[b]♠ INTRODUCTION ♠[/b]
This is a neat little gem of a game that ended up being a pleasant surprise. I picked this up with very little knowledge about it, and went into the game thinking it was going to be mediocre... oh how I was wrong, so very wrong... Westerado: Double Barreled is a niche little action-adventure game that sets you upon an adventure in the "High West" (the Wild West era at it's "peak"), and what an adventure it is. This little diamond in the rough is packed full of content and while it might not be the largest diamond, it is among the most bedazzling and shiniest. It's honestly a neat game to pick up and start playing, unaware that once it gets it's hooks in you there's a good chance you're going to want to uncover ever stone, explore all ends of this intriguing little sandbox of a Western.
[b]♠ GAMEPLAY & THE WORLD ♠[/b]
When I first started playing the game I was a little bit offput by the controls. No mouse? Keyboard only? I haven't done this since I decided to play Ultima IV! I honestly didn't think I was going to like the combat, but it did not take long at all for the game to change my mind and make me see otherwise. You used the WASD keys to move around in the four cardinal directions, and then you have J and K. J draws your gun, K ♥♥♥♥♥ the hammer and a second press fires the round. R reloads and E acts as a general action key.
With that, the combat is easy to get down and can be quite entertaining. This is a 'classic' western, so there are no self-cocking mechanisms in the gun, anytime you want to fire a bullet you need to pull the hammer back first. The same goes for reloading, you're handloading and you're doing it one round at a time. It might sound like it can be frustrating but it's honestly not, this is where a good chunk of the fun of gunfights come in, especially managing this as your dodging and weaving your way through a firefight. While you can move in each cardinal direction, both your enemies and yourself can only fire left and right.
There's plenty of gunfights to be had, hell you can even draw your gun on someone mid conversation! Desperados and banditos aren't the only hazards around however, there's coyotes wandering the lands, rattlesnakes and scorpions, native tribes, and more... this is the west after all... however, in certain places you may even see something that is, let's say, beyond logic and reasoning.
While there's plenty of gunfights to be had, adventuring and exploration is also a good chunk of this game. The map isn't extremely massive, but it is still fairly sizable with lots of interesting nooks and crannies hiding things that you can come across. There are a fairly good amount of quests you can do for a multitude of different people - bankers, oil tycoons, railroad companies, sheriff's, ranchers, the military, even native tribes if you feel so inclined to help to retrieve what has been taken...
Tired of gunslinging? Hit the saloon for a drink and a few hands of poker then! Or maybe, you've made quite a bit of cash in your adventures and are thinking of starting anew, settling down on a nice plot of land... that too is a possibility. It's a "small" game packed full of content.
♠ SOUND & GRAPHICS ♠
The soundwork and soundtrack in this game are both... serviceable. There firearms sound decent, and the music is your standard western soundtrack which, if you have seen a spaghetti western you more or less know what to expect. It's not bad by any means, the music ranges from moderate to good, but I never came across a bit or track of music that made me want to add it to a playlist to listen to in my own time or when playing other games.
The pixel art on the other hand I quite enjoy, though I am a sucker for pixel art. It has a minimalistic artstyle which I [i]really[/i] like, I don't know why but when it comes to pixel art I've always felt that the philosophy of "less is more" is best approach, a minimalistic artstyle rather than an artstyle where each individual character is made up of more than a thousand pixels. The art style really lends itself well in certain areas of the game on the other hand, especially when the view shifts down from the usual isometric-esque camera view there are a few really cool vistas in the game that make the most of the minimalist artstyle.
♠ SCORE AND FINAL THOUGHTS ♠
Funny enough, the game also has quite a bit of replayability, including more characters to unlock which can change up how some things play. I "beat" the game in about 5 hours via the primary storyline but didn't do NEARLY all of the content, I didn't even explore all of the map and looking at it achievement wise I only finished about 26% of the game. Rounding that, if we go purely off achievements (which some are obviously going to be harder to get), the game has about 20 hours of content for you - 30-40 if you're someone who really likes taking their time or plan on replaying the game with multiple different characters.
Recommended: Yes!
Rating: Gem - Diamond in the rough
Score: 7.8 / 10
