Bodies ragdoll, blood spatters and pools, and stetsons soar. As well as a range of weapon skills and spectral powers, you can also perform a bullet-time dive in any direction, slowing time to a crawl as you dodge bullets and fire back as if you’re in a John Woo flick. At least here there’s a tool you can use to control the pace. You don’t quite need Hotline Miami- level reflexes, but it’s not far off. That precision is important because death comes fairly quickly if you don’t use cover and movement to throw enemies off. It’s so precise that you can throw a bottle into the air and shoot it mid-flight. It plays like a twin-stick shooter, but the aim assist is perfectly tuned – it doesn’t lock onto foes, but it’s smart enough to take differences in elevation into account. I might have saved that town from the Stillwaters, but the saloon owner hates my guts now. In one fight, I kick someone so hard that they smash through a saloon window. Jane Bell even has a supernatural power that amps up her kick and allows her to boot baddies across the map. Kick over barrels of oil, causing them to spill before setting them alight. They’re all brilliant and they all have a kick button. Deathloop, Bulletstorm, Dark Messiah: Of Might and Magic – all of these games are elevated by the humble boot. As we all know, video game kicks are brilliant. No need to rope down a chimney when you’re the scariest thing in town. When I’m tasked with speaking to a jeweler as a pigman, I creep into town at night, check no one is around, and kick the store’s front door off its hinges. It encourages you to roleplay as each character – however it is you see them. It reminds me a little of how Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines ’ starting class altered your experience, and the bite-sized nature of each story really suits this structure. As a pigman, for example, some people are hostile to you on account of you being a, you know, man who eats corpses and has a pig’s head. While every character can use every weapon type – shotguns, rifles, pistols, bows – they’re also imbued with magical powers that make them feel distinct, whether you’re summoning tornadoes with the protector or barreling through enemies as the pigman.Įach character shows you the world from an entirely new perspective. You can even recruit your old characters into your party to adventure with you, and each brings something unique to a fight. When your story with one character is over, it’s onto the next, and the world remains however you left it – characters you killed are dead, enemies who got away might turn up on wanted posters, towns you didn’t save are overrun with creatures. I’ll let you discover the last two characters for yourself, but each has a self-contained story that’s weaved into the overarching tale about a group of immortals trying to do… something spoilery. It heightens the greed of men, to the point where they’re so full of lust that they eat their own lips. You’re tasked with helping a tree commit suicide.Īfter that, you’re an indigenous protector who’s fighting against the curse of the Wiindigo, a physical manifestation of colonialism. Once Jane Bell’s story is over, you take the role of a pigman who may or may not have been more of a pig when he was a man. Anyone in this world could be a siren in disguise, and there are even some people – like a prisoner who calls himself “Snack” – who want to be eaten by them. Your husband has been captured by a gang called the Stillwaters, who plan to sell him as meat to the sirens, a race of shapeshifting creatures who slither along the ground when they’re not pretending to be human. It grounds you in this typical cowboy movie setup, but it’s not long before you realize why the game isn’t just called “West”. Your first quest is to bury your son and dig up your irons, squirreled away back when Jane Bell decided to leave a life of bounty hunting behind. The game opens with a gang kidnapping your husband and murdering your child. Sure, you might see a lot of the same assets repeated across its small playspaces, but there’s more to games than realistically animated horse gonads. It’s built to be played and replayed, to be messed with and pushed to its limits. Kill anyone, including key characters, and the story goes on. While part of me wishes I could have seen the triple-A dollars version, played from a first-person perspective, this purity of vision – and the budget constraints – allows the game to go deeper on choice and consequence. Weird West is as much an immersive sim as Deus Ex and Thief, but it takes place from a bird’s-eye view. The main difference between this and, say, Dishonored, is the budget. It’s a design ethos that continues with the new studio’s debut game. These are the kinds of games Raphael Colantonio and his team at WolfEye have created since the founding of Arkane Studios: immersive sims.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |