For one, when strapped for funds, you might take to guiltlessly burglarizing the home of some shifty NPCs you encountered as another character.Josh Brolin and Megan Fox star in Jonah Hex Newly armed with prior knowledge of how the game works, you’re given space to adapt your play style and try different approaches to things like the morality system or locations that you’ve already visited. When you wrap up one person’s storyline, the game continues by dropping you into the shoes of another and essentially giving you a do-over with skill distribution and approaches to the morality system. If there’s an area where Weird West comes close to working, it’s in the cast of characters. The game’s only real concession for its camera seems to be its surplus of exploding barrels, which are all so bright and huge that they’re impossible to miss. Weird West, however, only obscures visual information, rendering its touted interactions like exploding ammo boxes, spreading fire, and revenge-seeking characters as tiny splotches of color against a larger, ill-conceived canvas. In this style of game, we need to be able to parse all our options at a glance. Your characters can take cover, but it’s not immediately clear which ones are tall enough to break the enemy’s line of sight or obstruct your own aim, the latter of which is shown as a red dot and then a grayed-out line on a UI that’s been seemingly built for ants. The entire game is designed this way, stubbornly refusing to adapt mechanics and conventions that no longer make sense with this awkward control scheme and this top-down camera perspective. Worse, the materials you find tend to all be the same nondescript junk, with the exception of a few coins and a handful of bullets, the latter of which can be used to dismantle the same few firearms and with the press of the right button. In a first-person game, you intuitively point and click on the objects that you want to investigate, but in Weird West you have to nudge your character little by little until they’re in the right position for a nearby loot container to light up, which is made even more difficult when there are multiple containers scattered around a small area. Even something so basic as scavenging for materials becomes a chore here. On paper, it even sounds like a good idea.īut you hardly need to spend any time at all with Weird West to see the fatal flaws in its attempt to stitch the immersive sim together with a top-down shooter. There are the usual gunslingers, sheriffs, and small towns where saloon doors are always swinging and the main street is defined by its dustiness, but there are also elements of fantasy and horror: zombies, cave monsters, and men with the heads of pigs. WolfEye Studios’s Weird West works hard to replicate this play style, though it opts instead for an omniscient, top-down POV and a rather atypical western setting. These are games about leveraging systems against each other, and experimenting with different approaches that may include the typical mix of shooting and stealthing, but that could also involve, say, stacking some crates to simply climb over a wall rather than dispatch that guard standing out front or sneak through a hole in the back fence. Immersive sims are generally told from a first-person perspective-the better to draw you into the role of a character whose choices and interactions with the world take center stage.

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