Immersive sims are generally told from a first-person perspective—the better to draw you into the role of a character whose choices and interactions with the world take center stage. These are games about leveraging systems against each other, and experimenting with different approaches that may include the typical mix of shooting and stealthing, but that could also involve, say, stacking some crates to simply climb over a wall rather than dispatch that guard standing out front or sneak through a hole in the back fence.
WolfEye Studios’s Weird West works hard to replicate this play style, though it opts instead for an omniscient, top-down POV and a rather atypical western setting. There are the usual gunslingers, sheriffs, and small towns where saloon doors are always swinging and the main street is defined by its dustiness, but there are also elements of fantasy and horror: zombies, cave monsters, and men with the heads of pigs. On paper, it even sounds like a good idea.
But you hardly need to spend any time at all with Weird West to see the fatal flaws in its attempt to stitch the immersive sim together with a top-down shooter. Even something so basic as scavenging for materials becomes a chore here. In a first-person game, you intuitively point and click on the objects that you want to investigate, but in Weird West you have to nudge your character little by little until they’re in the right position for a nearby loot container to light up, which is made even more difficult when there are multiple containers scattered around a small area. Worse, the materials you find tend to all be the same nondescript junk, with the exception of a few coins and a handful of bullets, the latter of which can be used to dismantle the same few firearms and with the press of the right button.
The entire game is designed this way, stubbornly refusing to adapt mechanics and conventions that no longer make sense with this awkward control scheme and this top-down camera perspective. Your characters can take cover, but it’s not immediately clear which ones are tall enough to break the enemy’s line of sight or obstruct your own aim, the latter of which is shown as a red dot and then a grayed-out line on a UI that’s been seemingly built for ants.
In this style of game, we need to be able to parse all our options at a glance. Weird West, however, only obscures visual information, rendering its touted interactions like exploding ammo boxes, spreading fire, and revenge-seeking characters as tiny splotches of color against a larger, ill-conceived canvas. The game’s only real concession for its camera seems to be its surplus of exploding barrels, which are all so bright and huge that they’re impossible to miss.
If there’s an area where Weird West comes close to working, it’s in the cast of characters. When you wrap up one person’s storyline, the game continues by dropping you into the shoes of another and essentially giving you a do-over with skill distribution and approaches to the morality system. Newly armed with prior knowledge of how the game works, you’re given space to adapt your play style and try different approaches to things like the morality system or locations that you’ve already visited. For one, when strapped for funds, you might take to guiltlessly burglarizing the home of some shifty NPCs you encountered as another character.
Even then, though, it’s disappointing to see how little the skills vary from one character to the next. And the simple act of using those skills can be a bizarre chore, with some requiring you to hold down two buttons and then press a third to activate them in the heat of battle.
Playing Weird West, it’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls, with the abbreviated scavenging of Void Bastards and the easy-to-read interface of Desperados III, another western with a top-down perspective, immediately coming to mind. The latter game also supports far more complex maneuvers despite lacking the sort of pointless granularity that has the player comb through indistinguishable shelves for a handful of ammunition. By contrast, Weird West is a slog dying for an extensive streamline.
This game was reviewed using a code provided by Tinsley PR.
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