles are boring & tedious, even when compared to their GTA equivalents
  
• RDO's complete overall failure to deliver on Wild West cowboy fantasies (Is your favourite Western movie the one where Clint spends 2 hours picking flowers? The one where John Wayne steals hairbrushes? Only the Bounty Hunter Role delivers, but even then, the rewards are negligible & you have to drop microtransaction money to be able to do it, despite bounty hunting being a famous Western concept & important to all 3 Red Dead games' singleplayer stories)
  
• Where are the RDO stagecoach/train/bank robberies? (literally one mission each, IF you have enough Dishonour to be able to unlock those missions at all/know they even exist)
  
• Items you want locked behind Role progression, illogically (why can't I just put my damn lantern on my horse?)
  
• Camp serves almost no purpose unless you drop hundreds to improve it (even then, it still won't load properly most of the time)
  
• Weapon loadout often resets during events; can't spawn with the melee weapon you bought
  
• Frequent network issues (camps don't load, failing to travel to/into/out of Moonshine shacks, game not recognizing you're in a posse so no rewards for the missions you're on, indefinite loading, open-world gameplay not loading even though your game tells you you're on the job but none of the required enemies or props spawn & there's no way to stop the mission other than quitting the game entirely, frequent disconnections for any/no reason...)
  
• "Match speed with leader" function does not work
  
• Contextual button presses often fail because they require a prompt rather than just contextually perform the action upon button press (eg: jumping onto a train from horseback: can only jump when/where/if the contextual prompt appears)
  
• HOLDING buttons when just a press should be enough
  
• No GTA-style voting screen to pick next job
  
• Doesn't seem to be a way to just play/jump between jobs yourself through the menus like in GTA
  
• Fast-travel: icons don't always appear on map, costs in-game money to fast-travel, can't fast-travel from your camp until you grind to unlock/drop hundreds of in-game dollars to do so
  
• Trying to start a mission that requires "1 to 4 players" alone will still put you into matchmaking; can't just straight-up launch a mission by yourself even if it only needs ONE player
  
• No keyboard lighting support, which GTA had & used well (pulsing in nightclubs, each character has his own colour, sometimes I wouldn't even notice I was Wanted until my F-keys lit up)
  
• Certain cosmetic customization requires microtransaction currency, as if this were some kind of free-to-play game & not a big-budget major release from a huge publisher
  
• Online missions locked by morality (so few missions available, yet if you want to unlock them all, you have to be a hero & an outlaw)
  
• Morality meter does not make any sense: returned fire on a civilian in self-defence? YOU'RE A VILLAIN! The lawmen will take you down! Killed a bunch of feds because they had the gall to crack down on illegal moonshining? Not a problem at all!
  
• No good reason to have low Honour other than unlocking the bank robbery mission: the "don't get killed by bounty hunter" events irritating, frequent, & don't make sense (why would I pay the bounty on myself when I get killed?)
  
• Fishing is boring & poorly explained (even Black Desert's fishing was more fun than this, & not only because you could just AFK)

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly doesn't seem right -- not enough of that first part. Plus, it feels like R*'s stance is For A Few Dollars More. Forget The Man With No Name -- R* thinks we're The Playerbase With No Shame, glad to eat up & defend anything while continuing to drop money on a full-priced big-budget retail game with multiple editions, a pre-order focus, an emphasis on microtransaction currency, & even pay-to-grind passes.

I'm not The Man With No Name; I'm The Man With No Patience For This Kind Of Rampant Unchecked Anti-Consumerism. R*, you're Unforgiven. The logical extreme of R*'s degradation, this clunky game is a mess in every sense of the word, the embodiment of anti-consumerism, & all the evidence I need to not look forward to anything else these shysters churn out.

I'd unironically recommend Wild West Online instead of this crap, even though it's an abandoned project from a known con artist, simply because that game has a reason for the unacceptable issues overwhelmingly present in RDR3. Some of my friends are excited about GTA VI. After seeing Red Dead Revolver 3, I sure's hell am not. Walk into the sunset, Rockstar. This town ain't big enough for your BS.

(More honesty, however unexpected, on my Curator page.)


I used to say that "People who say 'League' in reference to any game other than Rocket League are bad people."  I've long since stopped saying that, as the real "bad people" are the folks behind this mess.

Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable, and I will regale you with the tale of how an indie darling no one played became a poster child for the gaming industry's rampant, unchecked anti-consumerism.  Over five years, a game designed for over-the-top ridiculous fun would have the fun sucked right out of it, all while trying to suck as much money as possible from paying customers who'd already put down their hard earned cash on this entertainment product.

And if you're an aspiring game developer, for fuçk's sake, don't pull this shït.

Our story begins way back in 2008.  The Sony PlayStation 3 was available, and it had no games.  One of those no games was a little indie project by the title of "Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars"[store.playstation.com] from a studio called Psyonix.  Overlook the needlessly-shiïtty title, if you can.  It was some kind of version of TopGear's "car football," only with the cars having K.I.T.T.'s Turbo Boost and Pursuit Mode abilities from Knight Rider.

