Weird west ps4 release date4/25/2023 The finicky triggers and unintuitive button layouts become a nightmare when you’re in the middle of a gunfight, and friendly fire is almost impossible to avoid. I’m told it’s only marginally better with a controller. Aiming and pivoting is painfully finicky, and executing special actions – a process that involves holding down mouse buttons, haphazardly scrolling to the correct weapon and hitting number keys – feels counterintuitive and awkward. Of course, if things aren’t going well, like any good RPG, you can always just run away.Ĭombat using a keyboard and mouse – a new necessity for me thanks to long-term nerve damage – is not great. Ammo drop rates are pretty thin – this isn’t always bad because it forces you to get creative in combat – which leads to the tedious process of manually scrapping every gun you find for bullets, even in the middle of a murder brawl. Exacerbating this problem is the fact that you can’t cycle to adjacent items – for instance, if you kill two same-name enemies near (or worse, atop) each other, you can’t easily differentiate between the two corpses to loot them quickly. Even with camera zoom, there’s no ideal depth that feels right, and it’s a constant game of adjustment, which is especially awful on scrubby terrain. It’s a compelling premise that lays promising ground, but the ambitious story is undermined by finicky game mechanics and odd choices in the developers’ approach to immersion. By the time I get to the third chapter, the witch who routinely returns to laugh at me has lost her bite, and by the fifth, I just wanted her to go away. NPCs will drop in like an unwanted peanut gallery to remind you that all of this – the mystery, the strange brand you all share, talk of an “experiment” – will eventually make sense. Playing as Jane, a Pigman, a member of the indigenous Lost Fire nation, a werewolf, and finally an Oneirist, it becomes clear that our protagonist is the butt of an elaborate supernatural joke. The player starts as Jane Bell, a gunslinger-turned-farmer who returns to bounty hunting after an attack on her home. The first chapter is arguably the most tedious, and a real obstacle in attuning to the game’s pace and combat mechanics. The environments, sound design and wild frontier details are brimming with detail, and there’s clearly been thought put into how this dark fantasy/western hybrid genre – a genre built upon real histories of genocide, enslavement, racism, and violence – would resonate with modern values, assuming we’ve all evolved away from the ignorance and bigotry of the past (into more insidious forms of bigotry in the present). Still, Wolfeye’s ‘immersive sim’ supernatural western shooter is undoubtedly stylish with its broody art and raw, expressive lines. Most immersive sims are first-person for a reason, and frankly I can’t think of recent games that have attempted to do this, even poorly. Having missed the golden age of Ultima, my immediate point of reference after a few hours in the Weird West was the Shadowrun Returns/Shadowrun Hong Kong series – technically these are tactical turn-based RPGs where the sense of immersion stems from the depth of its writing – but even as my playing hours reached double digits, things still didn’t quite click for me. Wolfeye’s goal was to tackle the world of top-down immersive sims as homage to the Ultima CRPG series. On paper, Weird West reads like the kind of game I’d like, but in practice it’s an acquired taste.
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