I should preface this review by stating that I’ve not played the Early Access version of the game, so this review will be a critique on the final release as it is instead of a comparison to its previous version.
It’s been two years since We Happy Few released on Steam’s Early Access, and what everyone expected to be something similar in the vein to say, a Bioshock, turned out to be more of a survival game that was met with mixed responses. Compulsion Games has spent that time working on turning the game into what its initial trailers led everyone to believe it was, and I feel it’s safe to say the final product is more a middling affair of both genres instead of standing out as either one.
We Happy Few
Developer: Compulsion Games
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
We Happy Few takes place in an alternate 1960s England where things have gone a bit sour since Germany won World War ll. The citizens have begun taking a drug called Joy that puts them in an immediate chipper mood and helps them forget whatever awful things happened in the past. It’s a truly fascinating setting whose potential is never fully realized in a satisfying way. With the full release, Compulsion Games has decided to add a chunk more linear story elements to what was originally just a survival game. You’ll play as three characters: Arthur, Sally, and Olli. Each of these people are flawed and hiding some damning secret, but you never really end up caring much about them or the overarching plot.
At its core, We Happy Few is a survival game. It launched as that during its time in early access, and while it’s still partly that, the new story elements have caused both aspects of the game to clash horribly with each other. So being a survival game, there’s a big open map to explore for resources, quests, loot, etc. There are around six areas to explore, but they all more or less either look like a rundown shanty town or a rundown city so there’s not much visual diversity on display here. I have two big problems with the survival aspect of the game: the core survival element and the world itself. First off, in a survival game you kind of expect having to scrounge for resources and you know, surviving, to be a major part of the game but here it feels like an afterthought; not even that, like less of an afterthought. You have to manage your hunger, thirst and sleep while playing but the game throws so many resources at you I never had to actually look for food. When my hunger emptied out I simply walked to a trash can, ate a rotten banana which immediately refilled my hunger meter, and then continued on my day. Now you’d think eating a rotten banana would cause some adverse side-effects, and it does! Too bad the game teaches you how to make a drink that will cure you of this negative side-effect and the resource for it is literally all around you. So you get into this routine of eating whatever food and drink item you have, and then popping the sickness cure so you don’t get nauseous from the bad food. There’s just no sense of risk, and to emphasize this there’s even an ability you can learn that removes the survival meters completely. And on top of all this, the penalties for being hungry or thirsty don’t even matter. If you’re thirsty, all that happens is that you sprint just a *little* bit slower. Even crafting resources are easy to come by, with you never needing to look hard (or at all you’ll honestly trip into them) for the pieces to craft lockpicks, healing items, or gadgets. The game just drowns you in such an abundance of resources I never felt an urge to break into people’s homes in search of items, which feeds into my second issue.
Since you don’t need to ever go out looking for resources, the game never gives you a good reason to go explore its world. I broke into maybe two or three houses in my time playing because I realized I was just finding the same stuff I’d find out on the street or during a story mission. This then means you’ll likely never stumble on a side-quest since you won’t be going off the main path, and honestly the side-quests are just as forgettable as the main ones so you won’t care you’re missing them really. The game just completely fails to get you invested in its world which is infuriating because the game’s aesthetic is phenomenal.
You can play We Happy Few as either a stealth game or with a heavier focus on combat, both options which are fine. The melee combat is serviceable at best and the areas so open, and enemies so sparse, that you’ll never really feel a sense of reward for “sneaking” past an area. There’s a third way to play though, which is the one I subscribed to: simply running past everyone. You can really just run right past every part of the game and not have to worry too hard about anyone ever catching up or being alerted fast enough to notice you. By the end of the game, I was loaded up with so many gadgets and weapons that I never used I just started burning through them for the sake of using them. I had been playing this game for hours and had never seen what the hack tool looks like because it was just easy enough to walk past the Joy sensors and outrun the enemies.
While on the subject of weapons, the game is deceptive with its crafting system. It implies you’ll make some kooky weapons a la Dead Rising, but the (few) things you can make are just lacking in all sorts of creativity. And that’s ignoring the fact that, once again, you never really need to use anything. I rolled with the starting weapon for hours until the game gave me stun rods and I only switched to those because they were slightly faster at incapacitating the few enemies I got into fights with.
On top of this, there’s a useless skill tree that you can dump points into. Doing missions will reward you with points that you can invest into generic abilities like more health or strength, to more “useful” ones like being able to silently lockpick. Notice the use of quotation marks over the word useful, I did that because I’ve lockpicked next to enemies (without the skill) and they never heard a thing. The skill tree is full of completely worthless abilities like making machines meant to sound an alarm if they notice you not taking Joy take longer to notice you, but hey guess what I just ran past them all the time no issue. One of the more laughable skills you can unlock is being able to explore at night past curfew. I never bothered to unlock it because I never walked around at night since you can easily just fast travel to your base and sleep till morning. Every item on this tree just functions to make an incredibly tiny annoyance of the game slightly less so. Backtracking to side-quests for a brief moment. Not all of them reward you with skill points so you’ll end up with a bunch of side-quests in your list that you won’t do because for one, they’re not interesting enough to bother with, and also because you won’t get any sort of worthwhile reward for it. These all add up to a skill system that feels as much as an afterthought as the rest of the game.
With this “final” release, the game sees an evolution from a survival game into one that resembles something more like an adventure title, but what’s here just doesn’t do much and its piss poor mission structure hinders what little is there. The basic goal of each character is to leave the island and missions play out like this: reach a roadblock on the way to your goal, character has inner-monologue that Person #1 has the McGuffin that will let you past the roadblock, go see Person #1, they say they won’t give you the current McGuffin unless you fetch something for them, do that, receive your McGuffin, get past the roadblock, reach the next roadblock and rinse repeat. It’s such a monotonous formula with characters spouting drivel that just leaves your finger itching over the “skip cinematic” button. Even the game’s main hook, the Joy drug everyone takes to be happy, ends up being something you don’t actually ever need to use. You’re told to take it to fit in, but I never took the drug unless the game forced it upon me and I was able to walk around the city areas perfectly fine. If a robot sniffed me out I’d simply run past it and it’d forget about me. If there was a Joy detector on a street I’d have to pick between the mild inconvenience of going around the block or just running through the detector and outrunning the triggered enemies. A caveat of never taking your Joy is that you’ll never see the bright and colorful hallucinogenic aspect the game is practically known for, which turns an already dull world even duller. You’re just never presented any genuinely good reason for taking the drug which is just wild considering it’s a major part of the game.
The Final Word
At the end of the day, We Happy Few neither succeeds as a survival game nor as a plot driven adventure game. Just sort of middling about in-between the two not sure which it wants to be.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2 out of 5 – Poor
