‘Weird West’ is an ambitious RPG that bites off more than it can chew
“Weird West” is one of those games rather vaguely defined as an “immersive sim,” or an action role-playing game layered with systems that let you tackle enemies and obstacles in a multitude of ways. Its immediate lineage is that of “Dishonored” and “Prey,” not least because it’s made by some of the same people; this their first title as indie outfit WolfEye Studios, which they formed after leaving Arkane. The production values are obviously lower, and “Weird West” switches from the first-person perspective used in Arkane’s games to a more old-school, zoomed out view, but the scope of its story and the machinery underneath is comparably elaborate.
The story part, at least, is pretty successful. The West as WolfEye depicts it is a land of cowboys and incantations, where everyday farmsteading and banditry are disrupted by the designs of zombies, witches and cannibalistic sirens. In the midst of this, you play five characters with very different goals and backgrounds, accompanying each in turn on a mini odyssey that’s both a self-contained tale and part of a larger plot. After the first, the rather plain Jane Bell, a retired bounty hunter tracking her kidnapped husband, you get to experience life on the plains from a wide spread of angles.
It’s an alluring prospect. Yet reaching the end of “Weird West’s” journey will require a saddlebag full of patience. Sure, it gives you options to suit different playstyles, piling up your means of interaction with a long list of features. But precisely because there are so many, these individual elements often get in each other’s way, breaking the immersion as they fail to combine into a convincing whole or produce the kind of atmosphere the dark fiction deserves.
You sense it as soon as you roll into town. It’s too quiet and mechanical. The vacuum of ambient noise, bridged by some forlorn guitar strums, occasionally conveys the solemn mood, even a sense of eeriness. But more frequently, eerie gives way to sterile thanks to the faceless, blanched NPCs milling about their business. Perhaps they’re too focused on making it through the day without getting stuck on each other, which happens more than it should. When the local sheriff became irredeemably blocked on his way to work by a loitering pedestrian, I had to conclude this town really wasn’t big enough for the both of them.
There’s plenty to keep you busy here, though, much of which will help you prepare for your main quest — a wanted board where you can pick up bounties to earn extra cash for supplies, for instance, and hired guns you can invite to join your posse (maximum three members), adding much needed firepower in the random ambushes you’ll trigger as you venture across the map toward your latest objective. Or you might browse shops by day then return at night to break in and steal the stuff you couldn’t afford. All very immersive. Well, except that time the deputy got stuck in the general store overnight and I had to work around him as he wandered from door to counter and back.
That’s the way of the “Weird West.” Each time you get into a groove and start manipulating its systems, they buckle and shove you back out. And while it’s easy enough to smile at AI and interface quirks as you mosey around a settlement, they wear you down when you’re infiltrating enemy hideouts, occultist temples and mining facilities. Trying to progress through stealth is difficult, as the game’s lofty camera angle and dusty color palette make it hard to pick out enemies or tell which way they’re facing. It’s thus essential to rely heavily on the mini-map, with its red splotches and vision cones, regressing to the dated routines of 1998’s “Metal Gear Solid.” Yet even that’s no help when enemies start to short circuit on patrol. I’ve seen bandidos get stuck in tiny loops that mean they never get out of the way, or even wedged on one of my own posse members (who walk alongside you, but can’t be seen by enemies except in combat).
With such fumbles, it’s difficult to engage with the intricacies of “Weird West’s” stealth mechanics or unlockable abilities, and when covert operations fail, the surroundings are often too cramped and controls too fiddly to enable slick improvisation. As enemies charge you position or start filling you with lead, there’s often no time or space to make strategic use of scenery, while an excess of environmental clutter makes actions like grabbing a barrel of gunpowder to hurl at enemies more trouble than they’re worth. And although some character specific powers are certainly effective, like summoning a spirit bear or turning invisible or exuding a trail of poison gunk, none are as fun to experiment with as their “Dishonored” equivalents.
Indeed, once foes are alert to your presence, it’s often best to stick to your guns — literally. Switching between a pistol, rifle and shotgun, with a little luck and cover you’ll be the last one standing. Appropriate for a story of the lawless Wild West, you might think, but hardly in the spirit of a genre defined by player choice. Nor does combat have any of the tension you might associate with Western shootouts. As the first shot is fired, friend and foe alike scatter in panic, before reforming into a melange of machetes and revolvers, chasing each other in circles until one side falls silent. At least your allies can be devastatingly efficient, to the point you might hide behind a rock and await their victory. Although they also have a habit of going missing at crucial moments, casually hanging out a few rooms away while you’re getting overwhelmed by a mob of mine crawlers.
It’s a shame there are so many such incidents to report, because, when you untangle the mess, “Weird West” has plenty of smart ideas. Details like burying and digging up bodies, for example, or dynamic weather and fire effects, serve a purpose and slot into the flow. I was particularly pleased to discover after surviving an assault by a trio of bears that, because I’d killed them with fire, their meat was already cooked and ready for a health-restoring meal. Those moments where you’re left thinking “Wow, that actually works!” are what these games are all about, and between stumbles, “Weird West” conjures up its share.
More impressive still is how much it remembers what you’ve done. Pivotal plot decisions can alter the world for subsequent adventures, rescued prisoners become “friends for life” who might arrive to help their savior in the heat of a particularly tricky battle, and if there’s a witness to any crime you commit, you’ll need to square things with the law before conducting further business in town. I even realized late on that shops weren’t restocking between stories, and regretted using lockpicks so liberally in the first half of the game, depriving later protagonists of the convenience.
This continuity really pulls the segmented plotline together, too, as the map expands with each episode while also sending you back to places you’ve been before — as someone else — to experience a different reception. Splitting the game into shorter quests (each around five hours) is a neat way to encourage varied skills and build types in one playthrough. For instance, while all characters can use the same weapons, I only truly grasped the stealth value of arrows when in the shoes of Native American Across Rivers. That dynamic also puts you on opposing sides of tricky moral choices as the game develops a rich, multifaceted lore.
A mysterious plot device also intertwines the five’s fates together, and should you choose to do so on later missions, you can seek out your former selves and recruit them into your posse, reacquiring treasured equipment in the process. With each chapter, the draw of putting the band back together grows stronger.
There’s no escaping, however, that “Weird West” is crowded by its own ambition. No doubt, some glitches will be fixed — like mission objectives failing to update correctly — and some control issues are surely more applicable to the PlayStation 4 version rather than the PC. But other problems are more fundamental. It says something that by the end of the game, I’d killed 599 people, and as much as (almost) all of them had it coming, I had no such intention when I set out. The systems felt too brittle to warrant a more considered approach. In this Western, it doesn’t pay to be a master of the quick draw so much as the quick save, stopping to back up every inch of progress, in case your next move pulls the chair from under you.
