#Weird west platforms plus

That’s a wise design choice because it means that if you prefer to sneak through the whole thing, avoiding combat and pilfering the artifacts and golden playing cards that unlock new abilities you won’t be missing out on much by way of progression. Of course, there’s no XP gained from killing in Weird West, so that means it’s really an expedient means of acquiring loot as you go from point A to point B or defending yourself when you get caught where you shouldn’t be.

There’s a lot of room to experiment here, and I love when a plan – or a completely accidental win – comes together.

#Weird west platforms plus

Electricity plus water is another good one to remember. Touching arrows to a flame makes them into fire arrows, while dipping them in poison does exactly what you’d expect. Throw a lit oil lamp into a field and watch the firestorm that ensues water (including rain) puts out the fire, while wind makes it spread faster. Weird West is as much an immersive sim as it is an action game (which makes sense, considering Wolfeye was founded by Raphael Colantonio, who previously founded Arkane Studios, known for Dishonored and Prey) so you can expect plenty of opportunities for physics-based antics. Pros will know to do this before a fight breaks out, but I relied on slow-mo to give me the time I needed to really take advantage of the environment. You get extra bullets in your gun and can fire rapidly, so anything short of a boss-level character will usually melt under a satisfying hail of bullets before you hit the ground. But their personalities come across in the writing when you interact with them, and we’re given plenty of opportunities to define them for ourselves with choices about who to help and who to harm.Īlso, slow-mo will automatically activate when you initiate a cinematic dive move, which eats some of your precious Action Point bar that’s consumed by your abilities, but is extremely worth it because of how much damage you can put out. There’s also an added tension from the fact that these irreplaceable companions can permanently die (unless you reload a quicksave), so they’re more of a loss than the disposable mercenaries you can hire in that role when things go bad.Īnother forgivable letdown is that none of the main characters are voiced – we only ever hear from the Sam Elliot-impersonating narrator, and the voices that play behind the text of everyone else’s speech sounds like spooky whispers or if Bane from The Dark Knight Rises was a Sim.

You can, however, go back to their homes and recruit them as one of your two AI-controlled companions (and you’d be crazy not to, since they’re powerful and you get their inventories back) but the AI doesn’t use their abilities with the precision they need to be really useful in combination with your own. While it’s kind of a bummer that you can’t switch back to directly controlling a previous character if you miss their abilities, that’s an understandable limitation when you consider how the story works as a sequence of events.