My Impressions: Westerado Double Barreled.
Comparing it to the free version, which I played some time ago.
Basic game description: Some mysterious fucker burned down your ranch and killed your family. You start out with a single clue about his (randomized) appearance, and get more details during various quests. You go out into the gameworld, and do whatever - kill bandits, herd buffalo, protect mail coaches, help ranchers defend their property, make peace with the local Indians, the works. Alternately, you can hunt down buffalo, rob mail coaches, massacre the Indians and force ranchers to give up their farms.
Gameplay - you move up and down through a 2d world, Zelda style (I really need to learn some technical terms for these). Up, down, left, right. Besides pressing E to talk to people and use fast-travel horses (fairly generously scattered across most inhabited areas), you can always press J to draw your gun, and K to cock and shoot. This affects the world twofold:
Gunfights become a bit more tactical and careful. You can’t run with your gun out, so you have to choose your position to draw and fire (also to reload). The other characters follow the same rules, and you can get them to waste their shots, or shoot each other. A decent amount of tactical possibilities for a simple 2d Western game.
Characters also respond to you drawing your gun in conversations. You can scare them, agro them, gain their cooperation, or get the first shot off in a coming gunfight. Makes for a lot of interesting possibilities.
You get three hats as a life system. You can buy more in shops (or bring a hat with special powers into the shop to get them to sell it, which the game never tells you), or shoot them off enemies and put them on. Hats saving lives is actually a part of the game narrative, which is the sort of dry humor the game excels at. The game plays broad Western clichés well, without being overtly and annoyingly self-aware.
The good:
For a 175 mb (an instant download) game, this looks really nice (if you don't have a problem with pixel graphics) and sounds great (decent variety of music tracks). The characters are probably the biggest issue - everything looks like a pixely painting, while the characters are more of a character-free (no pun intended) pixlel-mess.
This is where the game improves on the free version:
The world is fairly large, and there isn’t much wasted space. You can blaze through the game by focusing mostly on the inhabited areas, which are clustered together, or you can explore every inch of the desert, forests, mines and mountains, to see what secrets and items of interest are hidden within them.
There are a lot of different, mutually exclusive quests, and you’ll get several playthroughs worth right there. Some of quest outcomes are highly specific, and it’s worth experimenting. What the killer was all about also changes depending on what you quests you do to locate him.
You actually have a use for all the money you get from dead bandits and quest completion. A number of weapons that alter you playstyle a bit (best - dual pistols. Worst - the bolas, which just immobilize an enemy for an easy hat-shot). You also get a house as a final money-sink.
The achievements are probably the best I’ve ever seen (though the most recent game I played was Contradiction, where the achievements are literally just “complete chapter X” “complete chapter x without using cheats” and so on for x+1). Different endings, different quest outcomes, finding secrets, etc. The most impressive part is that despite having nearly 70 achievements, there are very few obvious “grind this shit out” achievs. No “kill X of enemy type Y” or “get x kills with weapon Z”. The few “kill a bunch of buffalo / lizards” achievements only require like a dozen kills. Just a good lesson in achievement design / how to have multiple interesting outcomes to plotlines in your game.
You also get different characters to play as depending on the ending you get. They don’t differ that much, besides their default weapons (except for one hard mode character), but it’s still a worthwhile addition.
The bad:
To summarize: some features feel buggy and half-finished, and I wish I could save.
To expand: The movement feels laggy, and you often get caught up on random and barely visible terrain features (which can get your hats depleted in a hurry)
When you play as the female character, NPCs will occasionally start talking about the murderer as an evil woman, only to switch to “he” in mid-sentence (the murderer can only be male).
The game autosaves, you can’t really experiment with different quest outcomes or just causing havoc without restarting the game (though, to be fair, you can progress quite quickly when you know what you’re doing), which gets even more irritating when:
Characters glitch out. Particularly NPCs that accompany you or travel from place to place. They refuse to leave their rooms and screw up quest progression. Quite annoying.
Check out this guy costing me the toughest achievement (saving escort NPCs is really pointlessly tough. Wish you could give them extra hats) in the game by getting stuck and duplicating himself. Or this guy failing to reset after a failed mission. This guy just has a basic proofreading error. By the way, have you noticed that the characters all kinda look like crap due to the refusal to draw their faces?
