Weird West Review - Page 2
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Perks range in usefulness between some handy unlocks, like being able to jump higher, sneak faster or deal more damage to unaware targets, and the significantly less impressive percentile increases to your HP or shop prices. Abilities are split between weapon abilities which all characters get, and a special tree unique to each character. These too vary greatly in their usefulness.
To take things one step further, all the upgrade items you pick up but don't immediately use will be transferred over to the next character once you recruit your old character as a companion. This creates a situation where you don't actually want to upgrade your current character, and instead want to hoard all the upgrade items. To make matters worse, your third character unlocks the ability to converse with ghosts, while the final one lets you decipher ancient texts, further incentivizing you to treat your earlier heroes as disposable.
And to complicate things even more, all your characters share their saddlebags and safety deposit boxes, but you can't transfer your actual savings between characters. This results in a rather tedious song and dance where before wrapping things up with a character you have to turn your dollars into gold bars, stash them away, and decide which consumables and items you need to finish your journey, and which you'd rather leave to your next hero.
Once you actually start that new journey, you have to first find a town with a bank, then find a town with a stable, then find one of your old characters and hire them to get all the upgrade items back. And you have to do this four times.
But at the very least, this approach allowed the developers to introduce a great deal of reactivity. During your journeys, you'll be making plenty of decisions that will affect the world around you on both a major and minor scale. You'll get plenty of opportunities to dismantle or prop up entire factions, save or destroy various settlements, and in the end, decide whether to save or destroy the world.
And on a more personal level, you'll be making friends and enemies. The former will aid you in combat, while the latter will be sending their goons after you. There's even a pared-down take on the Nemesis System from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
For example, during my pigman journey, I ended up turning the witch that cursed him into a pig herself. Then, on a later journey, I apprehended her for a bounty, as the pig version of her was now an outlaw. And finally, when visiting the pigman at some point, I had to put her down, as she had apparently escaped and together with her gang, was now attempting to take her frustrations out on the town the pigman was living in.
So in the end, despite some reservations about the game's approach to storytelling, the abovementioned busywork didn't stop me from enjoying Weird West overall.
Twin-stick Six-shooter
Now, usually, immersive sims tend to favor the first-person perspective. Weird West, however, adopts an isometric approach. Here, you'll be looking at your character from up high while using your mouse to control the camera and aim, and WASD to move. Alternatively, you can use a gamepad.
The fact that most immersive sims aren't isometric should've been the first warning sign here. No matter how you look at them, the game's controls are extremely clunky. All the menus seem to have been designed with a controller in mind, making them needlessly annoying to navigate.
Everyone's favorite "press button to do one thing, hold it to do another" feature is a big offender there. Having the cursor completely disappear on you whenever you're not holding the right mouse button (it's what you have to do to pull out your gun and start aiming), is a close second though. Inventory management could also use some drag and drop functionality.