Cars would boost around the ground, drive up the walls, jump into the air, perform all kinds of flips, spins, and rolls, all in service of getting the ball into the opposing team's net.  You had full a single-player mode, split-screen, silly challenges, bot support (something many modern games inexcusably lack), online multiplayer (at no extra cost, obviously, since network functionality is a staple of the industry and not a premium privilege; don't let any company tell you otherwise), a replay editor with YouTube integration, and a tiny price.

You also had silly arenas, with hills and tunnels, platforms and posts.  These weren't just boring flat pitches -- these were exciting battle arenas, including the deck of a pirate ship.  You had devs who cared and paid attention to the forums.  You had a game, not a microtransaction storefront.

It's still available, only costs four Canadian Dollars, and yes, it's better than Rocket League.[store.playstation.com]  Or at least, what Rocket League has since become.

Fast-forward to 2015.  Psyonix releases a sequel, titled Rocket League.  Rejoice, right?

Maybe.  Maybe at the start, when it still seemed like Psyonix cared.  Maybe at the start, when fun was still allowed.

Rocket League had some other game modes added over the years.  In addition to returning Car Football, there was also Car Basketball (unfortunately not NBA Jam enough) and Car Hockey (which, admittedly, was pretty lame).  There was a full single-player sports-season campaign.  You had split-screen, clan support, online gameplay, and all kinds of wacky customization.

But you also had tryhards who took what was initially a ridiculous, over-the-top stunt car game and unironically pretended it was some kind of real-life sport.  I'm not going to use that cringe-inducing marketing buzzword, but the back of the box on the Switch version explicitly has that word plastered on it.  Because what I look for when buying games is, "Instead of playing this entertainment software, can I watch literally-who attention-whöres on the internet play it instead?"  Fuçk right off with that weak bullshït.

Rocket League's sillier modes and arenas?  Forget about them.  If you wanted to play online, you weren't going to see those.  Better get used to playing that Car Football mode and nothing else samey boring-äss rectangles where any differences are just visual.  Who the hell allowed this?

Also, mouselook doesn't work.  Any attempt to move the camera immediately resets it, meaning you can't look around.  The "camera locked on ball" mode is not useful.  Judging distances (like, say, the distance between YOUR CAR AND THE BALL) and correcting direction is a pain in the äss when you can't see around you.  How in the hell can you make a vehicle-themed action game that doesn't control as well as GTA San Andreas and UT2004?

At least you can play with your friends locally and still get XP to unlock stuff, right?  Not after they made the change where you could only get XP from online matches.  What, you thought you were buying a couch-co-op party game?  And even then, you'd only XP if you "contributed" enough to the match.  So didn't manage to catch up to and touch the ball?  No XP for you.

And of course, there was paid DLC.  It couldn't be avoided.  Licensed cars lend themselves too well to this game.  And I have to admit, the only vehicles I cared about at all (and ever used) were the collection of pop culture vehicles that filled my garage.  Hell, even after the game had turned to shït, I still bought the Knight Rider pack, because the Turbo-Boosting black t-top was something I'd requested for years.  But one vehicle is a "pack"?  A single vehicle whose wheels and trails can't be used on any others?  Some were better than others, like the DeLorean's custom animations and the Jurassic Park T-Rex explosion, but still.

But it got worse.

Someone had the bright idea to introduce item drops, colour-coded by rarity, and, of course, "boxes" that couldn't be opened without spending real life money.  Gambling items in a game with a price tag that had become a DLC storefront.  Disgusting.

But it got worse.

Psyonix had to latch on to the latest trend in contemptible anti-consumerism: the pay-to-grind "pass" system.

Why patch in some badly-needed content into your game when you can release it as time-limited "exclusive" items that players need to grind their ässes off to earn?  And of course, the only good stuff, the real meat of the update, the content you'll feature in the marketing, lock that stuff behind a paywall.  Have other things to do?  Refuse to spend more money on a game you already paid for?  Well, too bad -- you'll miss out on these "exclusive" items, and there's no telling when/how/if they'll ever be made available again!  Bring money!

And then Psyonix sold out to that other company.  Nothing bad seemed to happen at first -- but you could say the same thing when Mickey the Corporate Rat got his hands on Marvel and Lucasfilm.

You might have read that Rocket League was going free-to-play.  Maybe you thought it was a chance to get some games in with your Steam friends who don't own the game!  Well, you thought wrong, and I can't seem to find a straight, official answer.  Piecing stuff together myself, it turns out that the game is being pulled from Steam, you need an account for an extraneous game patcher to be able to play, but at least your purchased DLC cars are still yours.

Unbelievably, they call this "Season 1," even though the game has been out FOR FIVE YEARS.  Not only do they think you're spineless enough to keep giving them money, but they think you're gullible enough to pretend that this wholly unnecessary change of course is a new beginning, rather than the final period at the end of this tired project's ultimate sentence.