Awesome Music: The score, composed by Christopher Lennertz, is an amazing blend of western motifs with modern orchestral scoring and has some downright wonderful pieces.
Catharsis Factor: There's plenty of it when you finally take out Reed, after being harassed by both Hollister and Magruder's men, especially given what a reprehensible Slimeball the aforementioned jack preacher is.
Major Thomas "Tom" Magruder is a railroad tycoon who has taken large parts of the Western United States from the First Nations and Government, feverishly seeking a legendary lost city of gold called Quivira, murdering and torturing anyone who gets in his way. Years prior to the game, as a Confederate Major, Magruder came to a small homestead out in the plains belonging to Campbell, a benevolent doctor—and Colton "Cole" White's real father—who helped the Apaches. When the chief tells Magruder—with Campbell translating—that his lust for his treasure will destroy him, Magruder gets angry. He shoots the chief, decapitates Campbell, and even shoots one of his men for protesting his actions. In the present, Magruder hires soldiers and henchmen to wipe out anyone who gets in his way. When his henchman Reverend Reed fails to find a cross in the steamboat massacre at the beginning of the game, Magruder cuts his ear off as punishment. In addition to taking their lands, Magruder also takes to taking the Apaches as slaves and using them as target practice for his soldiers. When Colton confronts him for his crimes, Magruder dismisses the innocents he massacred as nothing. Ruthless and remorseless, Magruder is a man singularly seeking to satisfy his greed, no matter who he has to destroy.
"Reverend" Josiah Reed initiates a massacre at the game's beginning on a steamboat that takes the life of Colton White's adoptive father Ned. When a prostitute named Sadie refuses to give Reed answers, he throws a tomahawk into her head and has the entire crew massacred. Reed is revealed to be an unhinged lunatic, every bit as bad as his violent boss. When he captures a prostitute named Jenny, Reed pointlessly slits her throat to let her die in front of Colton.
Sergeant Hollister is Magruder's top military man and enforcer of his operations. A racist, renegade Confederate, Hollister leads a barbaric militia to war against and persecute the Blackfoot people, having a hand in the steamboat massacre. He takes numerous Blackfoots prisoner in his war camp, having them enslaved, tortured, and even murdered, with flayed and burned bodies found in his camp. Taking Cole and his friend Soapy captive, he contemplates stringing their guts around the camp for trespassing, sarcastically acting like a gracious host. When he's overthrown, and mortally wounded in a fight with Cole, Hollister rigs himself up with dynamite in a last-ditch effort to kill him.
Goddamned Bats: Magruder's militia are easy enough to take down on their own, but what makes them so infuriating and difficult to deal with is that they are usually in groups and have a ridiculously fast rate of fire.
Sergeant Hollister. He's left more than a few unseasoned players frustrated and dead in their tracks due to the sheer power he wields with Ned's rifle.
The first stage of the final boss fight with Magruder can be incredibly annoying, especially on higher difficulties. Magruder wears a suit of armor that makes him immune to your bullets, so instead you have to use dynamite to get the geysers around the arena to spew fire on him. Considering Magruder has a powerful shotgun and the dynamite he throws might open a geyser on you, he might shred your health a few times if you're not careful. Thankfully the second stage is much easier, as you only need to shoot the bundles of dynamite that he throws while they are in mid-air.
Jenny is given a lot of focus early on, with hints at her being the Love Interest to Cole and even proving herself to be a bit of an Action Girl on the way to Empire City. Unfortunately, she is killed by Reed a little less than halfway through the main story.
Hoodoo Brown and his two henchmen Webb and Rudabaugh. When Cole meets him, Hoodoo pretends to be interested in helping Cole in his mission to get revenge on Reed, even deputizing Cole and sending him out on patrol with his two other deputies Webb and Rudabaugh. However, on their first and only patrol with Cole, Webb and Rudabaugh immediately kill two innocent farmers and reveal that Hoodoo was playing Cole the whole time. These reveals would have a lot more weight if they didn't happen in the same mission Webb and Rudabaugh were introduced a single mission after Hoodoo was introduced. Webb and Rudabaugh get it particularly bad, since you kill them in a boss fight immediately after the reveal that they are evil, meaning their entire screentime is a single mission. Despite the fact that Clay uses Cole's killing of Webb and Rudabaugh to get the other resistance fighters to trust Cole, we never learn anything about them.
Sergeant Hollister and the Renegades. The idea of an entire fort of U.S. Army soldiers having gone not only rogue, but totally insane รก la Apocalypse Now, seems like an interesting concept to explore, except it's never explained why they're like that, or why they would work for Reverend Reed, who is in turn working for a former Confederate officer (Thomas Magruder). Indeed, if it weren't for their association with Reed, they would just seem like a mere Wacky Wayside Tribe. And we don't know much about Hollister himself, apart from the fact that he led the attack on the steamboat at the beginning of the game (even though we don't actually see him do this) and he's not even introduced until much later in the game, only to be killed off two missions later. If anything, it's as though he was only introduced so that the game could have a boss battle in which Cole re-obtains Ned's rifle.
