This game is very absorbing, and is worth every penny.
Let me make this clear; I like this game. Hell, I love this game. The story of John Marston is incredibly well written, and I actually felt an attachment to the characters which kept me playing for hours. The gameplay is also great, being able to lasso people and drag them through a cactus patch is just the kind of psychotic fun I'd expect from Rockstar, but it's not like it's a faultless game.
For example, one of the things they added to the formula that just gets in the way is the bounty system. The fact that killing people in GTA went largely unpunished if you got away, when you do that in RDR, then a bounty gets put on your head, and, while that is historically accurate, it makes normal bystanders attack you, and you have to either run away or kill them raising your bounty further. It gets in the way of the sandbox madness I love. Nit-picking is pointless though, and I highly recommend this game with all of it's faults, for it's completely worth it.
However, there is a greater evil afoot, I'm talking about an expierience so bad, that I'd rather castrate myself with a fork, than take another crack at this. I refer to the RDR Undead Nightmare DLC for this game.
It's supposed to take place near the end of Red Dead Redemption, John Marston's family gets zombified, and John must try to find a cure in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Zombies aren't as much overused as they are beaten into dirt with a shovel made of poo, but this DLC seems to be aware of this, and seems to be going about things with a sence of self-parody. That's fine, but the story isn't the main problem, but the gameplay is where this DLC eats frozen turds.
It works simularly to RDR, but you know how if you were low on ammo, you could loot bodies to knick some more, well, zombies rarely carries ammo for guns, and there are no such thing as a store in this DLC, so it makes you rely heavily on the torch, which is a melee weapon that is about as effectual against a zombie as a rolled up newspaper, and there is no such thing as just one zombie. Pecking away at the health of one of an enumerable hoard limping towards you with a torch is not my idea of fun.
I also have some problems with the story, in that it's supposed to connect to the original game. Read Dead Redemption was a great story, and it didn't need supernatural bents, but then this DLC decides to put in a mass confusion of supernatural elements that it would take a signifigant amount of PCP to seem rational. This DLC only undermines the original story of RDR, so to sum up. Red dead Redemption is a great game, but the DLC Undead Nightmare is crap.