voice acting existing, and being fairly good is bizarre. but it’s so much polish on what is inevitably a shallow and not very creative experience. the only format is ‘go here, kill guy’ occasionally spiced up with opportunities for speech-check nonviolence. then its punctuated with almost absurdist levels of edginess, yeah okay so there’s room for 100 big bad serial killers/rapists in this area with an average town population of 20. with two occupying armies actively running around.

II was kinda fun with a more open presentation of targets, having posters spread out made you travel to different areas get the quests, which half solved the back-and-fourth from the bounty office format of #I. but you still had to return to the office to collect money. there was a moment i thought II might get me scared a little, there was a cliche killer clown child murderer and i have mild coulrophobia so that most lazy spooky clowns freak me out. then i heard the line delivery of dime-store Cicero from Skyrim, cRazY rAnDoM writing, and just offputting ‘crazy sad clown made that way by sad (edgy) circumstances’ backstory you get with the nonlethal takedown. i swear these quests bend over backwards to give the child-murderers the sympathetic backstories then ruthlessly gun down the most normal criminals. i doubt its to be like pro child murder just “subvert” your expectations

#III is the one that crosses into simply bad, hamfisted “consequences of your actions” hooey as the main theme, a hideous new worldspace that’s a pain to navigate and i guess has multiple characters/side quests? i wouldn’t even know because the gameplay loop went back to ‘go to bounty office’ ‘go kill guy’ ‘go to bounty office’, you can’t see distant locations to go explore cause they’re all covered in trees so when the hell was i going to run into side characters and do stuff for them? the only place in the town the quest requires you to go to at any point, twice in fact, is the saloon. at the end there’s this broken cutscene with the shocking revelation of who the main villain was (dude you met earlier) and a very stilted railroad where he kills all your friends you never met from town & buries you alive. then classic Kill Bill third act you get out mow down betrayers etc. but the difficulty spike got unreasonable with the final fight, this regular ass man not even wearing armor has more health than the legendary deathclaw and magically hits just as hard with a pissant .357. a lot of the dialogue with this Marko character talks about how pointless and shallow your accomplishments are, and you even have the option to end the quest & leave without exacting revenge, there’s very little ceremony to the getting revenge and this is the germ of a clever idea. but making the gameplay clash so hard with that, not even letting you take his head off at range-a perfect anticlimax-it has to be a Duel where he can speech at you how anticlimatic this is followed by a fight better cheated through. guess what it wouldn’t be very fun to see Clint Eastwood cooly standoff and talk to the Bad Guy then the fight involves both of them getting shot 30 times instead of the faster draw prevailing