Weird West Review – IGN

Each of the five characters youll inhabit has their own vignette story that can be as short as a handful of hours or, if you take your time like me, an average of eight a piece. We begin with Jane the Bounty Hunter tracking down her abducted husband, followed by a forcibly mutated pigman searching for the truth about who he used to be, a Protector of the Lost Fire Tribe battling a greed demon, a werewolf who is prophesized to lead his people in a battle for survival, and finally a cult member. They all take place on the same large, dense overworld map of a region known simply as the West. And while theres not a ton of overlap between where their main quests lead them, theyre all free to explore and revisit anywhere and anyone they like. Dont worry about the count of how many days youve spent theres no time pressure to any of the stories.

The playable characters are largely defined by their sets of four class abilities, ranging from the bounty hunters landmines to the pigmans poison trail and the werewolfs temporary invisibility. Theres also a universal set of useful weapon skills like electric pistol bullets, silenced rifle shots, and stun arrows, but those must be leveled up for each character individually. However, a set of perks you unlock that remain persistent, and between that and a couple of shared loot stashes that means youre considerably more powerful in the fifth act than in the first thanks enhancements like more health, doubled explosive damage, and faster stealth movement. That provides a sense of progression even as you reboot from one character to the next.

While its kind of a bummer that you cant switch back to directly controlling a previous character if you miss their abilities, thats an understandable limitation when you consider how the story works as a sequence of events. You can, however, go back to their homes and recruit them as one of your two AI-controlled companions (and youd be crazy not to, since theyre powerful and you get their inventories back) but the AI doesnt use their abilities with the precision they need to be really useful in combination with your own. Theres also an added tension from the fact that these irreplaceable companions can permanently die (unless you reload a quicksave), so theyre more of a loss than the disposable mercenaries you can hire in that role when things go bad.

Another forgivable letdown is that none of the main characters are voiced we only ever hear from the Sam Elliot-impersonating narrator, and the voices that play behind the text of everyone elses speech sounds like spooky whispers or if Bane from The Dark Knight Rises was a Sim. But their personalities come across in the writing when you interact with them, and were given plenty of opportunities to define them for ourselves with choices about who to help and who to harm.

Weird West Review Screenshots

When the action begins, gunfights with more than a couple of adversaries get hectic quickly because everybody moves pretty fast and the lead flies faster. Weird West is effectively a twin-stick shooter, and rapidly aiming and firing while managing your lengthy reload times for your revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and bow and arrow is a tall order. However, theres a slow-motion button that takes the twitch reactions out of fights (except for the reaction required to push that button); with this activated, the real challenge becomes managing the amount of time it takes to swing your gun from one target to the next its not instant and of course, timing your special abilities for maximum effectiveness.

[Note: to activate this tactical mode on console, push and hold the right bumper button.]

Also, slow-mo will automatically activate when you initiate a cinematic dive move, which eats some of your precious Action Point bar thats consumed by your abilities, but is extremely worth it because of how much damage you can put out. You get extra bullets in your gun and can fire rapidly, so anything short of a boss-level character will usually melt under a satisfying hail of bullets before you hit the ground.

Pros will know to do this before a fight breaks out, but I relied on slow-mo to give me the time I needed to really take advantage of the environment. Weird West is as much an immersive sim as it is an action game (which makes sense, considering Wolfeye was founded by Raphael Colantonio, who previously founded Arkane Studios, known for Dishonored and Prey) so you can expect plenty of opportunities for physics-based antics. Throw a lit oil lamp into a field and watch the firestorm that ensues; water (including rain) puts out the fire, while wind makes it spread faster. Touching arrows to a flame makes them into fire arrows, while dipping them in poison does exactly what youd expect. Electricity plus water is another good one to remember. Theres a lot of room to experiment here, and I love when a plan or a completely accidental win comes together.

Of course, theres no XP gained from killing in Weird West, so that means its really an expedient means of acquiring loot as you go from point A to point B or defending yourself when you get caught where you shouldnt be. Thats a wise design choice because it means that if you prefer to sneak through the whole thing, avoiding combat and pilfering the artifacts and golden playing cards that unlock new abilities you wont be missing out on much by way of progression. Also, it smartly takes the Last of Us approach to companions while youre in stealth, meaning theyre simply invisible to enemies and you dont have to worry about them blowing your cover if the AI does something goofy.

