If you don't mind a few minor glitches and control problems bug you, you'll have plenty of fun with Red Dead Redemption.
Story wise, the game may be a little cliché (badass on a mission, family in distress, etc.) but it's told in an extremely compelling way. The characters are well-rounded and imaginative, there's great humor moments included (MI NOMBRE ES JOHN MARSTON-cracks me up every time), and Rockstar does a really good job setting the mood and making you sympathize with the characters. A great story from beginning to depressing end. (The ending would have made me shed a single tear…if the internet hadn't spoiled it for me. Damn you internet! *shakes fist* DAMN YOU!)
Gameplay wise, you have a lot of what you'd expect from a Grand Theft Auto game. A massive open world, mini games, challenges, and side missions along the way, etc. The core gameplay is also third-person cover based shooting. The weapons are varied; single shot rifles, to shotguns, to pistols, to thrown weapons, to the good old lasso. Let me tell you from personal experience that kneecapping a runaway straggler, hogtying them and dropping them on train tracks and watching them rise into a cloud of blood is to coin a phrase, "facking oresome", and seldom gets old.
It's all very functional (you shoot the guns and bad people go away), but the cover some times doesn't seem to conceal you worth a damn. One out of every ten gunfights it seems you get shot from behind cover. And that's when the simple act of taking cover doesn't give you so much delight that you random leap three-hundred feet into the air with glee…and then fall to your death. (Happened twice to me). You also might have a hard time making it through a doorway once in a while or find something glitched with the geometry but that isn't major enough to make you hate the experience, just some minor hiccups along the way. Dead eye, horseback riding, everything works rather nicely 99% of the time.
Mini-games get frustrating. Blackjack is always rigged so I never bothered except for an outfit requirement, but being a poker player in real life I had to play it a little bit in game. And the result is that the AI is rather poor…and when you learn how to cheat the game…well you just earn more money. The worst is horseshoes. Horseshoes has an achievement tied to it for getting a 'ringer', having a horseshoe hit the post. But when I bet the maximum amount what seemed nearly impossible for me became easy for the AI I was playing against. After scoring his third consecutive ringer I promptly ended the game and shot him repeatedly in the face. Overall, the side bits of the game are plentiful enough to keep the game interesting when you've beaten the story and gotten tired of shooting cougars.
This game is very immersive, which is probably part of my recommendation reasoning. My friend on two separate occasions saw something outside and thought it was a bear or a horse from the game. (Yes, before you ask, he does smoke, but it still makes you wonder.)
The immersion is thanks in no small part to the graphics. I don't usually use graphics as a point in a game's favor but RDR's landscapes and skybox are quite spellbinding. Riding around south Mexico at night, admiring the brilliant mesas and moonlight highlighting the stars in the sky gives you a sense of joy and wonder…shortly before you are raped by a cougar. I mean, I even cited this in a school report (research paper on games as art) along side Portal thanks to graphics and story, so it HAS to be good. (the paper is available on my website here: http://flame-sama.webs.com/bored.htm It's entitled 'Videogames: Form Of Art Or Mindless Indulgence?'.
And finally, the multiplayer is fun. IF you stick to the playlists, if you want to go achievement hunting in a public free roam game prepare to have dickholes shooting you and spawn camping you for sport. And not even for any gain! You only get one EXP for a player character kill so they do it just for the sake of being pricks. Other wise the multiplayer (and singleplayer) achievements are hard without being completely impossible and all relatively fun to get; with possible exception of the achievement for earning a level 50 in multiplayer. I need to add multiplayer rank achievements to a list of game developer deadly sins… Sure they're cool and all, but grinding the same Gang Hideout mission a hundred times to rank up sure damn near ruined the entire game experience for me.
If you appreciate a good story with great characters and an expansive, imaginative world to run around and kill things in, you can do a hell of a lot worse that Red Dead Redemption. Not flawless but the high points I highlight above compensate for anything you could complain about. Nine out of ten, at the VERY least rent this game and have fun.