Weird West

Was playing this earlier and it's quite good (and on Gamepass!).

It is not based on Deadlands, however, and the devs get really salty when you suggest it might be. (I had asked them about it and they insisted it was based on the 'weird west' pulp genre as a whole and not on a particular IP)

Better on pc or xbox?

faille said:

Better on pc or xbox?

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Kind of a wash. Aiming is harder with the gamepad, but keyboard movement pretty janky too. You'll definitely want to go in and remap some keys (or in the case of stuff like weapon swaps to pistol/shotgun/rifle/melee, map them at all since by default those are all unassigned) too.

It has cross-save support so you can easily try both platforms. Overall, I think I like PC a little bit better, but only because I have a very fast SSD (zone transitions are just as fast on Series X, but loading saves drags a bit) and an ultrawide monitor. Game text is pretty small on a TV too.

Be prepared to save scum like crazy unless you are a superhuman reflex ninja. Even with save scumming like mad I nearly threw the controller across the room while doing a sneaky brothel quest.

The overall concept of you switching bodies as you go through the game is interesting in that it allows for progressive overall improvement while also revisiting the 'levelling up' newbie segment of gameplay. You can even recruit your former selves as posse members which allows you to still have the combat advantages you had previously earned.

Though you can go guns-blazing through the game it seems to reward stealth and creative use of environmental hazardsas a preferable mode of violent conflict resolution.

Skill up shit on the game pretty hard and ACG liked it a lot. Weird these two are so far apart on a game…

Wow, those are indeed very different. While they both touched on some of the same negatives (similar layouts/maps, wonky combat at times, some bugs) Skill ups review focused a lot on that the game felt disjointed in terms of progress and world building like story/lore, characters and events that happened, while ACG praised many of those parts.

Very harsh review from Skill Up ending with saying that while it is on gamepass and would cost you little to nothing, it does take "time" to play it, and it isn't even worth your time.

Could it be that ACG got a "better roll" so to speak on the procedural parts getting a more cohesive run? If so, then that would be a negative of the game, if you risk having a procedurally built world that can set up a path that will make less sense of what is happening in the world/story than on others. Or do sidequests have events/story unfold of the beaten path that makes more sense of the main story? Skill Up mentioned that he didn't like it and had to force himself to play for 20 hours to finish it, and struggling with the last 10. So it couldn't have taken him long to start focusing only on the main story.

Downloading it now though, ACGs review made me want to try it.

acg seems to be a fan of the weird west genre, while skill up doesn't. that could be the reason for the disparity between them

tried it on gamepass.

struggled to enjoy it. The controls are fairly clunky. the action combat moreso. I am pretty sure this game would be 10000x better as a standard real time with pause tactical combat game.

I think the Weird west aspects do feel off. not really in the same way skill up complained. My issue is its a bit too out in the open. like, everyone is practicing witchcraft, theres monsters everywhere, etc..
It needs to be more like a Lovecraftian element. theres a "witch" that lives on the edges of town. but no one actually believes in her hoodoo. The town seems normal.. but there is a cult under the surface.
if the supernatural were just so out and in the open as it is in this game, everything would be different. towns would have walls with arcane barriers at the entrances. homesteads too, would be fortified if theres just random werewolves, and wendigos roaming around... people would be openly praying to the dark gods. if zombies were so common, everyone would burn their dead. and so on. Theres so much supernatural shit in this.... the normal stuff doesn't make any sense anymore.

And its not that you can't do that mega supernatural world. Grimdawn for example does it. But "normality" in Grimdawn got washed away with the... Grim dawn..

I like the setting a lot myself, but I'd say that they both make some valid points. It's definitely not all sunshine and roses. Core game is interesting, but the controls are janky whether you use keyboard or gamepad (like I said before, gamepad does practically everything better, except aiming your gun which happens to be the single most important thing). Also, I've yet to figure out how to turn on tactical mode when playing on console. The bigger issue that has nothing to do with platform is that I don't really find any of the perks or skills to be interesting.

The best skill imo is the rifle one that silences your shot, but it becomes a complete waste of a skill point the moment that character shifts from being the main to being a companion, since the AI is not allowed to start fights and therefore can never use the skill. Most of the other skills involve starting fights with big groups which isn't a great idea, or else they do stuff like dump a bunch of ammo into [over]killing one enemy. I mostly use my AP on bullet time, which is something you can just do by default and makes the purchased skills seem rather pointless.

The character specific perks are alright, each of them seems to have a couple that are really good and a couple that pretty much suck. The generic perks are just +gooder passives that aren't too interesting. Making the companions tougher is where most of my cards go, since they seem like they always get the aggro once shooting starts and they are pretty bad at avoiding damage.

