F4LL0UT: Just beat Weird West on PS5. "Mixed feelings" doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about the game.

Apparently the game was supposed to become like the ultimate immersive sim, albeit at a low budget, in a top-down perspective and in a weird west setting. Could have worked but sadly it does not.

My first impressions of the game were actually pretty great. To me it's the kind of game that just instantly feels nice. It looks pretty great and has beautifully surreal sound design that really puts the "weird" in "weird west". Also story-wise it starts out strong: you assume the role of Jane Bell, an ex-bounty hunter whose idyllic farm life gets destroyed when bandits kill her son and abduct her husband. Off the bat the game sends you down a path of revenge against bandits led by a supernatural creature and nicely establishes what kind of depressing world you have just entered.

There's a world map with many locations and random encounters that you navigate like in many RPGs, there are quests, there's real-time combat and a lot of stealth gameplay. You can hire companions, you can take on bounties, look for treasure, trade and so on. And since it's an "immersive sim" you can kill enemies by creatively using the environment, you can reach locations in different ways and you can also take on quests in different manners. On the loading screen the game actually sometimes brags that you can kill literally anyone and still complete the game. For the first couple of hours this kinda felt like a new 2D Fallout game to me, albeit with action gameplay, and I enjoyed that a lot.

As the hours passed, though, Weird West started reminding me of a completely different game altogether: No Man's Sky. Not because of similarities in the gameplay but due to how this hugely ambitious game turns out to be an empty façade. Nothing about Weird West is great and sadly it's also not a game that is much more than a sum of its parts.

It is mostly a stealth game and not a good one to be honest. The enemy setups are very random and for the most part you will probably just find yourself waiting until an enemy wanders away from his mates on his own where you can just knock him out. It's not challenging and you don't have to resort to any of that "immersive sim" stuff at all. I've barely used the environment or fancy character abilities because it was far more convenient to just strangle almost everyone - also, this way there was a lower risk that I'd start open combat which does have its fun moments but is mostly just a frantic mess, especially if AI companions get involved (and you do want those idiots with you, if only so they draw some fire and for extra inventory space). There are admittedly enemies in this game whom you can't strangle and indeed, those were the cases where I used a few more of the tools at my disposal but also then it didn't amount to great gameplay.

And besides that it's an underwhelming RPG. This is where I really felt parallels to NMS. In the end the systemic nature of the game just means that everything is of lower quality than in a game with traditionally handmade content and it ironically also feels like there's very little content. There's really just a handful of locations that get reused millions of times. Towns, mines and temples follow just a few repeating patterns and they barely offer any quests. And sure, you can kill everyone in a town and then it becomes a ghost town and maybe bad guys move in but: 1. Why would you do that? 2. So what? It's not really interesting. And remember that "you can kill everyone" thing? The game is actually really awful at handling these unexpected solutions. Heck, even expected alternate solutions can make the game feel broken by making the quest log display a deprecated objective and then just fast forward through the chapter's quest line for incomprehensible reasons.

Finally, I also did not like the game's structure. It is actually separated into 5 chapters and you play a different character in each one. In my opinion this was not handled well at all. Basically everything persists throughout these chapters and you can also regain access to all your old loot by hiring a former hero. In practice this meant that I spent 12 hours playing as Jane Bell and then rushed through the remaining scenarios because I had basically already seen everything in the first chapter. And neither the overarching story of the game nor the individual stories of the other heroes are even remotely as captivating as the first hours of the game. Sigh.

In the end I just didn't enjoy the game much. It starts out really strong but soon becomes very disappointing and incredibly repetitive and boring.