Wild West and Wizards Reviews

wacky!

Though not a perfect game, I quite enjoyed playing through Wild West and Wizards. It scratched an itch for a western game with fantasy elements, and was obviously a labor of love from a very small team of developers. The game has a lot of heart; you can see the developers' creativity and clever puzzle design all throughout, and the quests all had a creative spin or story element that elevated them beyond simple fetch or enemy-hunting missions. Though the landscape, dungeons, people, and towns all share a very small pool of game assets and models, you can tell that the developers went out of their way to arrange and present them in new ways to give places or NPCs unique flavor despite using similar assets. Even many of the samey bandit camps throughout the map had little journals that gave them character to help set them apart from other bandit camps. I think where the game struggles the most is in the enemy AI. Even though there are quite a few different enemies, a lot of them felt very similar in behavior, even bosses. For example, anything that could cast a spell behaved exactly the same, only varying in what kind of spell was thrown at you. The only thing that makes most bosses different than their minions is an inflated health pool and more damaging weapons or spells. I think if I hadn't been so invested in the exploration and quest lines, the somewhat repetitive combat might have made me give up the game sooner. I also quite enjoyed some of the puzzles in the game, but I did run into a handful of them that had little to no environmental clues to help me solve them or find hidden keys to get to a tantalizing treasure chest. I had to look up guides or developer feedback forums to help me solve a few that I just couldn't figure out based on the environment in the game. That being said, these were definitely the minority, and most of the puzzles were very engaging. Overall, I'm very glad I picked this up on a whim a long time ago, and finally gave it a chance. It won't win any big awards, but for a very ambitious indie open-world exploration game that only falls a little short of the mark it aimed for, I think it was a good experience.