Regarding this new game created by several former members of the Arkane studio, although the scale is obviously not comparable to quasi-AAA works such as "Shame" and "Predator", I still see the quality of the game in terms of solid combat feel, rich and not lacking in detail, moderate difficulty, etc., and have a unique charm that cannot be stopped in the first few hours.
But after this excitement period, the problems of the game have gradually been exposed, the level and task advancement method is relatively single, the map range is small, the battle difficulty is large, and because the scene is full of various interactive items and detailed terrain obstacles, it is easy to encounter enemies or get stuck in the game process, and more small bugs are also very affecting the game experience.
Not only that, but on the XSX console version I used for the experience, I also found a very significant drawback - because the UI design and operation logic of "Wild West" are based on the PC version of the keyboard and mouse combination customization, although the controller control for the console has also been optimized, but the actual game process will still encounter some problems, especially when there are multiple interactive items in a narrow range, because there is no key to switch to the target, so I can only control the character to keep spinning in place. I'm looking forward to finally being able to target that thing I want.
▲ When there are many small objects or corpses piled together, it is not easy to select targets
In addition, the size of important props such as keys and bandages is very small in the game, and there is no highlighted UI or other hint methods that remind the player of attention (such as the common function of pressing a specific key to scan the surrounding interactive items), and in order to facilitate the observation of enemies patrolling around, players often need to play in a state that pulls the field of vision to the highest point, which makes it easy to overlook the props that are placed in a conspicuous place.
Putting aside these shortcomings, the basic experience of the game is still qualified, the classic American Western adventure story and mysterious religion, inhuman creatures, reincarnation and other settings are organically combined, through the 5 background settings seem to be isolated from each other but full of plot foreshadowing of the protagonist to tell the story, coupled with a high degree of freedom of sandbox gameplay, I believe it can still get the love of many players.
We've been involved in an early online appreciation of the game before, and a lot of the information at the time is still useful for everyone to understand Wild West.
Innovative themes, ancient gameplay
This game from the bottom logic is today's relatively rare top-down perspective action adventure game, the player controls a specific character to talk to people, interact with objects and scenes, fight with the enemy, in this cycle of repeated process to promote the plot, at first glance seems to remind people of CRPG, but because the game actually does not have the traditional sense of the level, experience point setting, the battle process is also a complete real-time system, so the overall sense of rhythm and promotion mode is still very different from the traditional CRPG, In addition, many battles can also be avoided through clever stealth, and theoretically, it is possible to complete the level without training at all, so the attributes of action-adventure games are more distinct.
The biggest feature of the game in terms of theme is to first show people a shell of the classic "Wild West" world view, you see the barren land, the ruined town, the rampaging bandits, the aggressive sheriff, the malicious drunkard and so on, but the player soon finds himself fighting in addition to humans, there are various supernatural species and phenomena, such as the agile, strong man-eating creature "Siren", as well as the witch who can dodge the player's fatal blow through teleportation, etc. Even the five operable protagonists have a cool "werewolf cowboy" and a cursed pig-headed man, plus the protagonist's own identity is also full of mysteries, so the atmosphere of the whole game instantly becomes weird, and the origin of the title "Strange West" is understood.
Frankly speaking, the game can provide players with a lot of driving force in the plot part, with the theme of revenge and pursuit of the murder as the theme of classics and not conventional, occasionally point out a few foreshadowings to make me curious about the protagonist's past experience and the future development of the story, in addition to the first few tutorial nature of the battle level Is also relatively low difficulty, which is conducive to the player to quickly enter the character and push the game process forward.
▲Large scene and small map
Although the content of the game is very rich and there seems to be a lot of things to do, the context behind it is actually very simple and clear. The scene in the game is divided into a large map and a location internal scene, there is no traditional open world map for people to move freely, but set up a number of fixed locations on the map, including large and small towns (mainly different types of shops), mines, farms, bandit nests, etc., both general scenarios, such as randomly refreshing targets in several specific nests according to the bounty tasks you receive, players need to repeatedly go to the same place and fight with different people; there are also some special locations. For example, through occasionally found treasure maps (searching for treasure chests or enemy drops), you can find hidden treasure locations, houses inhabited by specific NPCs, colonies for specific groups of people, graveyards, and so on.
In addition to these fixed, well-known locations, the player's movement between two points may also trigger some unexpected events at random, of course, there are the most common encounters with enemies, such as the enemy family chase (the little brother who accidentally let go when killing the bounty object comes back to take revenge), simple robbers, fierce wild animals, sirens in haunted towns, etc., there are also some positive events, such as encountering a cruising merchant, you can buy some items or sell the garbage cleaning prop grid on your body, and sometimes the plot NPC I will also use this way to stop you in the middle of the road and nag.
Random events are all one-time, not fixed triggers in a fixed position, and it is likely that they will not be seen next time they pass by. If you buy horses, the time spent traveling on the large map will be significantly shortened, in addition to a chance to shake off randomly encountered enemies and not enter the battle, and the role of horses is immediate under the premise that most side quests and bounty missions have time limits, not to mention that horses can also bring additional item slots to the character to store items.
