Blood West

[i]In cursed lands where shadows creep, And ancient evils never sleep, A gunslinger wakes from death's embrace, To roam a wild, forsaken place. The prairie groans beneath the moon, Coyotes howl a mournful tune, While twisted spirits haunt the night, Beyond the reach of lantern light. Each bullet counts, each step must weigh, For death is never far away. The darkness watches, still and vast, A whisper from the haunted past. Its stealth is sharp, its tension real, You stalk, you hide, you aim to kill. No reckless charge, no hero's boast — One careless move, and you're a ghost. The world is rough, yet rich with dread, A frontier painted black and red. Old legends mix with cosmic fear, And every distant sound feels near. The graphics may not seek to shine With modern gloss or grand design, Yet every pixel serves the tale Of haunted gulches, dark and pale. The soundtrack hums with eerie grace, A lonely wind through empty space. Its silence often speaks the most, Like footsteps of a wandering ghost. So if you seek a western grim, Where horror fills the daylight dim, Then saddle up and ride out west — For Blood West stands among the best.[/i]

+ First-Person Sneaker (a la Thief, Dishonored, etc) + Old West / Weird West Adventure (don't see many of those) + "open world" maps let you explore and choose how to go into some areas + exploration rewarded with better weapons / gear - pixelated graphics may not be everyone's cup-o-tea (adds to the gritty look, though) - Lots of GPU cycles wasted graphical detail you'll barely notice - Sneaky stabbing gets critical hits for insta-kills, but sneaky bow / tomahawk shots don't - leveling your character feels weak, b/c most main bonuses come from gear This game is a mash-up of "this is kind of cool!" and "what were they thinking?" I work on graphics shaders, so I'm going to start there. The pixelated graphics make folks think the graphics won't be GPU-intensive in this game. Then they fire it up, and their GPU is firing up like it's running Call of Duty or whatever. The reason is because they baked in a bunch of modern-day features to the game, but in such a way you barely notice them. Ambient Occlusion darkens every nook and cranny to add depth to the scene, but you won't realize it unless you know what you're looking for. Water has waves and specular shine that follows light source on it. But, you barely notice it, since the atmosphere is gloomy. The waves on the water are super understated, so you won't notice them unless you're see the specular shine, and the specular shine ("sunny trail" if you look towards a sunset on water) is very faint you'll barely notice it. There seems to be atmospheric scattering to create fogs and such. But, the biggest weirdness.. they have real-time lighting and shadows.. in a game that has a fixed/static light source. The moon never moves. So, they could have replaced that with baked-in shadows that would improve performance a lot. And the shadows aren't even anti-aliased to blur/smooth their edges. Nope, they're chunky pixel edges, which means no AA on the shadows. But, mostly, real-time lighting / shadows get noticed when the light source movies (eg: sun changes position based on time of day). None of that happens, so, again, they could have baked the shadows into the map or something. These design decisions boggle the mind. The pixelated graphics lend a grittiness to the atmosphere. The ambient occlusion keeps the scene from looking flat. But, the water, specular and real-time lighting/shadows seem like a waste since they're not noticeable. And it's bizarre they didn't provide toggles to turn these features on/off like pretty much every other game does in existence to let gamers tweak their graphics. Ok, off my soap box. I'm just miffed that through-out the game I'm getting 15-20 FPS while I notice gpu-intensive features that barely make a difference to the scene killing performance. ~~~ Aside from that... the stealth is bizarre. You will spend a majority of your time sneak-killing enemies. This helps you save ammo, avoids alerting lots of enemies near-by (who will dog pile you to death fast). The game decides that stealth hits with a melee weapon get critical hit damage and almost always insta-kills something. But, stealth hits with thrown or bow weapons DON'T get a critical, so just upset and alert the enemy. Then they charge you, and usually alert everyone else around you. So, unlike Thief or other stealth games, you can't just go around picking folks off with a bow quietly. All this does is kick the ant mound and get you killed. Nope. You gotta go in with your melee weapon. Which means you have to look at patrol patterns and figure out which order to take folks out in. That's fine. I didn't mind doing that. But, I do love some stealth archery sniping. But, this game robs you of that experience. ~~~ Another baffling aspect is character development. Your character gains xp, levels up, and gives you skill points to purchase skills with. But, even maxing out skills, your character still feels weak in them. I maxed out stealth first thing. I was still being spotted easily. What you soon realize is that the gear is where it's at. You get multiple high-power stealth-bonus gears and suddenly you're a ninja. I guess this helps demonstrate that man alone is not enough; the gear + skill is what counts. But, it puts a heavier reliance on gear than skills. And some of the skills seem down right useless. There were so many skills to boost stamina, but I was never running out of stamina. One-shot stealth kills or a few swipes on an enemy that's alerted didn't leave you winded. And blasting folks with guns didn't need stamina. Not sure who thought you needed so many stamina buffs. Overall, the skills are so underpowered, and the game play forces stealth so much, that there's little replay value for different character builds. It's not like you can make a melee tank character that rolls in w/o stealth and murders everything, or a super gun slinger that goes in an circle-strafes everyone while dual weilding guns. Nope. The skills are so understated that you will simply fall into the role they want you to fall into, and that is stealth melee assassin. ~~~ Being old west, you get a bunch of guns to use. But, ammo is scarce unless you play a mode that lets you buy more ammo from vendors. So, again, you're stuck stealth murdering folks. But, when you finally get a stock pile of ammo.. you find out shooting enemies is kind of meh. The revolvers and long rifles are pretty meh. Enemies are FAST, so it can be hard to keep a bead on them. So, spamming a revolver or long rifle is often a bad idea. Instead, you find out that the best use of firearms is one-shot kills. Blast someoen with a sawed-off up close to insta-silence them. Pull out your buffalo rifle to headshot a demon at a distance to take it out. This isn't DOOM. No circle-strafing gun fights. If you think of them as sniper guns then you'll have a better time. Sneak + Melee or Sneak + Shotgun / Buffalo Rifle is basically where it's at. Overall, the game is an interesting setting. If you like stealth sneakers you'll have fun with this, but it won't be life-changing. You've played other games that have done it better by now. But, this one is fun and has an interesting exploration and story.

