Weird West review: Turning the old West into a sandbox

digitaltrends.com:

I don’t keep my love of the old west a secret. If you’ve read my opinion pieces about Red Dead Online before, you’ll know that I’m drawn to the setting like Americans were to the west coast. If I see a game with a cowboy in it, I’ll yeehaw my way straight in.

That’s how I was originally sold on Weird West.

But Weird West is not a cowboy game. It’s hardly even a western game. Weird West, an immersive sim from two of the minds behind Dishonored, is a much more unique story. It clearly has Dishonored‘s bones, offering players multiple ways to sort out encounters, though it lacks the same polish. Instead, Weird West‘s take on a fictional American frontier meets Dungeons & Dragons hosts the most engaging stories, even when it shows its janky side.

Weird West doesn’t put players into the shoes of one cowpoke, but five different figures. Each is unique to the game’s setting in their own way. Players start off as a woman whose husband is kidnapped, forcing her to pick up her guns and return to her bounty hunting ways as she tracks the villains that took her man.

During this first adventure, the West is large, scary, and strange. I started by traveling to another farmstead, and immediately, Weird West showed me that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. At the start of the mission, my first goal was to retrieve my horse. I quickly notice that there’s a house on the farm, which I could break into if I so dared. To do so, I could kill the owner and find out or wait for night and sneak in through the window.

In a moment that hooked me into the game, I realized that I had turned a major boss into a simple paycheck.

At this point, traveling across the West is at its most exciting. Only a corner of the game’s sizable map is visible —