Dismounting from your horse always, and inexplicably, turns you around to face the opposite direction. Your gun sometimes mysteriously unequips itself when you die. But while some - such as the increased backpack space and damage reduction - are indeed helpful, I'm unclear what kind of tangible impact the other perks have in-game.įor every positive feature, you'll uncover three negative ones. It offers three different types of activities grouped loosely as Settler, Explorer, and Maverick that boost your abilities in crafting, exploration, and combat respectively. And with neither strong combat nor that delicious MMO loop to snag you, what's left to do? There's only so much meandering you can do out on the plains. Despite many hours with the game the arsenal is still woefully thin and much of the gunsmith's wares remain frustratingly out of reach. You'd expect the gunplay to be functional if not exemplary in a game rooted in the wild west, but this is sadly neither. Wild West Online not only lacks even the fundamental features you'd expect from a MMO, but it's also sorely lacking in basic shooter mechanics. Unless, of course, you're playing with a vanilla cowboy like me, in which case you won't even have one. It's like being in Groundhog Day, but in a stetson. The interiors of buildings, too, share the same fate, seemingly copy-and-pasted from town to town. Each town you'll happen upon offers the same collection of dusty buildings, each one desperately soulless and lacking any distinct landmarks or features to make it memorable.
There are no animals leaping over the plains, no people gathered on the streets or elbowing for room in the saloon.
But it's so empty, this place metaphorically, and literally, too. The world itself may not be the most exotic thing you've ever seen, but it's certainly pretty enough, and trotting across the map, discovering new places as you go, is a good way to get familiar with your environs whilst unlocking XP. There's so much it could've been - so much it has been, in previous iterations. It's the promise of Wild West Online that's so unbearable, though. Add on to that the game's incessant demands that you shell out more money to unlock some pretty fundamental features, and everything starts to feel more than a little unpleasant. And that's what makes all the rough-edges - the placeholder text, the imperfect graphics, the shallow gameplay, the glitches and crashes - all the more difficult to endure.
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That said, it's important to remember that this is now considered a full release, entirely out of Early Access. Having pulled back on its promise of a PvE experience, the Steam store description of Wild West Online does, in fairness, now tout this as a PvP adventure, insisting it "isn't a story-driven MMO with deep narrative and AI opponents to solo-grind" but rather a "PVP action MMO game where you duke it out with other players in a persistent PVP combat world." For all its bluster and promise, Wild West Online is a desperately hollow, cheap experience, and wholly unworthy of those three little letters: MMO. The sad truth, however, is that the more time you spend galavanting around in this world, the easier it is to spot its flaws, and the harder it is to overlook them.
You'd think that a few more hours out in the wilds - trotting through the scrub, listening to the world as dusk spills across the sky - would be enough to take the edge off those rough first impressions of Wild West Online. The west is an empty, lonely place in this well-timed release - but that's not exactly what you're after from an MMO.
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