WANTED: A Wild Western Adventure Review
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Review WANTED: A Wild Western Adventure
Review by James Saighman |
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For those of you who only glance at the beginning of a review and then quickly skip to the bottom to see the final grade, I want to start with this caveat so there is no misinterpreting the final score: I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU PURCHASE THIS GAME! There are three exceptions to this caveat:
1) If you or some member of your family is exceptionally talented at shooter games.
2) If The Adventure Company or Revistronic comes out with a patch or cheat which allows you to skip the action/shooting sequences. Or at least makes them possible for the typical adventure gamer to complete.
3) If you truly don’t mind paying for a game that you can only play 2/3 of the way through and then uninstalling it because it is impossible to finish.
There are actually three shooting sequences. One is fairly easy, one is damned difficult, and one is stone-cold impossible for the typical adventure gamer who dabbles minimally (if at all) into the action/FPS realm. Unfortunately, the “impossible” sequence is the one that you encounter first, at about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through the game; most players will never get to see the two easier sequences.
The real shame here is that these action/arcade sequences totally destroyed my enjoyment of what was otherwise a pretty good game. Wanted is a throwback to the comic third-person-perspective adventures of the “Golden Age” of LucasArts, with a whole new 3-D graphic style that is interesting and refreshing. It is also a tongue-in-cheek take on perhaps the most classic and iconic form of American entertainment: the Western movie.
The basic setup of Wanted could have come out of any John Ford (or Sergio Leone) script. A handsome stranger wanders into town. He soon discovers that the rich cattle baron who runs the town is using violence and intimidation to drive off the local farmers and seize their land. The handsome stranger agrees to help the poor farmers defend themselves from the rich cattle baron. It turns out that the cattle baron has a beautiful, independent-minded niece who is the real heir to the family fortune….
Sound familiar?
The writers/developers at Revistronic started with these classic icons and themes and then gave them a twist. While Wanted’s “hero”, Fenimore Fillmore, may wear a white hat and a blue U.S. Cavalry blouse and shoot like an ace marksman, he only ends up jumping to the defense of the farmers because he picks an inopportune time to back into a cactus. He isn’t above sneakily stealing every dollar bill in town that isn’t nailed down, or even swindling a few bucks out of the President—all in the name of his “heroic” cause. In almost every scene and setting of the game, it is made clear that the creators have a deep fondness for and familiarity with the archetypes of the American Western, while poking their tongue out at those very archetypes. This is all the more remarkable when you know that Wanted was written and developed in Spain!
You shore are a purty l’il thang
The first thing you notice about Wanted is the look. Try to imagine a cross between the stylistic exaggerations of Grim Fandango, the 3-D realism of Toy Story, and the outré beauty of Little Big Adventure. Now throw in some of the comic camera work of the Coen Brothers. This will give you some idea of the originality and visual appeal of Wanted. The characters are presented in “real time” 3-D, all jutting polygons and angles. However, the theme of the game and its cartoon presentation combine to make these polygons seem… well… natural. Of course Fenimore’s torso is a triangle from broad shoulders to skinny waist; isn’t every Western hero’s? The backgrounds are predominantly pre-rendered 2-D, but the camera angle changes frequently enough to give the player a faux 3-D feel as he navigates around the screen.
Presented in familiar 3rd-person perspective, Wanted manages to succeed in exactly that area where so many other 3-D adventure games have failed: an easy point-and-click interface. Revistronic has developed a technique for letting the camera work with the player, instead of against him, thus facilitating the mouse control. Moving the mouse moves the camera. When you are at the edge of what the camera will allow you to see from your current position, there is an “elastic” wavering of the view, letting you know that you can probably see more if you walk Fenimore farther that direction. I was seldom in doubt as to whether I could continue to walk in a given direction and never once found myself in a “pixel hunting” situation. It was a sheer joy to play a 3-D game where the camera was my ally instead of my foe, and an eye-opener to see how well 3-D can be accomplished with a point-and-click interface.