▲You can camp at any time during the rush to rest
In addition, outside of the various points of the large map, players can actually stop and camp at any time, enter a camp map, where you can restore HP by cooking things or sleeping, and can also be used to organize props, etc., which helps to reduce the tension when running in the wild and reduce the impact of combat.
So the rhythm and atmosphere of the whole game is actually very free, there are many things to do outside the main line, in the very beginning I spent a lot of time in the various branch strongholds to do carpet search, very rich, not only by assassination from the enemy to scavenging a lot of ammunition, but also found a considerable number of bandages (equivalent to blood bottles), if not too troublesome, you can also bring the garbage back to the city to sell money. In addition, the two key items, "Nipp Relic" and "Golden Ace", which are crucial to improving the character's ability, often rely on such a carpet search to obtain.
As mentioned earlier, the character development in the game does not rely on experience points and levels under the RPG system, but mainly relies on the above two items to unlock the two talent trees of "ability" and "specialty" respectively.
"Ability" is mainly the exclusive active skill of some characters (there are also some common to the 5 protagonists), through the consumption of ammunition or action points to launch, such as pig people's specialties such as rebound bullets, poisoning, bounty hunters' enhanced kicks, etc. These are exclusive talents, and the revolver, shotgun, rifle, bow and arrow, melee five types of weapons are bound to the general fixed ability, including rifle silencer attack, bow and arrow armor shooting, etc.
Each ability requires 1 or 2 relics to unlock, and the entire skill tree is flat with no preconditions, so you can choose your favorite ability to point out and use.
Once unlocked, the contents of the "Specialty" skill tree can be shared by 5 protagonists, including a total of 13 items, each of which can be enhanced 3 times, the first time requires 1 Golden Ace, the second level 3, and the third level 5. These are basically passive skills of ability enhancement, such as increasing the HP ceiling, increasing the stealth speed, reducing the price of goods and services purchased, and so on.
The acquisition of these two upgrade items is basically 100% dependent on the player's carpet groping in various scenes, they may be hidden in various containers such as safes, cabinets, barrels, crates, etc., they may be searched from enemies who have been stunned or killed, and they may also be placed in safes and cages that require special keys to open, and the locations hidden are various.
Although the "Nip Relic" and the "Golden Ace" will emit a slight purple and golden yellow light to indicate their position, respectively, it still requires the player to observe the scene in great detail to see, but in all fairness, the process of searching is not torture, and many times it is a windfall during the habitual carpet search, and the ability improvement effect is immediate.
However, it should be pointed out that in addition to the weapons, ammunition, and garbage items that will be refreshed with the enemy, the important props in most fixed locations (including bandages, nip relics, golden aces, etc.) will not regenerate, so the design is also very reasonable.
So after a period of free exploration, the revenue from repeated searches will drop sharply, prompting players to advance the main story to unlock more locations, forming a driving force closed loop between the main line and the branch line. However, from another point of view, this also reflects the small number of game scenes and the limited freedom of exploration of players, which limits the overall pattern of the game.
And because there are a total of as many as 5 protagonists to tell the story, so the main plot of each one is not too long, too complex, leaving aside the battle process, each story generally has a maximum of a dozen scenes, connecting less than 10 key NPCs, roughly in 3 or 4 hours can end. Although the structure of the top-down view + fixed avatar recitation is inherently less suitable for interpreting complex character feelings or real interaction between characters, this part of the flaws is greatly compensated for because of the ups and downs and mysterious suspense story, and there are not many spoilers here.
Another feature of the story part is the multi-branch option and multiple endings, each time a script will finally list what choices the player has made at key nodes before, which will have an impact on the subsequent story development and character ending, and if you want to play all the endings and side lines, it is definitely not enough to play only once.
Whether to sneak in or kill is up to you
After the "Allied Death Squad" series became popular that year, there were many imitators, among which the best quality and most successful stylization were the "Desperados" series. The series has gone through several iterations until 2020 can still launch "Bounty Raiders 3", which is much longer than the "Allied Death Squad" series.
The battle system design of "Wild West" is easy to remind people of the experience of "Bounty Raiders", but it is an upgraded version that greatly strengthens the frontal confrontation, and there are also great differences in gameplay between several protagonists, some frontal attacks will be very easy, and some good use of stealth skills can avoid many unnecessary risks.
Intuitively, the combat process of "Wild West" is like a simplified version of "Bounty Raiders", the art is not so eye-catching, there is no variety of assassination mechanisms and skill combos, the operation requirements for players are very low, but the atmosphere is still in place to reproduce the essence of stealth RTT (Real-Time Tactics, real-time tactical games).
The protagonist often faces enemies several times more than himself after entering the hostile area, and the game's numerical settings are more stringent, if there is no reliable armor under the ordinary difficulty, it is often easy to be hit by the enemy 3 or 4 shots, and the enemy AI's strong desire to attack combined with the oppressive sense of multiplayer shooting from multiple angles at the same time, let me suffer a lot in the early stage of unfamiliar combat operations.
