Sir Whoopass: Immortal Death

I'm glad I got this as a freebie as it hardly feels like a full and finished game. And I don't necessarily mean the fact that it just ends on a "To be continued" after a few hours. The game trolls the player on occasion and this could very well be one of those occasions. The bad thing is that you can't even tell. Sir Whoopass is so good at imitating the mediocre games it tries to make fun of that it just becomes another one of them itself. And that's always a great risk with parodies, especially the ones with "on the nose" humor as this one.

My main gripe with it isn't the humor though (despite it not being particularly clever or funny most of the times) - it's that Sir Whoopass starts out presenting itself as a parody game full of gags only to stop and run out of ideas after the first 1-2 hours. The premise of a parody RPG already isn't very original and exciting, but it should provide lots of opportunities for jokes, and yet most of them are only presented on the loading screens later in the game. There's a tutorial level, a Red Riding Hood parody level, a Stephen King's It parody level, and ... that's about all I can remember. After that, it does what every bad open world action/"RPG" game does and repeats the same patterns over and over, sending you on lots of same-y dungeon crawl missions to find the three doodads. There is no story to any of these dungeon crawls anymore and I didn't even bother to read and memorize their random names. The environment in the dungeon varies a little bit, some have puzzles or a new opponent or boss battle, so they aren't completely boring, but not all that creative either and it feels kind of repetitive after a while. And the game does not even comment on any of it anymore. One has a puzzle with lots of backtracking through a maze which is not fun at all, but is that a parody of bad game design or just bad game design itself? After being very blunt in the beginning and spelling everything out, here the game just stays silent about it. So it seems they really just ran out of steam and/or money. Which also shows when the narrator comments start repeating themselves, very soon.

And there is enough bad game design here to think that it wasn't all intentional. Was Sir Whoopass made for gamepad or keyboard and mouse controls? Both feel awkward in some way or other. There is a console-y feel to the game and button prompts, yet even with a gamepad plugged in you have to move the mouse cursor with the stick in menus instead of just selecting option with directions and shoulder buttons, as in your regular gamepad-friendly game. And why do you have to go through the same animations and dialogues again and again, in order to buy more than one weapon? Especially considering that you WILL want to buy all three different weapons available, every time you visit the "Blackschmidt", because item progression is very guided; there isn't much of an RPG here, really. Every few levels you gain access to new weapons which are always of the same three types, fast sword, heavy hammer, magical missile staff and mainly change in look and damage dealt, but it's more of an upgrade than a new weapon most of the times and you will hardly ever want to switch back to previously bought ones. In the world and the dungeons you can find chests that grant automatical upgrades to your current weapons (+25 or +50% damage), but it hardly matters as you will soon buy new weapons anyway and then these upgrades will become obsolete.

You can also find a lot of hats, which come with minor benefits like +10% damage to all weapons or x % fire protection etc., most of which doesn't really matter much either. If you're like me, in the end you'll just want to use that one head that automatically replenishes your staff ammo, because THAT does make a huge difference for a change. Or you'll just wear whatever you think looks funny. If I didn't overlook anything, there's also ONE "Pimp my protagonist" shop that sells about 6 different (mostly meaning differently colored) outfits and that's it, for the whole game, which is pretty poor. Worst of all though are the three doodads you have to find. One is a hat that automatically equips itself on certain conditions and never switches back to your hat of choice when the conditions are removed again. So this game that's all about collecting and wearing your funny hats of choice suddenly forces a hat on you again and again and makes you re-equip your own choice manually. The second item you get is never properly explained which can lead to players getting stuck without a walkthrough. And the third one doesn't appear to do anything, from what I've seen.

Last but not least, there are some repetitive mini-games in the world that are just as primitive and annoying as mini-games in AAA games, and Sir Whoopass doesn't comment on this either.

So Sir Whoopass not only fails at consistently poking fun at bad game design, it also kind of fails at being a well-designed game itself. It's like they wanted to make an open world action game but lacked the time, funds and creativity for going all the way, so they dressed it up as parody and then became bored with the concept themselves pretty quickly. They ridiculed a few fantasy tropes - and righfully so - but at the same time proved that a cliched story is still better than none at all, apparently.

That being said, it's not all bad, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it, despite it being comparatively short for an open world game. Occasionally I was caught by surprise and successfully trolled, and those were the most funny moments. The combat takes a bit time getting used to at first, but I came to enjoy it, especially since you're pretty overpowered most of the time, and opponents explode with much effect and pretty colors and sounds! I loved that enemies can actually turn on each other. Get a rifleman to deal friendly fire to a colleague and suddenly they will duel it out amongst themselves. Fun! I also liked the jetpack, and you get a vehicle for faster movement as well, even though its usefulness is limited since specific areas of the map prevent you from using it (without giving a good reason). The save system was very convenient, automatically saving after every combat encounter or other achievement, and into several slots. You can die pretty quickly but you never really lose significant progress and you can jump right back into it and try again. I didn't even bother much with manual saving due to that, although that's also an option. If they had actually aimed at creating a real open world RPG with interesting story and side quests and rewards that are worth it, or at least stuck to the parody idea the whole time and offered more content in this regard, this would have been a very solid base, IMO.

But as it is, it's more of a one trick pony and quickly forgotten again, the gaming equivalent of fast food, I guess. Which is a pity.