I thought Skillup's comment about money being superfluous was really bizarre. I have found it to be a big problem unless you literally buy nothing from vendors. I had to restart my first game because I bought an amulet from a random encounter vendor only to realize when I got back to town that there was no way to afford the horse. So yeah, if you're just starting the game now, be sure you have ~$370 when you get back to town after the first series of missions (the other ~70 is for the skinning kit at the armor shop) or else you're gonna have a bad time. If you want a second companion you'll need to go do the first bounty and/or nearby sidequests to have the $100 to hire her, and then you'll be broke again but still need $300 more to progress the main story. Along those lines, break down every extra 1* weapon you find and don't use. Inventory space is a real bitch until you get saddlebags and some companions.

I'm on character 4 now. Ive gotten to the point now of making sure to load things up on the horse before the end of a given storyline so I have better gear when I buy my horse back (your horse and safety deposit box transfers from story to story).

The first story is by far the most 'plain', it gets deeper and deeper into supernatural stuff as you progress through the different characters. I quite like the anthology approach, it lets you explore different parts of the genre.

The later part of the game has some wonky bugs. I'm on character 5 now and walking through objects / walls and/or getting stuck on surfaces. Lots of random crashes mid combat, posse members getting stuck etc. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but my 'skill' points did not transfer over from the 4th character to the 5th. I had like 15 unused points and thought I'd use them to rank up character 5's stuff right away, but no.

Character 5's abilities are also pretty damn 'meh'

Finished the game. Character 5's story was the shortest of them all, but by that point anyone with a pulse can figure out where the whole deal is headed and you likely have orange weapons/armor on your posse-peeps so it was just going through the motions. Never did address the lost skill points from transferring from Character 4 to Character 5 and thus missed out on using some of 5s skills....but they were really quite blah, especially in comparison to either Character 3 or Character 4.

Certainly a game worth playing if you have it via Game Pass.

Qhue said:

Finished the game. Character 5's story was the shortest of them all, but by that point anyone with a pulse can figure out where the whole deal is headed and you likely have orange weapons/armor on your posse-peeps so it was just going through the motions. Never did address the lost skill points from transferring from Character 4 to Character 5 and thus missed out on using some of 5s skills....but they were really quite blah, especially in comparison to either Character 3 or Character 4.

Certainly a game worth playing if you have it via Game Pass.

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AFAIK, there is no carry over between characters, for unspent orange points (and purple, for anyone else reading). I thought I noticed, early-ish, on the second character (but too late to revert to a save) that everything was zeroed out. So, made a save before then end of act 2, with unspent cards, transitioned to the third character, and boom, zero points again (then reloaded the old save and spent them).

There is carry over for all the characters except character 5. There's even a bit at the start of the 2nd character where they are explaining the whole concept after you recruit the 1st character back into your posse that you will carry over their inventory including any unspent points. This was significant as it let me buy all of the character-specific abilities for character 3 and character 4 right at the start of their stories. (I never bought many of the weapon skills because, honestly, only a couple of them are really worth bothering with as your Action Points are better spent on the character specific stuff in most cases, thus I had a ton of skill points unspent when I transitioned to them)

Qhue said:

There is carry over for all the characters except character 5. There's even a bit at the start of the 2nd character where they are explaining the whole concept after you recruit the 1st character back into your posse that you will carry over their inventory including any unspent points. This was significant as it let me buy all of the character-specific abilities for character 3 and character 4 right at the start of their stories. (I never bought many of the weapon skills because, honestly, only a couple of them are really worth bothering with as your Action Points are better spent on the character specific stuff in most cases, thus I had a ton of skill points unspent when I transitioned to them)

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Weird, since I got zeroed out twice at the start of the game, I just ended up spending everything at the end of every act (I had a~10 purple unspent points on the first character that just went poof). So maybe they changed/fixed it since then.

I started playing at release, but took a break from it, and haven't dedicated a lot of time to it, so going slow (currently on the 4th character).

The abilities of character 4 were certainly not what I was expecting. Its pretty much a cleric with an AE shield and AE heal. I don't think I used the double-tap bumper ability even once despite it being the defining trait for the character.

Yea, the combat is serviceable, but not that good. I should have probably turned it up to the hardest difficulty, for more of a challenge (but then the camera control and bad AI would just stick out more).

On the second hardest difficulty, almost all the abilities are lack luster, especially the AoE that will do friendly fire (with stupid AI running all over the place). The AoE heal and shield on the 4th guy seems totally worthless, as it helps enemies that get too close, and I am always moving in combat with shit in chase.

Up until the end of character 3, I snuck around putting people in the sleeper, or using the assassination rifle talent. Other than first character, and her slow time, I don't think I have used a single other ability more than once.

Now, with an orange vest and rifle, I go in guns a blazing, using the assassination to pickoff the strongest immediate target and face tank bullets and try to use up my hoard of bandages.