BIGTIMEMASTER 4

This review contains spoilers , click expand to view . Here's a brief description of one mission.



Your mission is to rob a train. First step is to steal a wagon with an oil barrel on back, which you are going to put on the railway and light on fire so the train will see it from far away and come to a stop. Then you can rob it.



So you look at your mini map and it tells you where to go to steal the wagon. You ride your horse there. This takes 5 minutes. Real world time. Just riding a horse. Along a road you have gone up and down probably 20 times already doing various errands.



The wagon is in an oil field where the workers shoot on sight. Because sometimes the game is realistic to a fault, and then suddenly it's not. You jump the fence, hop on the wagon, get shot a few times -- doesn't matter, you have at least 50 different healing items that restore full health pretty much at all times -- you repeatedly mash X to gallop away to safety. You ride for another 5 minutes to drop off the wagon where it's supposed to go. That was easy, though it did take me three times because once you get close to the wagon area, if you move away too far the mission fails. So my initial idea was to scope the place out, then take cover on some high ground, pick dudes off, lose them in the woods when they come after me, and then drop back into the oil field after drawing most of them out. But nope. So much for open world freedom.



You ride another 5 minutes back to home base to tell home boy you done your job, and he says "cool man." Then you have to complete another mission before you can continue. So you take a kid that talks like the worlds most generic child fishing, and he say's it's boring, and I wholeheartedly agree. Besides the boring nature of the game mechanic, what does fishing do for you? It gives you more health. I already have more health items than I can carry. It's not worth enough to sell, and I don't need money either. The only things to buy are clothing items, everything else the game gives you anyway...



So you do that stupid mission which, start to finish, will chew up twenty minutes in which you are basically doing nothing. Now, back to the train robbery. So you ride back to where you stashed the wagon -- 5 minutes. Then you watch a cutscene, then you got to ride with the gang to the ambush site. This is another 5 minute jaunt, but this time you got the crew trying their durndest to tell side-splitting funnies, but it's typical game dialogue that feels disjointed and unnatural -- like the voice actors recorded at separate places and times. And the dialogue can be ignored, because it's just banter -- it doesn't build characters or move story, it's just non-sense "tough-guy" talk, because everybody knows all tough-guy train robbers do is talk trash to each other constantly, and especially before pulling off a big heist.



Alright, so now, finally, it's train robbin' time. You're ready to get all sweaty palmed and squinty eyed, because you're here to do what you came to do. You've worked almost an hour doing monotonous crap to get to this point. The big dramatic train robbery! Now's the time when you don't mind that big, drawn out cutscene with the tense chord and the beady eyes twitching and the trees drawing long shadows as the train blares it's horn with it's headlight coming round the corner... hell yeah, you can feeeeel it coming...



But wait.. something isn't right. Remember the oil wagon you were going to set on fire? Well, they just put it on the tracks, and hero character stands on top of it with his rifle. What? That wasn't the plan. And the corner the train is coming around clearly isn't far enough away to give the train time to stop... Why did I steal this wagon again?



The other gangsters hide behind the trees, and then real sudden like a generic action track starts up, you get a real fast sweeping shot of the gang in the trees, then the train comes and see's the wagon all of a sudden and just stops. No squeeling brakes, no smoke plumes, no dramatics -- nothing. Then there is a bunch of yelling, and even though you are in charge of this heist somebody is hollering "hey arthur, come do this! Come do that!" So you try to hurry over, but the game has locked running for right now, so you have to walk slowly over to the guys shouting to hurry.



You follow behind your bro who is holding a goodie bag and demanding people to point money inside. Every third person says "no" and you press B when it tells you to punch them in the face. You can't do that or anything else until you are prompted to do so. So you do that for about a minute then the game tells you to go help somebody else. This time bad guys jump into the scene, you hold the trigger which auto-aims onto anybody on the screen, and you pull the other trigger to shoot them. You do that for ten minutes, then you go on another 10 minute horse ride. Mission over. What do you get for all of that? Money that you don't need.



I cannot recall a more poorly designed AAA game than this. … Expand