A big collection of pretty plain mini-games
Great graphics - check
Famous developer with lots of fanboys - check
Gameplay - uhm, here it becomes a bit messy...
To better illustrate how the game works, let me just describe a typical mission you can undertake. By looking at a Wanted poster you can accept to track down the individual for a bounty.
So off you go, riding long distance to the target which is dynamically updated on your map by the wild west GPS system so you always know the exact location of your badguy.
After about five minutes of riding, you will find your target among a few other badguys. Your target will always try to run away, while the other guys will always try to kill you.
Here it becomes a bit messy. Sometimes your target jumps on a horse, sometimes he just runs away. If he jumps on a horse your mission suddenly becomes ten times harder, and you have to chase him forever as he will ride faster than you most likely (at least in the start before you get a great horse).
So, while you are busy killing the guys attacking you and he run off by horse, once the distance between you and him gets past a certain threshold, the mission is canceled. No matter if you have ran him into a dead end or what. Pretty annoying when you know you would get him sooner or later, a stupid artificial limitation in something advertised like a sandbox game.
Once you have managed to capture the badguy by lasso or killing him, there will be a few badguys spawning in from thin air trying to kill you. When you kill them, a new bunch of bad guys are teleported in, and so on until you get your target into a town where you can collect your bounty.
It seems so forced to teleport in badguys all the time to create more drama, it becomes very annoying and spoils the sense of realism in my opinion.
On this trip I also often got attacked by wildllife like wolves while fending off gunmen, making it almost impossible to succeed. So, will your badguy jump on a horse? Will you encounter dangerous wildlife? A lot of the key to success is simply plain luck on this mission.
Throw in the fact that the game is horrible as a FPS, then it becomes really frustrating. When you get chased by teleporting cowboys on horse, it is almost impossible to shoot them accurately. Just turning your aim from front to back takes so much time you will be dead before the camera finishes rotating.
This is just one example of mini-games, there are also others, like some lobotomized version of poker, throwing horse shoes and various others. None of which are much fun.
So, what is left is to follow the main storyline. Herd cows, hunt animals and kill badguys. Plus you will encounter many side missions on your random travels around the plains. Some are fun, some are not.
I miss an RPG aspect here, allowing you to improve your abilities over time. There are a few elements like that, for example you can buy clothes giving you some bonuses or a better gun or horse, but nothing that really drives you forward for your next rewards.
All in all, this is a big collection of mini-games. Some work, others don't. You can have some fun with the game, but its not the big Messiah of gaming like it has been painted by its fans so far.