Weird West: Definitive Edition

Starts off great, but quickly gets boring after that. Honestly expected a lot more from Colantonio after the masterpiece that was Prey.

I can't believe people made such a big deal out of the multiple protagonist mechanic. To me it worked really well, it even reminded me of the old Call of Duty games where you play multiple soldiers all working towards the same goal. This game really is the best of Prey and Dishonored, put in the blender, and mixed with old school isometric Fallout. What a perfect little game and I can't wait to play what's next from WolfEye games. 10/10

Weird West Definitive Edition: Дивна спроба з'єднати незрозуміле Гра балансує між класичним вестерном, RPG та темним фентезі, створюючи унікальний світ, де mythology американського фронтиру переплітається з містикою та жахами. Потужні сторони • Дизайн — класичний вестерн-антураж з депресивним настроєм • П'ять історій з власними сюжетними лініями • Можливість вбивати/не вбивати ключових персонажів з наслідками (принаймні так запевняла гра) Мінуси, яких не уникнути 1. Геймплей: Постійний екшен, який геть не личить грі. Не встигаєш скористатися середовищем, вороги одразу, або через дейякий момент йдуть у лобову атаку. Більше б підійшов пошаговий режим. 2. Персонажі: Поза основними героями — повний провал. Взаємодія з ними мінімальна і нецікава. 3. Інтерфейс: Наче повернення в доісторичний Fallout. Незручно передавати речі через напарника, та оснащувати його. 4. Напарники: Найтупіші союзники, які навіть не натякають на тактику. Просто м'ясо, що йде уперед, і тільки вперед. 5. Графіка: Яскраво-токсичний комікс, який викликає нудьгу замість захоплення. Вердикт: Гра на вкусовщину. Якщо взагалі немає у що пограти і подобається вестерн — можна спробувати. Інакше — краще пройти повз.

I really wanted to like this game. It starts our great, then you get to the Pigman journey, which is aweful. The game essentially forces you into a style of play for each journey, and if you ignore that you are massively punished. Basically, the game does everything it can to strip the fun out of what should have been an excellent experience. Not to mention the balance is out of whack and half the characters are unlikable. There is an illusion of choice, but it is wafer thin. Such a shame.

Great game, good narrative, there's some nice great mechanics in it, if you like immersive sims you'll gonna have a great time. I do have some gripes tho. I really wish the characters got developed more, even the main ones don't really get developed much. You have stories of 5 diffrent protagonists which you play as, their stories are ???somewhat??? connected narratively together but it doesn't really matter much until the end. The mechanics really invite you to recruit your past playable characters as your companions but there's not really much done with it...? I wish there were some interactions, I wish they commented on story events and as mysteries unraveled, I wish they did ANYTHING except only helping you kill enemies. I get if that was the case for just the NPCs you can recruit normally but the main characters really should do more stuff. In the last POV campaign it seems like you're gonna do more with past mcs but not really and it's kinda disappointing unfortunately. The ending itself is really good and rewarding tho. Weird West has wonderful music but... doesn't use it much...? Idk it's hard to explain there's some really good tracks in the soundtrack but they don't play nearly often enough to be really heard and appriciated, I think the banger tracks should play more often especially in story moments rather than playing ambience 90% of the time. The main plot of the game and mysteries are awesome. I was really looking forward to finding answers to my and characters questions and it's really great how past actions affect the future. Side quests aren't really that developed and are somewhat "fetchy", there are exceptions to this but not that many, the best is by far the one which spans over multiple mc POVs. One of my favourite elements of the game is how many options you always have to deal with situations. In combat you can do so many creative things using the enviornment to fight the enemies, sneak around, just go in guns blazing, do some story ♥♥♥♥♥ to resolve the situations or hell not even kill anyone through the whole game and that's just combat wise. There's basically always at least 3 diffrent ways you can do a story objective and often more, it's very rewarding to mess around and then realize "♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that worked??", absolute cinema ngl. It's also cool how often it has effects later down the line in the story. One of my favourite mechanics is the friends and vendettas. You will meet tons of people in the Weird West and depending on your choices, they will become friends for life coming in clutch and saving your ass or start vendettas against you and be your doom. It's a really cool mechanic and it's fun seeing an NPC you got accustomed to in the first POV, come into a gun fight in the third POV while you were almost dead and shooting off the boss's head with a shotgun (thanks Monte). The vendettas are also pretty intresting. The people you've hurt might come back to bite you, sometimes by making an ambush on you when you enter/ leave a location or in a random enoucnter while travelling (probably in other ways too, I haven't gotten many vendettas beacuse I was a pacyfist the whole game xD). Random encounters on the map are sorta neat. While travelling between locations you can get attacked by zombies, witches, bears, bounty hunters or so many other things, encounter some sp00ky ruins, find relics, meet merchants, old friends, fun npcs or just some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up shi. Cool mechanic albeit might get a bit tiring if you're clearing the whole map in the later POVs. Every mc has some of their own random encounters which is pretty cool too. Oh also the setting is really cool. Like this crazy wild west with magic, fantasy elements, native-merican folklore and so many other things is very intresting (I especially liked the elements inspired from the native american history). Overall a pretty good game, if you like Deus Ex, Dishonored, Prey or hell even Read Dead Redemption you're gonna like it. I do feel like the thing had a lot more potential tho. PS. Don't pick up the snowglobes in POV 3 and 4, they get bugged and disappear from your inventory or the storage you put em in, instead pick up all the snow globes in the last POV if you wanna get the achivement.

