Red Dead's Undead Nightmare Update is Anything but That

There was a big update to Red Dead Online not long ago, after years of being ignored. You might think that alone would be reason to celebrate. The new missions, called Strange Tales of the West, are meant to get people interested in Rockstar's long-abandoned online frontier again. But if you've read that this is like a spiritual follow-up to Undead Nightmare, you might want to lower your hopes.

To be clear, this is not Undead Nightmare 2. Not even close.

People who go into the new Tales of the Plague mission expecting the usual zombie chaos will be shocked. Instead of hordes of lunging, flesh-hungry zombies, you'll find slow NPCs with tomahawks. There's no real horror vibe, no tension, and nothing that you can't guess. The way they act is more like tired thieves than infected ghouls. They don't swarm or lunge. To be honest, the Undead Nightmare mod still gives you a better experience than this official content.

It's clear why Rockstar or the community would want to use the name "Undead Nightmare" to promote the update—it makes people feel nostalgic and gets people to click on it. But at best, calling it that is giving it away. Strange Tales of the West is what Rockstar called it, and that's how it should be known.

If you can get past the false advertising, let's say. The next problem hits you like a priest with a bow: the level of difficulty. Not only is this update hard, it's incredibly punishing. It will feel like you need to be a prestige 10 warlord with a "hacked" account to have a chance.

The enemies seem to be as accurate as aimbots and can kill you while you're hiding or in the middle of a sprint. There are infected NPCs whose aim is better than yours from Black Ops 1. It's hard to understand and frustrating. Things that should be scary adventures turn into slogs where just making it through feels more like a miracle than a skill check.

Good luck if you're playing by yourself. After a few failed attempts, most of your teammates will leave, leaving you to fight powerful enemies by yourself, which is almost certain to fail.

You have to fight robots in one mission called "Strange Tales of Modern Science." That sounds like fun. Not when these robots hit people over 80 times in the head and don't even move. They just stand there like metal sponges that can soak up bullets and shrug off whole clips. It seems like the ones with bows and arrows are even worse, making every fight a nightmare of frustration and too much violence.

It sounds like "a bunch of modders pissing around in a lobby," which is a good way to put it. On paper, the idea of robots, zombies, and cultists in the wild west sounds cool, but when it comes to playing, it's a complete mess with wildly unbalanced rules.

You are dropped in the middle of nowhere with little health and no weapons in one of the more experimental missions. You are being held captive by a cult and need to sneak through a huge search area to find a researcher who has gone missing. It turns out that stealth is the only way to play Red Dead Redemption 2, which wasn't really its strong point to begin with. It's also not very good. The enemy AI acts in unpredictable ways, and detection seems more random than proactive.

Also, do your best to find the researcher. You might as well be looking for hay in a pile of needles, because the search area is so vast and the target is so well-hidden.

When you only have a dull knife and no patience, it stops feeling like a scary western and starts to feel more like a stealth torture simulator. Plus, once you finish a mission, you have to wait a certain amount of time before you can start the next one. It may be Rockstar's way of keeping your blood pressure in check, but it slows down the game and makes it less fun to play. If you're one of the few people who are actually interested in what's being shown, you'll have to wait because breaks are a fun thing.

If you're hoping for something like Undead Nightmare, you will be let down. That's not Strange Tales of the West. There is something much stranger and more annoying going on. It's great that Rockstar is doing something with Red Dead Online, but it might not have been the best idea to bring players back and then put them through missions that are too tuned, buggy, and hard to understand.

Still, it's... something for die-hard fans who have been dying for content. A pulse, maybe. But it's a whole different story if that pulse is worth following.

For sure, Rockstar will need more than zombies that walk like old men, robots with endless health bars, and priests with aim that could win World War III if they want Red Dead Online to really come back.