The Western genre is a tough nut to crack for video games. While the Red Dead Redemption series has of course made a huge splash for fans of jingling spurs and rusty guns, there aren’t many other major games set in the Wild West. Some highlights that jump to mind are the Call of Juarez series (whose most recent entry launched in 2013), and the real-time tactics/save scumming sim titles in the Desperados series. It’s slim pickings for players who yearn for their six-shooters and a trusty horse. Like a Clint Eastwood character, Weird West has breezed into a town in desperate need of a hero. How does this stranger measure up?
From the jump, Weird West’s aesthetic is on-point. This is a paranormal spin on the American West, where greedy land developers are arm-in-arm with cannibalistic ghouls and literal werewolves. All of the character art conveys the eerie solemnity of the setting along with the comic book-y thrill of this premise.
Gameplay takes obvious inspiration from CRPGs like the original Fallout games and Divinity: Original Sin. You move your character through different areas, from cramped hallways to open fields, cycling through weapons and abilities to fight off enemies and navigate environments. Some situations can be solved with dialogue or careful infiltration. You can recruit other gunslingers to your posse by paying them or completing side missions to win their favor. Doing random acts in the world like saving someone from a robbery will earn you allies who can appear at surprising moments to save you, while gunning down a gang leader and leaving some members alive may lead them to form a vendetta on you and attack when you least expect it. Weird West has large ambitions and puts a strong impression forward for the kind of endlessly complex clockwork world it’s offering.
At the start of Weird West, you see a person tied to a chair, surrounded by ominous figures in a room with five portraits on the wall. They speak in cryptic half-statements about what’s to come before you jump into the body of a retired bounty hunter whose violent past has caught up to her, forcing her out of retirement. As far as beginnings go, it’s a pretty strong one. I shot some thugs invading my home, buried the dead (an optional touch that the game didn’t force me to do, but it felt like the respectful thing), and stormed off, ready to get revenge like so many wronged gunslingers of Western films past.
Over the course of my adventure, I returned to the strange room from the beginning before jumping to controlling a new character in the same world: a mutilated pigman, then a Native American tracker hunting a mythical beast, among others. Crucially, the characters I’d previously inhabited still existed in the world after I was finished with them, which was an interesting wrinkle on the body-swapping premise. However, it seems that when I stopped controlling them, they lost all their personality. When the bounty hunter joined up with the pigman, she wasn’t different from any of the other helper characters you can invite on your travels, and she even said the same stock phrases in battle as those generic posse members.
Your journey across these lives will see you trekking to various locales on a larger world map – abandoned towns, eerie mines, and large, bustling settlements abound. At first, there’s a pleasant variety in these locations. The maps are colorful and distinct, but after a few hours the repetition will start to come to the surface. What’s worse, you’ll quickly run out of new things to see. The “new” areas blend together with what you’ve seen.
Within these small toy boxes, you’ll embark on story missions that usually involve killing a whole bunch of enemies as each character tracks down their target. These encounters often give you the option of stealth, or the option to go in as loud as possible. Some story missions offer even more adaptable problem-solving: one early mission had me visiting the company town of a shady businessman, who possessed some vital information. He said he would only help me if I stole the deed to a nearby farm he had his eye on, but I was able to avoid being kind to a capitalist pig by skulking around his compound and finding some dirty secrets I could use as blackmail.
There are a handful of similarly open-ended missions scattered across Weird West’s landscape, but unfortunately they’re typically the exception to the rule. Too often, you’re dropped into town full of monsters and left to scramble through until all the enemies are dead. Then you can track down whatever single journal entry or note the game wants you to find so you know where to go next and repeat the cycle.
When you travel from place to place, you’ll occasionally wander into a random encounter. Some of these are optional, like inspecting some ruins you didn’t know were there or visiting a traveling merchant, and some are unavoidable, like being jumped by a pack of wolves. This is a nice system in theory, as it suggests that travel is meant to be unpredictable and full of both risk and reward. In practice, however, it mostly translates into having to fight off random guys on your way to fight off other random, slightly more story-relevant guys. It’s really a shame, because those more flexible missions hint at a deeper, more complex version of Weird West that you can easily imagine while playing the version that we got.
Compounding the shallowness in the world is how vacant all of the settlements come to feel. For the most part, people in every area just stand around like cardboard cutouts. For a game that has considerable flexibility and complex NPC behavior in its scripted story missions, Weird West’s non-combat areas, places that could really sell this paranormal version of life in this era, end up feeling hollow.
The biggest issue with navigating Weird West is, given how much of the experience involves combat, how frictionless and fiddly the combat feels. Aiming with the right analog stick is slippery and imprecise, meaning your aim will slide right off of targets between the time you pull the trigger and the time the bullet whizzes past them. Status effects chip away at your health with little visual feedback to let you know what’s going on, and every characters’ special abilities are clumsy to trigger, requiring you to navigate two submenus while under fire. It makes gunfights into fumbling slogs, and the dubious AI of your posse members means you’ll usually be doing it all on your own.
Muddy visuals compound the frustrations in combat. While every character’s portrait and character art are kinetic and full of life, their 3D character models are stiff, and the environments use cel-shaded colors and textures to approximate old adventure comics on yellowed paper, but lack the detail and specificity to do so. Terrain is difficult to discern, and enemies are camouflaged expertly by being indistinguishable from the similar smudges that make up the ground and walls.
Given the lack of graphical fidelity, it’s also concerning how Weird West has some beastly load times on the PS4. Every death leads to a lengthy loading screen, and moving from place to place also forces you to stop and stare at a loading screen. Whenever I was actually getting into a groove and feeling immersed by Weird West’s immersive sim ambitions, a loading screen or six would barge in and break that flow before it had a chance.
Players who can juggle all of these hiccups will definitely get their money’s worth, especially if they’re already fans of the old school CRPG school of design. Across my multiple lives, I spent more than 40 hours in Weird West, with plenty of side quests that could have shaken out differently on subsequent playthroughs.
Weird West also deserves points for attempting something new and distinct in its genre space, and the creative team’s consultation with the Anishinaabe to better sculpt the title’s depiction of Native American people. I can’t speak to how respectful or successful this depiction is, as a non-native, but the intention and ambition are there.
There is clearly a great amount of care and creativity in the ideas that inspired Weird West — it’d surely make for a hell of a pitch doc. Unfortunately, like so many living legends we hear about from the Wild West, Weird West can’t possibly measure up when you meet it in the real world.
A PS4 key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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