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Gamers beware! There is great darkness looming on the horizon. There is an evil force laying in wait for you,
just around the corner hoping to catch you off guard and unaware. Heed my warning.
Dont be lead astray for you could face the greatest trial of your life when
you least expect it. That is why we, the
select, must remain ever vigilant for our brothers and for ourselves. Divided we are weak, but united we are STRONG. Every gamer has
gone to the store looking for an exciting new game and found after returning home that
they have been duped into purchasing the biggest bomb of the year. Well ladies and gentleman here it is; and it is
called Wild Wild West. Wild Wild
West, developed by South Peak Interactive, is by far one of the most frustrating,
uneventful, boring, and sad games that I have had the privilege to spend some time with. But I am forgetting myself, perhaps it would be
better to start from the beginning. Let me
lead you through the sorry tale of two noble heroes trapped in an adventure gone horribly,
horribly wrong. You come on the
scene shortly after the final showdown with Loveless.
As select members of the President of the United States' Secret Service your job is
to protect the president from a new would-be assassin.
Your job is to solve the mystery and discover the identity of the would-be assassin
before it is too late. To do this, you
alternate between Jim West and Artemus Gordon, playing each successive mission as the
other character. Both West and Gordon have
special skills and weapons that make each character very different from the other. While Jim West usually throws down with a variety
of exotic weaponry; Artemus Gordon is more likely to dress up like a woman to get around
with out catching the attention of his adversaries. The idea behind
this game is good, unfortunately it is only good in theory.
The actual game itself leaves much to be desired.
The play control is horrible. The
characters are difficult to control, and the weapons require more patience than can be
expected for the gamers of today. While your
character wanders aimlessly across the screen (oblivious to the shots raining down around
them) you must wait forever for the target display to slowly shrink around the
target before you can fire. Of course you can
fire whenever you like, but your chances of hitting anything before the target
locks are nil. When the target
has locked on target your chances of actually hitting the target jump up
slightly. The choice of
weapons available is acceptable, but nothing to really get excited about. There are not that many to choose from, and ammo
is extremely limited for the exotic weapons. Also,
some of the items and weapons listed dont seem to be accessible. They are available on the shelf to choose from,
but have a broken sign hanging from them.
There does not appear to be any way to fix these items, maybe they are there to
whet the appetite for an upcoming sequel. God help us. The graphics
are decent, but nothing to write home about. This
is a 3D game, but aside from the character renderings the scenery isnt all that
interesting. The best way to describe it is
to imagine a combination of MYST and a side scrolling action game. The pictures are kind of pretty but the action is
very, VERY limited. Most of the game is spent
lazily moving the mouse around the screen looking for items to look at closer or treasures
to pick up for use later in the game. What goes well
with mediocre visual effects? You guessed it! It's mediocre sound effects. The weapon sound effects are OK, but like
everything else in this game, they could have, and probably should have, been redone to
make them more realistic and powerful. The
musical score is more annoying then anything else and doesnt seem to lend itself to
the different environments. The character
dubbing is fair. Yet the voice actors
dont really sound anything like Will Smith or Kevin Kline, but I am sure that they
tried: that counts for something, right? The only thing
that this game does do well is the cutscenes between each level. Each completed area leads to a cutscene, which can
be entertaining. Its probably a good
thing that these cutscenes are done well, since they take up about a quarter of the entire
game. The levels in Wild
Wild West are short and not very involved for the most part. Some of the puzzles are a bit tricky, OK, it was
only one puzzle, but its been a long time since I had to know all the presidents. In all seriousness, there are a few thought
provoking puzzles buried in this game, but even a few thought provoking puzzles
couldnt even come close to saving this game from ruin. It appears that this game, like so many others,
was rushed out by a company that is not very serious about games or gamers. It is an ill-disguised attempt to sell a bad game
under the guise of a mediocre western movie that came out to moderate success because of
the star-filled cast. To summarize:
this game is pretty much the most horrible thing that I have ever had the pleasure to load
on my computer. Give me Ghostbusters
on the old Commodore 128 any day. The few
puzzles that were remotely thought-provoking and sometimes entertaining combined with cute
cut scenes cant hope to make up for the sheer horribleness of this game. Giving this title one star is being generous in my
opinion. The only reason that it warrants any
merit at all are the cut scenes, the 2 puzzles that were reasonably interesting, and the
retail box looks pretty cool. In other words,
dont buy this for someone that you like. However,
if you have any enemies that you really want to get back at, wrap up this baby and send it
to them. I am sure that it will have the
desired effect. |