

Weird west physical release full#
Skills that allow you to unload a full clip in one powerful shot or leap into slow-motion to dodge a swipe are vital. And when the caves coughed up monsters, the sturdy crates I was hiding behind couldn't save me. Stealth is an option too, but the density of enemy patrols made it hard for me to stay undetected, often leading to frantic firefights anyway. I was forced to take cover, roll, and carefully aim, but every bullet felt like a dice roll. Enemies carrying shotguns blasted my health away in a few shots.
Weird west physical release series#
The first character, a bounty hunter in search of her husband, is equipped with a series of lethal and silent skills but is incredibly weak. Weird West is about making plans that inevitably tumble out of control. Instead of minimizing your combat encounters like a Deathloop speedrun, you fail and improvise as in a speedrun gone wrong. It's a character-driven RPG where you solve problems and mysteries, primarily with a gun. It doesn’t take long before you start to see where Weird West is coming from.

The five hours I spent with Weird West wasn't enough time to guess at where the story goes, but I was able to get a grip on my role in the game. The level of historic transformation here doesn't resemble Friends at the Table's Sangfielle (opens in new tab), which disassembles the bones of the Old West into something monstrous and unknowable. It's also the first game I've played set in this time period that features a number of Black and Asian characters, although it's unclear to me at this point if Weird West plans to grapple with America's westward expansion from those perspectives or the native perspective, which are often erased in western fiction, or if the supernatural will take center stage. Nods to the nature of Weird West's world (hint: it's weird) and not only my character's place in it, but my place as the player, upended a lot of my assumptions about how it'd frame a well-trodden sort of fiction. A recurring character who takes the form of a young, dead girl referred to my character as "the passenger" almost as if that name was for me, the player. Not everyone I bumped into had a story to tell or a quest to give. His portraits are raw like Disco Elysium's cast, but not quite as surreal. I didn't remember their names, but I remembered their faces thanks to Cedric Peyravernay’s art, which previously defined the gloomy Dishonored series. As I led my veteran bounty hunter through Weird West's tangled world, I spent a lot of time speaking with the people, something that happens rarely in Deathloop. Weird West yanks the camera back from the first-person view established by Ultima Underworld and System Shock to a bird's eye view, turning the characters into board game pieces.