Janky trash. The AI is braindead which makes the game incredibly easy, so they make you restart item progression FIVE times in the game, which is incredibly annoying and tedious. The game is balanced very poorly and instead of fixing the balance, they just added artificial difficulty. Shotguns and arrows and melee are pointless with the way the game mechanics work. You can hire mercs, but their ai is even worse than enemy ai. They will just rush headfirst into fire and die. With pistols and rifles being the only weapons that matter, the progression system is also broken and close to pointless. I enjoyed the game well enough through the first "Journey" but when weapon progression was reset along with an artificial limitation on available items upon a new "journey" the game started to feel incredibly tedious and I dropped it soon after. The fun of the game is approaching each situation as you want, but this requires a full load-out. Resetting your load-out several times over the game's runtime was a disastrous decision, IMHO. It took six hours to beat the first part of the game and they want the seventh hour to feel as basic and limited as the first. Why? And then again and again and again? It is really bad game design from a pacing perspective. Starting a new "Journey" causes as much apprehension in me as starting a new video game. I have to play through an hour of boring trash to start having fun again. FIVE TIMES OVER. Incredibly anti-player and anti-fun.

[h1]The first rodeo[/h1] Weird West is one of those games I vaguely remembered for overall positive reception around the time of its initial release as “impressive RPG debut”. The only expectation I had for this title was a distinct setting – a western with supernatural touch. You can take my word for it, the developers were keenly aware of the game’s selling point and an atmospheric intro sequence neatly establishes just how weird the West may get. To give credit where it is due, this title does an excellent job at getting the player hooked in early. However, once the novelty effect wears off, the further you delve into the story, the more it starts to drag on. Impressive as it may be, Weird West also comes with a long list of caveats, all neatly packed into one mixed bag. Depending on what you value the most in games, the scales may easily tip either way. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697196218[/url] [b]Starts with a bang[/b] Literally. After witnessing a strange occult ritual, shift in perspective takes the player to a scene of a ranch assaulted by a gang of armed outlaws. A single shot wakes up the protagonist, who runs outside only to see her husband carried away by the masked goons, and her child dead on the spot. This is not a tale of sunshine and puppies. In a proper western fashion, the former bounty hunter digs up her trusty revolver and sets out into the world with a score to settle. Writing is definitely one of the stronger sides of Weird West and the opening sequence is almost too good, with how well it sets the tone and maturity of the story. Frankly, nothing afterwards was able to match this impact for me. Jane Bell is a character we are going to spend the most time with, as her storyline gradually introduces the many mechanics of the game, including one both intriguing and polarising in equal measure – Weird West lets on quite early it is a story of multiple protagonists. For a narrative-driven game this sounds like both daring and excellent idea with a lot of potential. Shifts in perspective allow the player to witness Weird West from multiple angles, while also creating space for the choices made during the previous chapter to shape the world. At least on paper, as when it comes to execution, it is mixed much like everything else. To avoid spoilers, I cannot delve into specific examples, however for how much the game is advertising its freedom, the key story choices generally had less gravity to them than I would expect. Furthermore, most of dilemmas in the game leave the player with two-dimensional “good or bad” pick, while some story dialogues simply play out as exposition dumps, leaving the player with no means to shape the conversation in a meaningful way. Enough said, that later chapters get progressively shorter, as once you become aware of Weird West’s limitations, it starts to feel like you are a passenger, watching the story play out as you drive by, rather than its active participant. [b]Guns, explosives, and elemental tornado[/b] Fitting to the name of the game, the combat of Weird West is just that. For the record, being a pacifist is not an option in this title, besides you are not a bounty hunter out for blood to keep your iron holstered. That said, in many combat scenarios you have the choice whether to go in quiet or loud. Let’s start sneaky, as while it is a perfectly valid approach, there is less nuance to it. Assuming you catch your adversaries unaware, you are able to get behind a foe and strangle them unconscious. In order to make the stealth valid, the enemies take some time to “discover” the player or any bodies left out in the open. Moreover, any bushes you can fit into will make you impossible to discover, even if a guard steps on your toes. On the downside, any noise (especially gunfire) will kick up the hornets’ nest, and every camp has a group of enemies staying closeby, making fully quiet clean-up particularly challenging. Then again, stealth mechanics also reveal that enemy AI is a tad silly, as it is perfectly able to make a conveniently long pause beside freshly discovered body, completely unfazed by previous 5 bodies already piled up on the spot. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697195939[/url] When things do eventually get loud, there is a lot more possibilities available. Not only there are 3 firearm types – pistol, shotgun and repeater rifle – each weapon comes with a dedicated skill tree. On top of that, there are several types of grenades to share the love with multiple enemies at once and surprisingly prevalent barrels filled with all kinds of environmental hazards. Because every farm out in the West needs two neon-green barrels of poison for no particular reason. Getting back to skills, they are divided into 2 categories – passive bonuses and active abilities. The latter, relying on quickly depleting energy bar, is what evens the odds in 5 vs 1 fight. Rapid fire, explosive bullets, burst of infinite ammo, damage shield or summoning a tornado are just a few possible tricks up the player’s sleeve. Admittedly, not all abilities are equally useful (there is a melee tree I didn’t use), however once everyone starts blasting, even the slow-motion mode doesn’t always suffice to make sense of the ensuing chaos and collateral damage is a given. In short, not only it is a challenge to make sense of the fight flow, occasionally while looting corpses you will come to realise that one of them belongs to your own posse, and it might be time to load a save. Worth a separate mention is the currency used to upgrade characters, as both passive and active trees rely on collectible items. Not a single point of experience is present throughout the game. Completing quests merely advances the story, while combat is just means to an end – granting at best a monetary reward. To become stronger, the player must explore the world and loot its many cupboards. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3697195201[/url] [b]Curiosity killed the cat[/b] Let’s summarise then. We have a story that hooks you in, only to eventually overstay its welcome; chaotic combat, sprinkled with minor bugs and gameplay which primarily serves to facilitate the aforementioned narrative. One may begin to question – why bother playing in the first place? For me, the answer is a ‘vivid setting’. To my eyes, when Weird West works, it does so like clockwork. I am especially fond of the first chapter, which is a textbook Western story, but also a well-paced gateway to how much of the mysterious and supernatural is out there. Vengeful ghosts, zombie plague, ancient temples built of unknown glass-like substance or a mischievous witch for whom all of the existence is a child’s play. To be fair, some of the symbolism in the game is too “on the nose” for my liking, but I did love exploring the world at my own pace. Even if my search was driven by the appreciation for the ideas behind the game, and oddly specific interactions the player may have with the world, rather than whatever the developers might’ve intended. Final verdict time – would I recommend the game? If you are the kind of person who enjoys odd indie titles in search of something unique and distinct, then yes. However, you need to bear in mind that Weird West requires a certain patience and occasionally looking the other way to be enjoyed. Don’t feel bad about rushing the ending either, you are likely to figure things out way sooner than the game catches on its time for a curtain call. On the other hand, if you are looking for a classic immersive sim or a gameplay-focused experience, you are likely to find the game shallow and drop it long before the credits roll. In the end, I am giving the game a pass mark for daring to be ambitious, despite the flawed execution.

[h3]For a ''Definitive Edition'' this still feels under-cooked[/h3] [b]Rating ★★☆☆☆[/b] The world is essentially a patchwork of small maps you can traverse in 30 seconds or so, all stitched together with load screens. Most of the maps, especially the towns, feel empty and lack any feeling of being lived in. NPCs are roaming around, but they are few and far between. The combat is acceptable, but I struggle to find anything to praise about it. There are some nice ideas, like destructible environments that can be used to kill people, but just like the towns, this too feels half-finished and not fully fleshed out. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3492118773 The story is decent, and I liked the art style and ambience, yet I feel it's let down by the lack of voice acting for the story scenes. ⠀