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In the middle of the night, I was awakened by noise outside the house. I picked up the oil lamp on the bedside table to see my surroundings, but I accidentally clicked it wrong and let my character throw the lamp against the wall. The lights were shattered and flames burst out of the cabin. A bottle of whiskey on the table was set on fire, and the fire shattered the wooden chair, spread to the curtains, and then burned all the way out of the window, burning the chicken coop outside the house. A few loud chicken cries came from outside, and I stood in a mess watching the feathers of the poultry flying in the air, and then I myself was gradually swallowed into the fire caused by my own stupid mistakes.
Ah, it's the kind of game, I thought to myself, just like Bliss Disco can die with a tie, but with more physics and chemistry, and a fire that can spread.
Wild West is the first work from the newly formed WolfEye Studios. The studio's co-founder, Rapha l Colantonio, had worked at Arkana as creative director for games like Shame and Predator. In other words, Wild West also has a chaotic and complex system.
Like Shame and Predator, this is also a non-genre game that combines the wilderness and gunfights of westerns with horror and fantasy elements. In this game, you can find extrajudicial justice in the Westerns or the duel at noon, but there are witches, werewolves, and vampires here.
While Wild West is a mix of systems and gameplay, it's still a familiar CRPG at its roots, not a spectacular, reinterpreted immersive simulation game. Similar to Larian's last Few Divine Realm games, you can pick up almost anything, set your surroundings on fire (instantly), or stealth pickpocketing NPCs. Wild West is not very large, the world size feels smaller than many large RPGs, and because it is divided into several areas, it does not seem particularly coherent.
The plot structure of Wild West is similar to that of a story set. There are 5 main characters in the game, each with their own story and a problem to solve: a bounty hunter whose husband is kidnapped by a powerful gang of cannibals; a pig-man who has undergone a terrible metamorphosis and is seeking revenge; a Native American hunter who wants to protect his homeland from greedy demons; a werewolf; and a witch. There are also a number of common character threads that tie together the chapters of the 5 main characters, including a strange girl who tells riddles, a wandering witch who plays games with you, and a bounty hunter obsessed with immortality and bad jokes.
Each protagonist's story affects the chapter of the next protagonist. If you liberate a haunted town of monsters in the bounty hunter's story, when you return here as a pigman, it will become a lively place with shops and taverns. If you burn and plunder here, it will turn into an empty city flooded with graveyards in the next chapter. After completing each chapter, the chapter protagonist will be retained for the next story, waiting to be recruited into the team.
In the final showdown of the main story, 5 characters will come together. The choices in the 5 chapters will all have an impact on this showdown. This is a common practice of CRPG, which varies in the early stages, but in the end, they all become cold criteria for judging, and they are summed up to determine the outcome. Although the overlap of 5 different lives in the same world is a very ambitious structure, "Wild West" has some east and one hammer and one stick, which ultimately gives people a feeling of weakness.
It is all the content that has been read by the flowers and is not worth savoring. Random encounters are insignificant, and even the highest-level side quests are not "tricky" enough. I would have been expecting more Cthulhu, more bizarre novels, like the talking rats in Shame, the intelligent and emotional heart, the magic whale, and so on. As it turns out, Wild West is not very "weird".
If the main plot is scattered but ambitious, then the side line is a real failure. The map is large, and players will encounter hundreds of locations when crossing the wilderness, but many places feel very similar, and they are all things that are read by the flowers and flowers, and it is not worth savoring. Random encounters are insignificant, and even the highest-level side quests are not "tricky" enough. I would have expected more Cthulhu, more bizarre fiction, like the talking rats, the intelligent and emotional heart, the magical whales of Shame. But it turns out that "Wild West" is not very "weird".
During the game, I explored dozens of underground mines and explored a larger number of caves and ancient ruins, all of which had the same "mysterious" architectural structures. While some of the levels with hidden rooms and trail entrances are well designed, too many are the same set of things that are out of order and rearrange the combination. The scene style is very similar to the dark american comics, a bit of a weakened version of Mike Mignola (well-known American comic artist, masterpieces of Hellboy, Batman: Gotham under the gas lamp), but far less eye-catching than the character avatars and cutscenes.
Disappointingly, there are so few unique locations. Among the more carefully designed locations, one is a large wind and moon place with complete furniture and red velvet curtains, reminiscent of the golden cat in "Shame". While the top-down view doesn't do the intricate architecture of a first-person immersive simulation game, in some of the larger levels of Wild West, players can climb up rooftops and balconies and descend from the glass ceiling.
One of my favorite parts of the game is sneaking into the manor and robbing banks, so that my character can gain great power in the early stages. After getting dozens of gold bars and a legendary six-shot revolver, I felt like I was cheating. In immersive simulation games, this kind of "out-of-order gameplay" is my favorite thing. Wild West is less careful about the balance of difficulty. It has a lot of flaws, lacks polishing, and doesn't mind the player experimenting, nor does it mind the player getting the post-equipment too early (of course, it still needs the help of a few quick saves).
While sneaking behind enemy lines is fun, the stealth system itself has limited functionality. You can take down unsuspecting enemies and hide corpses to avoid detection by patrolling guards, but other than that, the stealth system is very rudimentary, and sneaking to clear enemy camps can become very boring.
In this regard, a number of excellent spy games represented by Mimimi Games' Bounty Raiders 3 have made Wild West unattainable. However, it is not a tactical stealth game, so Wild West can also rely on the combat system. In games like Bounty, getting caught often means it's time for a quick read, while in Wild West — like its predecessor , Shame — the experience is great.
While players can add a variety of percentage-plus buffs to themselves (each weapon type also has a skill tree), character-specific skills are the most powerful and interesting thing, and in the case of Pigman, a strong character who can slash and shoot, unleash poison gas, or rampage everywhere to create chaos. These skills not only match his personality, but more importantly also encourage players to try different play styles.
But at the same time, there are certain drawbacks to binding skills to specific roles. The experience would be much better if the first two characters could use teleportation instead of until the last one. I also want Pigman to use the Hunter's Tornado spell. For a game that is keen to experiment with players, not being able to mix and match these skills can seem like a big flop.
Wild West also has some cool combat mechanics. Each time you roll over in the aiming state, the game temporarily becomes Max Payne — it temporarily enters bullet time, giving you time to make decisions about your next action. However, perhaps the best combat mechanics in this game are "kicks". This skill, copied from Arkane's Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, is presumably a favorite of many, as it makes the most of the subsystems that work with each other, and almost everything in the game can move and be used as a powerful weapon.
The level is littered with explosive barrels, a small pool of oil, or other dangerous environmental items. Where this chaos is about to strike, Wild West is most like an excellent immersive simulation game. All kinds of ideas are constantly bursting into the player's mind, constantly thinking about how to move items? Which thing to kick? Do you want to bring electricity and water together? Or mix fire with poison? While these ideas don't work out a lot of times, and can even backfire and burn yourself to death in a log cabin, it feels really amazing when your plan succeeds.
But in Wild West, there are too few such wonderful moments. Its vast ambitions and voluminous simulation system mean that sooner or later it will bring some memorable moments — like the disaster caused by an oil lamp — but it's not necessarily the one that makes you happy, and when you compare it to the complex and elegant Shame, Wild West is even more crude. It failed to do what many people (including me) expected, failed to bring the spirit of Arkane and immersive simulation games into a creative top-down game, and stumbled into a mediocre realm, becoming a shrunken CRPG, far from being "weird" and "wild.".
Translation: Liu Sheng's non-love sword
Edit: Tony