Weird West Preview – The Good, The Bad, and the Weird

Cowboys vs ____ is always a great setting for a story. I know it didn’t go super great when they did it with aliens last time, but that’s on them for squandering a great setup. Weird West takes the familiar wild west setting, with all its tropes, and injects a heavy dose of the supernatural into it. Weird West is a game where gangs and ruffians aren’t the thing you worry most about, it’s zombies and ghosts instead.

Weird West is the debut game from Wolfeye Studios, made up of former Arcane Studios developers. If you’re familiar with the games they used to make, like Prey or Dishonored, then you should be familiar with how the immersive sim genre works. Sticking to what they do best, Wolfeye replicates this for an isometric wild west RPG set in a world rife with supernatural elements. The full game features five separate storylines, but for the sake of this preview I was able to play as the bounty hunter Jane Bell.

Without even a moment to collect your thoughts, the game pops off with your son being killed and husband kidnapped by a gang of cannibals. This sets you a path of revenge as you spend the five or so hours trying to find where they’re keeping your husband captive. It’s a story that’s not particularly engrossing, but the characters you meet along the way are pretty well written and every little nugget of info teasing the grander nature of the world is really what keeps you going.

Speaking of the world, Weird West functions in a pseudo-open world nature. You’ve got a map screen that you can click anywhere on to move to, and if you’re near any points of interest they’ll pop up for you to then enter that area to explore. Along the way, surprise encounters could hit you at a moment’s notice from a simple merchant caravan, to a witch asking you to hold onto a mysterious box for her on the grounds that you never open it till she returns. Or maybe you’re jumped by a horrifying ghost. The surprise of what you might find really encourages you to click on a random spot on the map and see what may come. Entering an abandoned town and running into a creature that makes you go “what the fuck is that” is a moment that never stops satisfying my curiosity.

I had to stop for a moment to think of how best to describe how Weird West plays, and isometric Max Payne seems to fit the best. The game quite literally has a slow-down dive ripped straight from that series, and it’s fucking sick. Countless times I dove through windows, emptying my revolver into the goons on the other side and it never stopped being cool. Being an RPG, you can of course expect more to the game than simple gunplay. You’ve got two separate types of abilities to unlock: combat focused ones like being able to charm enemies during combat, or character specific abilities like improving your lockpicking. If you’ve played any sort of RPG you can likely guess what sort of abilities you’ll find in here, as they’re pretty par for the course.

What’s particularly fun about the game is poking around to see what sort of different ways you can accomplish your objective. Need to get into a safe but lack the right key and don’t want to cause a massive shootout? Well if you’re stubborn like me, you could stack up a bunch of barrels to get on a roof halfway across town, and precariously jump from rooftop to rooftop until you can bust through the window into the safe room and swipe the loot.

Another mission tasked me with taking out a gang leader. Now I could have gone guns blazing with my posse, but I opted to try a more subtle approach. Instead, I crept along the farm grounds, waited for the target to enter their house, and proceeded to light the grass by me on fire. I watched as the wind spread the fire to the house, setting the entire thing ablaze and trapping everyone inside of it. Seeing how far the game will let you take your stupid plan was a big part of my fun with Weird West and I really hope the full release expands upon that.

Of course, how the world reacts to you is a big part of the game. Similar to Arkane’s previous games (and the genre in general) your actions will change how people view you. Making the effort to save a person might make them a “friend for life”, showing up at dire moments to lend a helping hand, or a fleeing enemy might return with renewed strength and a desire for vengeance. Even the environment has its own level of interactivity, as oil lanterns you find can be thrown around to cause spots for fires. Or you could soak an enemy in water from a barrel, only to hit them with some electrical bullets. If you wanted to be particularly gruesome, you could wipe out an entire town to strip it of all its loot. Careful though, since monstrosities can decide to move in now that it’s been emptied out. I only got a little taste of ways the game will twist around your decisions, and I’m eager to see more.

I should note, the game’s world does operate on a day/night cycle which changes how you might approach things. Want to steal something from a shopkeeper? Breaking in when they’re asleep might be the best move. Some missions even have completion timers, but in my time with the game they were pretty generous with how many days you had to finish those particular quests. In terms of things to do in the world, there are bounties to hunt for, or side quests to complete. Whereas the main quests were pretty standard affairs of “go here, shoot these guys”, the side quests had a bit more variety to them. Obviously most were of the same “shoot these guys” variety, but one had me trying to find a girl’s diary in a zombie infested town, and in another I had to deliver a love letter. Now I do wish there was some way to tell what weather was going to come your way. It’d be cool if you could plan to tackle a mission when rain would arrive, or time it when tornados might appear to add some chaos to a battle.

Now I do wish there was a way to view your quests. There’s a journal, but it’s filled only by books and lore you find in the world. At a point, the entirety of the left side of my screen was just filled with a distracting amount of quests I had no way of hiding. I’d much rather prefer if I could keep one or two active, and simply open up a quest log to view the rest instead of having it take up screen real estate. It just seems like a weird exclusion in an RPG, along with the lack of weapon comparisons. I’d go into a shop to buy a gun, and while it tells you whether a gun’s stats are better or worse than your currently equipped one, it doesn’t tell you by how much. Instead I’m having to exit back to my inventory and double back into the store menu to compare. There’s just a lot of quality-of-life features missing, that you just come to expect from the genre.

Like another really odd thing the game does is how it handles its weight system. It’s an RPG so of course you’ve got your typical inventory limit, so for example in-game I had a limit of 48 and unlike most RPGs that have a weight stat tied to each item, each thing was basically worth 1. So say you’re at 47, you pick up a gun and you’re now at 48. Simple.

Where the eyebrows start to raise however, is when I realized you can stack multiples of the same item and it’ll only count as one inventory slot. So while you might find something with a value of $32, it wouldn’t make sense to drop your $8 spoon if you had a massive stack of them. The way it works, you’re encouraged to ignore rare, valuable items and instead focus on the common items you can make massive stacks of. It makes looting a tad disheartening, because instead of getting excited because you found a demonic totem worth a fat stack of cash, you simply proceed to ignore it in favor of grabbing the broken cup you’ve collected twenty of in the dungeon. And again, I’d like to stress that the game isn’t due for another three months. So for all I know these could all very much be in the pipeline or already fixed. But it is worth noting.

Being a preview build of a game that’s quite a few months out, it’s no surprise to encounter a variety of bugs. I got everything from UI elements being glitched, to autosaves loading me into blank white maps and enemies respawning upon quick-loads. I didn’t pay any of these much attention though, as the game isn’t due for another three months so I expect they’ll be fixed by then. The only bug that did hamper my experience was how jittery the camera and movement controls were. My character would regularly just stop moving in certain directions at times, as if they had gotten stuck on an invisible rock or something. And the camera would also just stop working full stop. Fixing the movement involved just moving in any other direction, and going into aim-mode fixed the camera. The mouse controls would get particularly funky when opening the weapon wheel, as I needed to make drastic sweeping motions with my mouse to move the selection around. It almost felt like it wanted me to be using a controller and was fighting with my mouse movements. That’s the one I really hope is fixed on release, because it’s a subtle enough bug I could expect to fall through the QA cracks.

I’ve definitely got some nitpicks with Weird West, but I’m confident in those being fixed by the time the game is out next year. My brief romp through Weird West’s world left me hungry for more, and I can’t wait to dive back into it next year to uncover more of its fantastical mysteries.