The combat system in the game uses real-time system, whether melee or ranged weapons must first make a "raise your hand" or "raise a gun" action, and then you can slash or shoot, after raising your hand, in addition to the melee weapon, the player can clearly see a red line extending out from the muzzle, coupled with the obvious effect of auxiliary correction, you can more easily aim at the target you want to attack.
But the problem is that the power of the bullet is not enough first, the enemy encountered in the early stage basically has no armor, the weapon power can be how much, but the final damage value will be interfered with by many factors, such as obstacles can offset 100% of the damage, when using the shotgun, if the enemy is outside the red range of the triangle, the power will be greatly reduced.
▲ Weapon upgrades consume a lot of resources
The more important problem is that because the individual battle scenes in the game are generally not large, once fired almost 100% will cause all the enemies around to frantically chase and output the player, and one by one the marksmanship is accurate, the melee enemies will basically use simple techniques such as flashing at a low frequency, and in the case of insufficient ammunition and unfamiliar skills in the early stage, it is normal to fight.
However, I soon discovered that it was obviously more efficient to sneak past and assassinate enemies from behind than to confront them head-on. First of all, the enemy's field of vision identified by the red fan in the game is much larger than the range of the actual warning judgment, and although the movement speed of the crouching state is very slow, it can be used to point out the skill of increasing the movement speed when lurking, which can greatly improve the movement efficiency.
Taking advantage of these two characteristics, as long as the enemy's action route and field of vision are slightly observed, it is easy to determine the assassination route, start from the periphery to clear out most of the enemy bit by bit, and finally when there are 3 or 4 people left, they will face each other head-on, and the winning rate will be much higher.
Once you are familiar with the many skills that consume action points and the interactive elements within the scene, the battle process becomes easier. These skills, including weapon boosters and flesh boosters, can basically achieve a striking effect, such as the rifle's silenced sniper, which not only ×2, but also does not trigger an alarm.
In addition, the excellent physical environment in the game also provides a variety of ways to fight, first of all, there are many interactive items, in addition to the common shooting oil lamp, oil barrel to cause fire to burn the enemy, you can also shoot at the bullet box on the table to cause a small range of explosions, rainy days If the enemy appears wet signs, then throwing a lightning battery at this time can play the most extreme effect, in the reduction of HP at the same time can also fix the person in place.
▲ Water, fire, and electricity may all become partners
If you're fast enough, throwing an oil lamp at an enemy and blowing it up in the air is also possible, and it's part of the game's design tutorial at the beginning. From the original design point of view, the makers hope to create a physical environment as realistic as possible in this cartoon world, so that a lot of visible efforts have been made to allow players to figure out new ways of playing outside of conventional combat methods, although the actual result is of course that the frequency of use of such operations is not high, stealth assassination and conventional combat methods are enough to deal with the vast majority of enemies, but it also shows the persistence and stubbornness of the developers.
Ironically, however, the biggest flaw I encountered during the battle was not within the design of the entire system, but the "instant archive" function. In addition to a few auto-saves in the game, players can also manually save their current status in any non-combat state, anytime, anywhere.
Combined with XSX's extremely short reading time, I quickly found that this almost completely destroyed all of the game's combat difficulty design and other experiences, all I needed to do was touch behind an enemy and kill him to save a file and continue to touch forward, and if I failed, I could read the save of tens of seconds ago.
Even the mandatory boss battle is not difficult for me, there are countless props in the scene and backpack for me to test, how to kill the boss more efficiently and safely. Finally found that the most dangerous situation is the forced encounter with the enemy in the process of running in the field, entering the battle minimap is directly the combat state, but generally speaking, this case will not encounter any hard stubble, a little attention can be.
Who would have thought that the high-speed reading and instant save features that were originally used to facilitate players and the power to destroy the game experience would be better to avoid using this feature if you don't want your journey to wild west to become a boring access game.
summary
"Wild West" implements the consistent style of publisher Devolver Digital in terms of volume, subject matter and actual performance, the core experience is solid, it is fun to play, and it exudes a unique and unique temperament, which is also the characteristic of the core members of the developer WolfEye Studio in the early years of the Arkane Studio masterpieces.
▲ The game has a very real and vivid interactive system
▲ Free to explore a variety of possibilities
However, to be fair, after the novelty and rich experience in the early stage of the game slowly faded, the shortcomings of the small pattern works such as the lack of diverse exploration modes, high scene repetition, and rigid combat experience of "Wild West" were quickly exposed, and the internal beta version also had various small bugs, such as not finding mission targets, AI teammate pathfinding problems, assassination judgment drifting, etc. I couldn't let myself dig up new stories and start new adventures with passion like the first 10 hours of entering the game. Carpet searches have gone from fun to boring, repetitive work at first (after all, most items are not very useful), the mode and content of side quests are relatively monotonous, and the relatively harsh combat difficulty makes me "skip class" again and again.
Fortunately, the game finally tells a twisted and bizarre, fresh story that makes me not have too many doubts about WolfEye Studios' capabilities. This time, they did have some problems in the handling of some subsystems, but it was still commendable to experience an alternative Western adventure.