This was fun for a bit, but its problems really grate on you the more you play. Unfortunately, it's all a little too basic. The game confuses outdated for classic; many of its systems are frustrating. The combat and enemy AI is very one-dimensional, with the same one or two options being the most optimal. It doesn't matter how cool the environment looks when there's absolutely no way to interact with it and meaningfully use it to your advantage. It actively discourages experimentation with a boring skill tree (like really, a skill that boosts XP gain?) and expensive/rare respec, as well as the boring/tedious artifact system. It sucks because there were weapons and builds I wanted to try (like HP loss weapons, alcohol build, and melee build) but I would have had to farm to respec. Farming is fine, but not when you're selling the game as a compact 20-hour experience. It also falls into the same consumables trap that developers learned to avoid a long time ago. You are drowned in a multitude of potions that you save for later, 'til you realize you're halfway through the game and you haven't touched them. I haven't even mentioned the atrocious inventory system that has you peddling items across the map back to your stash, or backpacks that I have to manually go through and sort (minor gripe but it all adds up to an overall tedious experience). Oh yeah, and the death system sucks. Punishing dying with curses just... isn't fun. It encourages you to fall back to the same boring sneak n' stab rather than trying something new for once. It sucks because I love so much about Blood West -- the art direction, the way weapons feel, the open world. It's too bad the devs seem caught up in a bad kind of nostalgia.

I could not have fun with this game. There were some moments that were pretty good, but it very quickly gets worse throughout the chapters. On the third chapter, there is a huge difficulty spike, and I just could not get used to it. As well, it feels confusing that the game would punish me for dying. If I was having trouble with the game, why would cursing me every time I die be encouraging? And some things are needlessly expensive, there is one gun that is 18000 dollars and I can't see how you would ever manage to buy it. As well, maybe I'm a bit of a hoarder, but I want a bottomless stash, I don't get why it wouldn't have no limit. I like collecting the legendary guns and keeping them because they look cool but I don't think I can fit them all. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I have no clue what it is. Also the boss on chapter 2 really sucks, it made me go away from the game for a while. I think this could be a good game but so far I'm just slogging through it.

Excellent stealth game and I emphasize "stealth". Going in Rambo style is not how this is supposed to be played, just keep that in mind. Every situation needs to be approached carefully, with an espace plan if things go wrong and so on. And I love this game for exactly that because it is done so well. A lot of weapons, amulets, upgrades and items that lead to a lot of different playstyles and I dare say there is something there for everyone. You like big shotguns, no problem. Knife is your thing, go crazy. Blood, sweat and tears difficutly is challenging but still fair. You just need to know what you are doing, which enemies take how many bullets from this or that weapon, etc.. I have not summed it up, but I would say from my playtime, about 180 hrs are main game, 10 hrs Dead Man's Promise and the rest is from Scavengers. Zero technical issues and voice acting is top notch! I recommend this even for full price. Get it as bundle with both DLC's and you won't be dissapointed - if you are into stealth games. Feel like I have to mention that again.