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this game, and it was well worth the purchase, but I feel like it could do with another major patch. 7/10.
Basic game description: Some mysterious fucker burned down your ranch and killed your family. You start out with a single clue about his (randomized) appearance, and get more details during various quests. You go out into the gameworld, and do whatever - kill bandits, herd buffalo, protect mail coaches, help ranchers defend their property, make peace with the local Indians, the works. Alternately, you can hunt down buffalo, rob mail coaches, massacre the Indians and force ranchers to give up their farms.
Gameplay - you move up and down through a 2d world, Zelda style (I really need to learn some technical terms for these). Up, down, left, right. Besides pressing E to talk to people and use fast-travel horses (fairly generously scattered across most inhabited areas), you can always press J to draw your gun, and K to cock and shoot. This affects the world twofold:
Gunfights become a bit more tactical and careful. You can’t run with your gun out, so you have to choose your position to draw and fire (also to reload). The other characters follow the same rules, and you can get them to waste their shots, or shoot each other. A decent amount of tactical possibilities for a simple 2d Western game.
Characters also respond to you drawing your gun in conversations. You can scare them, agro them, gain their cooperation, or get the first shot off in a coming gunfight. Makes for a lot of interesting possibilities.
You get three hats as a life system. You can buy more in shops (or bring a hat with special powers into the shop to get them to sell it, which the game never tells you), or shoot them off enemies and put them on. Hats saving lives is actually a part of the game narrative, which is the sort of dry humor the game excels at. The game plays broad Western clichés well, without being overtly and annoyingly self-aware.
The good:
For a 175 mb (an instant download) game, this looks really nice (if you don't have a problem with pixel graphics) and sounds great (decent variety of music tracks). The characters are probably the biggest issue - everything looks like a pixely painting, while the characters are more of a character-free (no pun intended) pixlel-mess.
This is where the game improves on the free version:
The world is fairly large, and there isn’t much wasted space. You can blaze through the game by focusing mostly on the inhabited areas, which are clustered together, or you can explore every inch of the desert, forests, mines and mountains, to see what secrets and items of interest are hidden within them.
There are a lot of different, mutually exclusive quests, and you’ll get several playthroughs worth right there. Some of quest outcomes are highly specific, and it’s worth experimenting. What the killer was all about also changes depending on what you quests you do to locate him.
You actually have a use for all the money you get from dead bandits and quest completion. A number of weapons that alter you playstyle a bit (best - dual pistols. Worst - the bolas, which just immobilize an enemy for an easy hat-shot). You also get a house as a final money-sink.
The achievements are probably the best I’ve ever seen (though the most recent game I played was Contradiction, where the achievements are literally just “complete chapter X” “complete chapter x without using cheats” and so on for x+1). Different endings, different quest outcomes, finding secrets, etc. The most impressive part is that despite having nearly 70 achievements, there are very few obvious “grind this shit out” achievs. No “kill X of enemy type Y” or “get x kills with weapon Z”. The few “kill a bunch of buffalo / lizards” achievements only require like a dozen kills. Just a good lesson in achievement design / how to have multiple interesting outcomes to plotlines in your game.
You also get different characters to play as depending on the ending you get. They don’t differ that much, besides their default weapons (except for one hard mode character), but it’s still a worthwhile addition.
The bad:
To summarize: some features feel buggy and half-finished, and I wish I could save.
To expand: The movement feels laggy, and you often get caught up on random and barely visible terrain features (which can get your hats depleted in a hurry)
When you play as the female character, NPCs will occasionally start talking about the murderer as an evil woman, only to switch to “he” in mid-sentence (the murderer can only be male).
The game autosaves, you can’t really experiment with different quest outcomes or just causing havoc without restarting the game (though, to be fair, you can progress quite quickly when you know what you’re doing), which gets even more irritating when:
Characters glitch out. Particularly NPCs that accompany you or travel from place to place. They refuse to leave their rooms and screw up quest progression. Quite annoying.
Check out this guy costing me the toughest achievement (saving escort NPCs is really pointlessly tough. Wish you could give them extra hats) in the game by getting stuck and duplicating himself. Or this guy failing to reset after a failed mission. This guy just has a basic proofreading error. By the way, have you noticed that the characters all kinda look like crap due to the refusal to draw their faces?
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this game, and it was well worth the purchase, but I feel like it could do with another major patch. 7/10.