Why is that?

Evverybody always praises the story, characters and animation (which i'll get to later), but often understate how messy the core gameplay is. First, there's movement. The game defaults to the spam x to sprint, which is probably one of the worst designed ideas in a video game, ever. Using these controls are a great way to jam the button on your controller, and also discourages long gaming session becuase mashing the button over and over makes the thumb hurt. In the game, spamming x means that you can't look arpund while sprinting, which means that, if you want to see where your going, the camera must lock behind your character at all times. But you don't always need to look straight ahead, especially in 3rd person where you can see a lot more, so, in gunfights, you're constantly jamming the camera to what you actially want to see while sprinting, when at the same time the camera moves back behind your character. There is the option to switch to toggling the joystick like literally every other shooter game (unless you're on horseback), but it's still not much better. Sprinting is imprecise and unwieldly, which makes sense; you get bonus movement speed at the cost of firing your weapon and handling. However, walking in red dead is extremely slow, so you can't really use it in combat unless there's like 2 guys shooting at you. The ideal way to move in combat is to use the auto-cover mechanic, which is pretty neat, but the level design doesn't play off of it at all, so it gets stale really quickly. The movment is frustrating, but the god-awful map design makes it 100 times worse. It's unnecessarily huge, with vast swaths of nothing. Even the spots where some missions take place are in the middle of nowhere that you'd never even think to return to later. Also, the roads are curvy and windy, which adds unnecessary length between places. It also encourages the player to get off the road and seek a straight-line path to their destination, but controlling the horse in the wilderness is a nightmare. The trees and bushes everywhere for you to get stuck on and bump into; it's impossible to sprint through all of it, and you'll never get anywhere at a slow trot. Also, there's random cliffs for you to fall off of with no way to cross them, so they might as well be walls. At the end of the day, it's faster to take the road, but the road is clearly inefficient. And, the map is beige and lighter beige for the roads, which doesn't tell you anything about rough terrain and possibly crossable, flat terrain. Fast travel is an option, but only between towns and only when you're at a town with a carriage. At the sane time, most of the missions start outside of town thrn you ride with the npc in, if it's even in a town, so you're forced to leave anyway. Which brings up another point: riding the horse is a large part of regular missions in addition to all the riding you do in exploration. Riding the horse is not fun; it's mindless spamming, so why does it consist of the majority of the gameplay? Also, there's a hunger and stanina meter for no reason. Red dead is not a survival game. Thankfulky, the game gives you plenty of money to afford food to keep up those meters, but there's an inventory limit on it, so you're constantly running out of it anyway, which forces you to interrupt whatever you're doing to go to town to get food, which forces you to ride back to wherever you were, which depletes your stamina bar because you have to sprint everywhere to get anywhere timely because the map sucks and the movement sucks. It's just such a mess. And that's only the movement! The combat is also riddled with issues. There's way too many guns. Most guns are straight up better versions of guns you already have. And of those guns, there's not much distinction between them. There only reticle in the game is a white dot, which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about weapon vareity. Also, even with a host of very similar weapons, you're forced to hit almost every enemy with a crit to kill them because enemies have way too much health. Between that and the terrible movement, there's only one way to approach red dead, which is to sit in the back and snipe every enemy. And that's how nearly all the missions end up playing out. The ganeplay really frustrated me, so i didn't pay all that much attention to the story. It was alright, i guess, very repetitive. I will say that there were too many characters. In the cano alone, there's like 20 characters, but only 7 of them really matter, the rest are just background noise. And villains are disposed of so weakly and easily with barely any build up, except for the pinkertons.