West of Dead (2020)

I won this game on Steamgifts and wanted to give it a try.

I'ts a fairly competent rougelite, but there were some things about the design choices that just made it unenjoyable for me. The tight camera angles and darkness mechanics are the two that stick with me as something that is a choice, but didn't work for me.

Overall, there were some elements that were cool. the two weapons on the triggers were interesting and the thematic stuff really worked.

At the end of the day, it's not a bad game, but it's not for me when I still have a backlog and so many other games are coming out.

~David.

But it's still good on the long run... probably.

West of Dead is a very brave game that ditches the "The" in its title, even though it kinda sounds dumb without it. It also is a twin-stick shooter, roguelike where you explore the purgatory in a revenge quest with a very nice spaghetti western atmosphere and aesthetic.

The shooting feels good and the weapons are fun to use, even if some are very gimmicky and less useful than others. The game includes an aim assist option you can adjust to your convenience, but even at the highest level, the guns aren't pinpoint accurate, giving the feeling that you are using very old, unreliable, weapons. There are hiccups in gameplay here and there, like the occasional glitch, but they never felt like deal breakers to me. Overall, if there was one thing that kept me coming back, it was the gameplay.

In the presentation department, the purgatory looks great with some very striking shadows and lighting. The theme for each area is pretty good and atmospheric. The story is just okay though but the one voice actor, sir Ron Perlman, absolutely kills it and increases my enjoyment exponentially. That is if his lines actually trigger though.

I should also probably talk about the state of the game. It's not completely broken, but it does have some problems that hinder the experience as of May 2021 (how is it may already??). Like the aforementioned hiccups in gameplay, broken animations, glitching through cover and bullets going above enemies; voice lines may fail to trigger leaving the MC silent for the rest of the run; certain objectives are bugged, for example, there are 3 characters you need to meet in a single run towards the end of the game, and they might or might not appear depending on your luck or the game might fail to register you met one of them, forcing you to restart a run just to advance the story. Those were the ones I found during my playtime, the last one was particularly painful, many runs were lost. Then again, I liked the game enough to come back after each failed run, but it was pretty annoying ngl.

Fun fact: the game starts with very few items you can find while exploring the purgatory, if you want more you need to unlock them, but you also may unlock an item you don’t like. These unfavorable items will start cluttering the purgatory making it harder to find the equipment you like! I find the game overall kinda easy, so it’s an interesting way to increase the difficulty.

Conclusion: It’s gud, very fun even if a little raw, but if you dislike the base gameplay, the bugs will probably cause you to dislike the game.

Great ideas but feels like a beta...

There is a lot this game has going for it. The Rogue-like elements are heavily inspired from Dead Cells, which is a fantastic formula. I don't fault any game for drawing heavily from successful mechanics. The twin stick shooting concept with the two weapons is fantastic and when you get good combos between your weapons it is very satisfying with great sound effects.

However the big fault is that the game's play control feels "off". Dodges don't always work and it isn't clear why. Without enemies around the dodge seems different and more forgiving. But when enemies are around I seem to be more limited in using multiple dodges and it isn't clear why. Similarly there are times when guns miss at point blank range, which is frustrating. Also guns don't reload consistently and there are times when I am empty even after a long delay of not firing.

There are other minor blemishes such as no fast travel (I assume that's what the green bonfires are) and if you have two hand guns the character animation still only uses a single hand. Not horrible, but additional small detractors. Nothing on the store page suggests this is still in beta but the version number is clearly not even 1.0. I really want to like this game as I see great promise, but will wait for additional patches. I hope they tighten up the play control because that is one of the things that made Dead Cells a phenomenal game.

Some fresh news from PlayStation Magazine on West Of Dead

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A roguelike that glares down at you and asks ”Do you feel lucky, punk?"

A massive no-no in games usually is having creatures that you just can’t see,” co—founder and coder at Upstream Arcade Adam Langridge tells us, “[...] [but our art style] looks its best when you have things emerging out of just darkness.” Borrowing from the shadowy works of Mike ‘Hellboy’ Mignola and the high-contrast panels of Frank ‘Sin City’ Miller, this western-infused cover shooter quickly instils a justifiable fear of the dark. It’s impressive work from a two-person art department, composed of studio co-founder Imkan Hayati and Patrick Martin. Gwilym Rees rounds out the four- man-band as a second coder, and makes the studio 3 Lionhead reunion. Langridge tells us how supportive publisher Raw Fury has been throughout West Of Dead’s development, expanding the scope of what was originally intended to be “a little indie thing” and making one particular developer dream come true. “

[Our publisher] started suggesting, ‘If you could choose anyone [to voice the protagonist], who would you choose?” Langridge tells us, elaborating, “We were a little bit insulated from the process [...] So, we had a short list and at the very top was ‘Ron Perlman.’ But it was one of those things that was like ‘Well, put it in. It’s not gonna happen but put him in anyway? [...] Every now and then I’d get an email and go ‘It sounds like Raw Fury is talking to Ron Perlman! No, that must be a mistake!’ And then I’d forget about it a bit longer until they said ‘Yeah, we’ve got him. He’s in.’ So that was fantastic!” As you explore each randomised room in Purgatory (Wyoming), unknown horrors lurk in every poorly lit corner. If you can get to a lantern, you can light things up with square, temporarily stunning nearby monsters. Pelting towards a dim lantern, glirnpsing a ripple of sinew in the dark, we experience the magical moment the art style is aimed at evoking. During our hands-on, lighting lanterns becomes a reflex, as getting caught by the ghoulies is a hard lesson that only bears repeating a handful of times. Langridge says, “Something that we want to do is pull people into the centre of a room even if it looks scary, so that they can get surrounded a little bit more, rather than [...] take pot shots from the corner [...] and the lanterns turned out to be quite a nice way of doing that. So you’ll see this scary dark room and there’s a bit of bait in the middle [...] [The light stunning] the creatures gives you a bit of a chance to think and then you can start shooting.”

Going in with a vague plan is helpful, but the ability to improvise is key to survival. Enemies can destroy cover, which regenerates after a while. You'll need to htmker down to speed up your automatic reload but you can’t just sit and wait either. Facing off against the first boss, seeing him diving in and out of cover, lobbing explosives, not to mention all the other ways he draws from the same intelligent bag of tricks as us, drives home the point that it doesn’t hurt to be adaptable.

RUN AND GUN

Your two guns are assigned to and I, aiding the fantasy of dual-wielding. Abilities, of which you can also equip two at a time, can be popped off via Ill! and I. Swarmed by enemies en route to the next lantern, we hurl a grenade at the approaching horde before diving over cover and making a break for the next passageway.

Now, this is a roguelike so you can’t carry over pickups like guns and abilities — of which there are a lot — between runs. Throughout Purgatory, there are places where you can channel the life force of enemies you’ve blasted into next week into stat upgrades. Reaching the end of a level finalises these changes so you can carry forward, say, your obscene amount of health into future runs. Let’s just say as we go from slow-moving zombies to dogs, we’re glad to have that cushion of hit points. (What is it about videogame dogs that makes them either the best or the absolute worst?)

Anyway, after peeking into a room only to see three dogs sniffing around, we decide to explore a different, procedurally generated path — and try to ignore the developers standing behind us, chortling. Our reason for turning back isn’t just cowardice (though that’s definitely part of it). We’re also regretting our specialised shotgun loadout. While every bit as powerful as you’d expect, shotguns are slow and necessitate close-quarters combat that we’d rather avoid for the time being. It’s worth exploring, but we’d rather make our escape before becoming demonic Fido’s new chew toy.