Red Dead Redemption – That Little Mexican Carriage

One of the most frustrating elements of Red Dead Redemption are those missions that take the horse away from the player in order to ask him to drive around using the carriage, meaning that players will be attacked on the road and that they will have to take out a respectable number of enemies while the vehicle lurches ahead at a snail's pace. These missions are not too tough to complete but they are often lengthy and repetitive, showing how Rockstar can create pacing problems in the middle of their experience.

The worse of them takes place in Mexico, south of the border and involves one carriage, one little lady that is unable to defend herself and only points the way through the world and one timer that the player needs to beat in order to complete the mission. Fighting and killing all the enemies the gamer meets of the road is not an option because of the time limit and Rockstar really manages to install a sense of urgency on the gamer. The problem is that urgency is usually expressed through shortcuts and they lead to the carriage toppling over. I must have restarted the mission about ten times until I realized that the developers must have timed the mission to perfection, with the time sufficient to use the roads that guarantee reaching the destination in one piece.

The Mexican chapter in its entirety is a bit too long and it's never clear why Marston should care about what's happening around him and why he isn't more direct in following his objective. Fortunately Rockstar builds a much more engaging and complex third chapter after Mexico so even though it starts to feel like a drag get through that section of the game in order to see how the entire story wraps up and how the game comes full circle.