Stealth is an exercise for the patient, so much of my first playthrough was done in a guns-blazing fashion, but every so often Id see an opportunity to thin the herd; with a little timing (and perhaps some quick-loading) you can crough-walk from bandit to bandit, knocking them out and then picking up their unconscious bodies to toss them into a bush or behind a minecart while you deal with their friends. If theyre dead you have the option to bury them if you have a shovel, so playing non-lethal stealth is slightly more of a self-imposed challenge. (Wolfeye says its possible to get through the campaign without killing a human, but I was nowhere near pulling that off myself.)

There are plenty of people around the West in need of your assistance the first acts villains are cannibals who round up people like cattle, after all and beyond simply being a nice thing to do, a benefit of choosing to help the helpless is that the people youve saved can randomly show up to assist you in tough fights later on. Thats a great reward for a good deed, serving as both a bonus and a reminder of recent adventures itll pop up with their name and why theyre helping you, such as You freed her husband from prison. The other side of that coin is that characters can form a vendetta against you if, for instance, they flee after you kill their boss or if you capture them alive to collect a bounty, and then they show up to make things a little tougher for you. Ive even had significant characters show up as bounty targets after their role in the story was complete, which was a nice way to tie a little bow on their story.

All these overlapping systems mean Weird West is hardly glitch-free. Ive seen moonwalking enemies, missing guns from hands, enemies suddenly detecting me when they shouldnt have, companions refusing to budge, taking hits to my reputation when Id left no witnesses, a man self-immolating at a campfire, and more of those sorts of things. One time my character was taken to jail for a night and then simply floated out of her cell and into the sky. But for a game with this many moving parts, thats to be expected to some degree and considering the frequent autosaves (the last three of which are available to reload at any time), I never lost significant progress.

Over the course of my playthrough I spent a lot of my time gathering loot, whether it was picking over corpses, rifling through shelves and poorly guarded cash registers, mining ore, or digging up suspicious mounds of dirt to reveal treasure caches. Theres stuff everywhere, and exploration is almost always generously rewarded. You also have the freedom to profit by unscrupulous means, such as robbing stores by breaking in at night, digging up graves, or just murdering people for fun (and stealing a horse for a quick getaway) at the cost of reputation which just like youd expect gets a bounty placed on your head if it drops low enough.

That said, much of the actual equippable loot is a little disappointing: there are rarities of weapons, for instance, but each tier simply does greater damage without any other special effects, and no matter what armor or gear you equip you wont see any changes reflected in your character model. Additionally, theres no real crafting system aside from creating armor vests out of animal skins or using ore to upgrade weapons. Thats fine, except that it makes all the other junk items you collect feel entirely like well, junk, and the process of separating the wheat from the chaff becomes tiresome after a good while. It leads to lots of inventory management as you decide what to drop in favor of that shiny new item. Given how your companions act as pack mules Id have liked an easier way to see who has what and move it between them than talking to one, accessing their inventory, moving it to yours, then talking to the other and moving it to theirs. (Thats something I wasnt so fond of in Fallout 2.)

The larger story wraps up in an interesting way that makes your choices in the many life-or-death situations and whether you just tried to do good or not central to a high-stakes event rather than a showy boss battle. Its a good call and it serves Weird West well. If youre just charging through you might finish in 25 hours; I took closer to 40 by going off the main path to explore, collecting quite a few bounties, and seeing what the West had to offer. I was not disappointed.

I was excited to start a second playthrough (on hard mode this time) because at the end of each chapter you get a recap list of your decisions and achievements as that character, which looks like a substantial amount of relatively small changes can add up to a big difference. After all, who lives and who dies in a game where nearly everyone who isnt literally immortal can be killed can lead to some significantly different outcomes.

Only a few hours in, Ive already found many things I missed on the first run. Instead of shaking down a local farmer for the deed to his land on behalf of a crime boss who had information I needed, I broke into his office by moving a barrel next to a wall and using it to reach the roof of the building next door, then jumping to a balcony and climbing in a window and breaking into his safe. I also stumbled upon a talking doll who asked me to help it break its curse, won a duel, found an amulet that gave my bullets a chance to set targets on fire, and more. (I could’ve used a lot more amulets like that on my first playthrough; most of the ones I got had bonuses so situational that I barely noticed I had them equipped.) This time Im making greater use of Janes ability to power up her kick, hilariously knocking enemies back and off of cliffs, and I intend to experiment with a lot more powers I overlooked the first time through.