2. Gunplay - from what I can see your character is almost immortal and can take multiple shots from enemies with basically no penalty. Combat is often stand still and shoot at anything that moves. Allowing time stop with any weapon at any situation only makes it worse.
3. Very little CC - you don't even get to choose responses in dialogues. At best you can kill or spare some random characters. This is a bit more complex "choose your own story" kind of game.
1. Combat is definitely a little tougher; if you get caught out in the open you'll die pretty quick, but hiding behind a small tree or rock does make you more or less invincible. I got into a fight with some bandits around a stagecoach who split up and flanked me, but that could merely be a pathfinding quirk. Some enemies seem to stay back and take potshots, others will charge you. You have two health bars, when the first one is gone you are in a crippled state and further damage can knock you down, off your horse, etc. I got ambushed and they kept shooting me off my horse which made escape impossible. If you are popped out of cover, the game forces you down when the enemies shoot at you, effectively giving them suppressing fire. Health regen is very slow so it's useless in combat, but there are 'health tonics' you can chug easily. Still a fairly popamole game, but not as bad as the first RDR.
2. There are dialogue choices and they give a few options but its nothing major. e.g. in one story mission you have to convince a guy to leave a cult, you can pick the right dialogue to do it peacefully or get into a gunfight with them. Then no matter what you do you get into a scripted chase sequence where the guy always outpaces you no matter what until you are separated by a train, and then he tries to kill himself (which serves as the game's quickdraw duel tutorial, of all things.)
3. Calling it an interactive movie is very strange, I played it for several hours last night and never watched a cutscene. I hunted several animals, found a bunch of treasure, robbed a stage coach, upgraded the camp, tamed a rare horse, and completed several challenges. This was all standard open-world gameplay, not a linear MGS cutscene or CoD corridor-shooter.
4. There is a lot of talking on horseback, I called the first game "Red Dead Talking On The Way To Places." Truthfully I wished there was more fast travel, the game is huge and you spend a lot of time riding around. But the game does try to keep things interesting with random encounters, plus the conversations are meant to fill the gap, and there are often several dialogue options about things to discuss.
Besides, fast travel is often disparaged on this board as codexers claim the player *should* be forced to schlep all over the map themselves.
The big issue with the game right now is the bounty and wanted system, you can get a bounty for trivial reasons and it effectively locks you out of a region until you pay it off or leave and wait a long time, as full posses of hunters will attack you almost non-stop. it makes crime very hard to pull off as no one has figured out a reliable way to use hoods or disguises yet. I guess that's the point, they want you to feel like an outlaw who is on the run all the time, but it seems a bit excessive.
Nobody is trying to act like a 21st century good guy and nobody preaches 21st century morals.
Not true, sadly, vide the timestamped moment below.
There are a few more moments like this further in the game. The story declines in the last chapters when the main heroes side with "muh oppressed indians" and massacre a few hundred of US army soldiers because they're "savages". All villains, sellouts and antagonists in the game are white men, the writers and designers doing everything to paint them as evil, by their behavior and even physical appearance - merciless capitalist Cornwall, ruthless agent Milton, deceptive Italian mafioso, two Southern families (with everyone repeating thousands of times how retarded and inbred they are, ad nauseam), Spanish plantation owner oppressing muh black slaves - and an Army colonel, who of course is stupid, undisciplined, drunk, wants to fight for the sake of it and goes against a noble captain who helps and cares for the natives. It's all extremely cringy cliches, but can be overlooked or ignored because the whole story is generally good and engaging. Main characters are likeable too, especially due to amazingly good voice acting.
That is clearly meant to feed into the story of RDR1, so it's prequel baggage. Also, dude, spoilers.