It’s time to get weird in the world of Weird West, where you can be playing cards in the saloon one day, or going toe-to-toe with a ghastly wraith the next.
Weird West
Developer: WolfEye Studios
Price: $40
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Weird West, the debut game from former Arkane Studio developers, now in the newly christened WolfEye studios, thrusts you into a dark fantasy world that blends the occult and the wild west. Weird West features five separate storylines that you’ll work through before culminating together at the end, with an overarching mystery of why all these characters are connected. The beginning storyline with the bounty hunter isn’t particularly engaging, but the following ones more than make up for it with tales of a Pigman who’s trying to remember who he was before his transformation or an indigenous hunter searching for the spirit of a wendigo. Weird West is probably one of the most realized worlds I’ve seen in a minute, with piles of books to comb through or newspaper articles to read. There’s always some off-kilter detail to find that adds a lot of personality to the game’s world.
The world itself features a pseudo-open world format with this map to explore, with points of interest popping up as you move around it. There’s a lot of really well-done environmental storytelling in these areas, as I happened upon a cave one time, hinting at the possibility of treasure or a frightening creature. Thankfully the cave was totally empty besides a trove of jewels, but it left me curious at the thought of whether another player might have stumbled onto a tough fight instead. As you move across the world, surprise encounters are waiting to pop up from random merchants looking to sell their goods, ambushes, or witches performing a ritual to summon a ghost. Unfortunately, the longer I played the more the surprise wore off as I started to encounter the same scenarios over and over again. Regardless, the world does a good job at poking your curiosity as you might discover an abandoned town full of zombies that might be hiding some good loot.
Isometric Max Payne still feels like the best way to describe how Weird West plays, as you spend the majority of your fights in slo-mo dives unloading an unhealthy amount of bullets into the nearest enemy. It honestly never stops feeling cool as all hell, especially when you do stuff like dive through a window into a room some goons are in and giving them the business end of your shotgun. On top of that, the game features an RPG system where you’ll unlock abilities in two separate skill trees: an active one for the character you’re currently playing and a passive one that’s shared among the five protagonists. Each character features a set of unique abilities, like the Pigman can bullrush enemies, or the bounty hunter can charm enemies, but they all share the same weapon abilities which made it feel odd that those don’t stay unlocked across characters. The passive ability tree (better lockpicking, health, etc) is shared across characters and feels like it’s paced well with how far you can progress in it with each character, but the active ability tree doesn’t. I felt like I could only unlock a small handful of abilities in the active skill tree with each character, and it was frustrating having to spend resources to unlock the same pistol upgrade I’d unlocked multiple times before.
“Why are these shared abilities transferable between characters, but these aren’t?” It’s just an odd choice in the game’s RPG system that feels contradictory. Additionally, Weird West makes the grave RPG sin of having you deal with a clunky inventory system. Like any RPG, there’s a weight system, but it felt like I was constantly at max capacity (with no way to increase it) as I’m juggling items between various inventories of me, my horse, and any companion I have with me.
Eventually I hit a point where I realized the way to avoid this was to stop picking things up. I realized that grabbing trinkets you’re meant to sell isn’t worth the hassle, or the money as you can do a single bounty and score way more cash than you ever would have looting a level. Once I had this realization it made looting completely unnecessary as I knew there was never anything worthwhile to find unless it was in a fancy chest, which usually held ability upgrades.
Even doing things like robbing towns felt superfluous, as you got no real benefit from doing so. There was one town I discovered that I meticulously worked my way through at night to break into the bank without a single witness, and when I finally reached the safe I was rewarded with a couple gold coins and a silver bar. I figured, “okay, let me go rob the gun shop for that expensive gun I saw he had”, and again carefully planned out how I would break in and swipe his stuff. My reward was the discovery that the items you could steal from the shop was only a small selection from the full inventory, and none of it good.
The amount of effort you have to put into playing the game differently isn’t balanced with the benefit, or lack thereof that you get. Why go out of my way to rob the mayor’s farm clean, when I can do a single bounty and make five times the money with a fraction of the effort? Combat levels feature some interesting open areas that lend themselves well to you finding clever ways to fight enemies, but most areas you’ll fight in are flat open zones or tight cave corridors that offer no opportunity at experimentation. A staple of the immersive sim genre is that you’re rewarded for thinking outside the box to solve a problem, but Weird West instead rewards you for playing as basically as possible. That’s not to say the game isn’t fun to play, I’m still having a blast playing through the game. It’s just that you only ever get a glimpse of the potential this game could have had; especially considering the pedigree the development team hail from.
The one thing particularly weird about this game is how awkward its control scheme is. I played on PC, and it had some pretty bizarre key bindings that never felt right, even after readjusting some of them. Swapping to a controller didn’t help as the aiming on a joystick felt nowhere near as accurate as a mouse so I had to begrudgingly use the keyboard setup. Another issue is how glitchy the UI menus are, as many times I’d see old quests (I’d already completely) suddenly pop up with their completion notifications, and some quests wouldn’t show up at all (even in my journal) until I cleared out some currently active ones. I also encountered various other annoying glitches like my bank vault completely emptying itself randomly (which I’m told should be fixed in a patch), losing me tons of valuable resources, or followers getting stuck in terrain until I left and reentered the area. Nothing game breaking mind you, but annoying nonetheless.
The Final Word
There’s a lot of fun to be had in the Weird West, but it sometimes feels more like a testing ground for a more fleshed-out sequel.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
