- Release Date: 31st March 2022
- Developer: WolfEye Studios
- Publisher: Devolver Digital
- Platform Played: Xbox Series S
- Platforms Available: PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series
This game has a lot of ambition, a lot of great ideas. It’s set in the wild west, but with supernatural creatures running amok. It promises the “immersive sim” experience where you can approach situations in any way you desire and the game won’t stop you, this includes killing vital NPCs. The story is spread across five characters with a decent amount of side quests, with abilities to unlock and weapons and equipment you can upgrade. Weird West has a lot of potential.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t manage to live up to its potential. It seems the simple solution to being able to kill any NPC is that looting them will get you what you want. Some moments will also lock you into conversations before you can fight, which prevents you from doing it in your own way if you just want to shoot someone. Dialogue options are very limited, especially considering that there’s no voice acting (other than a narrator).
The main “do it your own way” seems to be more with how you deal with each area – each one being a small self-contained square You can be stealthy, go in all guns blazing or a bit of both. The stealth mechanics feel fairly awkward, and the game encourages you to use quicksave to help get your dresigned outcome – although one big issue is that enemy locations are sometimes not saved, so you can reload and have no option but to fight everyone.The combat itself is like a twin stick shooter, but with the rate the guns fire and the controls, it’s very difficult to be accurate. A lock on system instead would have been much better. Instead, I focused on melee because using guns was so unintuitive.
The biggest issues with Weird West, however, are the bugs. Your companions – which can either be random goons or previous characters you’ve played – will often just stop moving, sometimes they can just vanish from the game completely. Things will count as crimes for no reason. I had one side mission where you have to let someone out of jail. I paid their fine, and when the sheriff opened the cell, the whole town opened fire on me. When I reloaded, I couldn’t even talk to the sheriff anymore. I’ve encountered other quests with no way to progress and some I couldn’t even trigger. In one of the chapters, people talk about a character going missing, but there’s no way to investigate. At the end of the chapter, it berates you for not investigating it.
The fourth chapter feels the most broken. There’s two routes through it, and the one I took ended up feeling like I wasn’t supposed to do it (even though that, logically, it seems the “correct” method). The game also bigs up the connection between all five characters and the end is just…underwhelming. One of the characters even comments on this – lampshading that the game’s big mystery just fizzles out does not make it any better.
It’s a shame, because Weird West really did have a lot of ambition, but it really feels like it needed another few years of development.
Poor