Technically well-made but deeply unrewarding, Blood West was a game i'd gotten a while ago that I actually had high hopes for, however the longer I played, the less satisfied I felt. So, I made the error of assuming this mainly a retro FPS, not a stealth FPS, so unfortunately I picked a much harder difficulty on the assumption that it was a different genre of FPS. However, a lot of my errors were more about the actual design of the game. For example, I had issues with headshots. For some reason, just not accurate, and I don't know why. Sometimes a melee weapon will just whiff the headshot and do a normal attack, while guns will (for some reason) have effective distances for headshots? I mean, do I live in a world where bullets do less damage when they land in your skull depending on whether you're in front of them or across the room? Dark Messiah of Might and Magic could do it, as could Thief, so I'm a bit confused why a gun should have an effective distance for headshots. Then we have the fact enemies will respawn, but they'll respawn...sometimes? Some of them will respawn, some of them won't, so sometimes you'll be able to get back to where you want to be rather quickly, sometimes you just get shafted. Perhaps there's a system for the respawns, but frankly I haven't found one after visiting the same places numerous times. Also, I hate the curses. They feel so above and beyond what's required. I mean my first curse was literally making stealth near impossible. How are you going to restrict my ability to PERFORM STEALTH, in the STEALTH GAME? So you respawn the enemies, the shop is ludicrously expensive, I have fk all space in my storage, and then I have curses on top of that? I just want to play the game, and it feels like I'm forced to just rerun the same small environments purely because of being hampered rather than of my own incompetence. The thing is, even with ALL that, when I clear a space...I don't feel powerful. I don't feel like I achieved anything. All I feel like is that I'm a bit closer to the finish, which I can't even see, so it just feels like I'm slamming my head against the wall and feeling like an idiot for doing it. Again: this game is not technically bad, but I would not recommend this to my friends, and that is the only review context that Steam provides. I'd probably give this a 7 or a 6 in quality, but recommendation for enjoyment, I just can't bring myself to do it.

Just a bunch of fetch-quests for boring NPCs with braindead enemies (with static spawns too, everything is predictable. Static spawns work for Dark Souls because of the big amount of different encounters but it doesn't work here since this game is a collection of the same encounter being repeated 100 times) and almost non existent stealth mechanics. Shooting enemies is kinda fun at first but it gets boring really quick too because of them being so dumb and non threatening to the player. Loot hoarding would be fun if the maps themselves were fun to explore but they feel kinda empty, they lack secrets, there are no puzzles, no interesting encounters, no traps, no interactable elements, nothing special overall. The harder difficulty option doesn't make the game harder, it only makes it grindier. This game is nothing like Thief or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. gamedesignwise, it can only feel like that for the first hour or two. I'm disappointed, big sad but some people may find it enjoyable nonetheless. Sick art though.

начну обзор со следующего. эта игра НЕ иммерсив сим, как вам внушают ваши любимые бездарные головастики на ютубе. тут максимум есть элементы этого жанра. вы можете по стелсу проходить или не по стелсу, и у каждого из этих вариантов есть свои ответвления: в мили боевки или пострелять. а пострелять как? можете и с лука, можете и с винтовок/револьверов/дробовиков пострелять. порубить монстрятню можете ножами, топорами, томагавками(их можно кидать, всё по классике). ну от иммерсив сима тут ещё и менеджмент инвентаря, хотя я бы не сказал что это черта жанра. короче как и указано в описании просто добротный стелс экшн шутер с легким налетом сурвхоррора и иммерсив сима. играть весело, хоть и довольно легко на любой сложности(с перма смертью не пробовал, конечно). визуальный стиль хорош, а вот музыка подкачала. очень маленькое разнообразие и быстро надоедает. три локации, исследовать их все интересно, раскидан хороший и зачастую уникальный лут. присутствует простейшее билдостроение. есть древо навыков, но оно довльно таки скучное, простые прибавки к характеристикам и прочему. сюжет для галочки и крайне предсказуем. но есть е66ануто мощная атмосфера, поэтому тебе интересно бродить по миру и читать раскиданные записки(хотя их содержимое по большей части чисто пук в лужу). сеттинг имбовый, на диком западе истреблять американскую(и не только) фольклорную нечисть это круто. круть крутецкая Все боссы легкие, но я считаю этой игре и не нужна запредельная сложность. суть в том чтобы почувствовать себе жеским охотником на нечисть. вот в длц босс, мог уже жопу порвать, но об этом в обзоре под длц) не хватило, конечно, разнообразия в квестах. хотя для начала не хватило скорее самого количества этих квествов. есть несколько скромных побочек и все. с момента раннего доступа и релиза добавили комедийный квест, где надо подвыпить и пообниматься с кактусами. забавно вышло, побольше бы такого. в игре вообще добрая доля юмора присутствует, хотелось бы развития больше в эту сторону. ждем длц с рогалик режимом, чето хорошее из этого выйти может