We got us a barn to raise
Aside from the aforementioned shooting sequences, gameplay in Wanted is classic and straightforward inventory puzzling and conversation. This is where many adventurers will delight; there is not a mechanical/manipulation puzzle or a maze in sight. The puzzling is (with a couple of exceptions) fairly logical and of easy-to-middling difficulty. There is a lot of inventory to collect and over a dozen characters to talk to. While the over-exaggerated voice acting meant that I kept conversation to a minimum, there is lots of extraneous chat available to add depth to the story. There was also one “laundry list” puzzle, in which you must run around and collect a series of specified objects to accomplish a particular end. I have no problem with these, but I know some people dislike them.
There were a couple of instances in which I could no longer progress with my current objective “logically.” That is, I went to the one location where I needed an object and could not get it there. This left me with nothing to do but wander around and attempt “illogical” acts that had nothing to do with my goal simply because I could until I stumbled across another task. This has become one of my pet peeves in adventure games (although not quite rivaling the poke-the-key-onto-the-newspaper puzzle). However, as one fellow critic put it to me, “It happens in almost every adventure game anymore. What are you going to do?” At least the game area of Wanted is fairly small and confined, meaning that I never had to go too far to find a new objective when I had stalled out on my current one.
I have to mention another annoyance. Travel between locations is done by “using” Fenimore’s horse, Reyo. Reyo has to be continually fed, as each trip uses up his energy. This means constantly buying or growing carrots to feed him. Since your funds are quite limited at the beginning of the game (you have to steal every dollar you get from the townsfolk), you mostly rely on growing the carrots at one of the two local farms. This entails a tedious repetition of the same few actions over and over countless times in order to make sure you have enough carrots to do the required traveling.
One last note about gameplay: much of the criticism of the original European version of this game (Fenimore Fillmore: The Westerner) was due to its numerous bugs. I didn’t encounter any bugs at all in the first three-quarters of TAC’s new version of the game. It installed and ran like a dream. I did encounter a few bugs and one crash in the last stages of the game. However, by then I was using saved game files I had gotten elsewhere (as this was the only way I could get through the shooting gallery sequence) and these problems may have been attributable to differences in OS or configuration.
Smile when you say that, pardner
One of the areas on which I anticipate a great difference of opinion about Wanted is its humor. This is partly because humor is so entirely subjective. What one man finds hilarious makes the next man groan. Now add to that the problems of translating humor cross-culturally and cross-linguistically (Spanish-to-English in this case) and of tickling the funny bones of a wide range of ages. Finally consider that many consumers in the younger part of the market haven’t even seen any of the films which serve as Wanted’s foundation and which it parodies. Taking all this into consideration, Revistronic had two strikes against them in their attempt to make a comedy game. I’m scoring them with a solid single.
In any comedy, there are three ways that humor can be conveyed: visually, verbally and situationally. Wanted makes no real attempt at “situational” humor unless you consider a parody funny simply by virtue of the fact that it is a parody. The verbal humor mostly left me cold. I found most of the dialogue that was supposed to be funny simply wasn’t. This can be partly chalked up to the difficulties in translating humor to a different language or culture. It is also partly due to the exaggerated-yet-deadpan voice acting of most of the characters. I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but think Little Rascals and you may have some idea of what I mean. Every character exaggerates their enunciation while maintaining an almost emotionless delivery. This manages to leech away whatever laughs were in the script.
However, in the visual humor department, Wanted knocks the ball out of the park. I earlier compared Wanted to the Coen Brothers. What laughs there are in the game come during the cut-scenes, which are directed with real cinematic flair. Interesting and creative camera angles, great animation of facial expressions and little unexpected touches all combined to make some of the cut-scenes laugh-out-loud hilarious. Look particularly for the homage to The Matrix in the introductory scene and the Pixar-inspired “outtakes” before the final credits.
Unfortunately, these weren’t the only two bits of “homage” in the game. A third one takes up a chunk of the actual gameplay and was, after the impossible action/arcade sequence, the single worst thing in the game: insult root beer drinking duels. That’s right, there are four progressive sequences in which you must come up with rhyming insults while downing shots of root beer (Well, spicy sarsaparilla, anyway). For some, this bit will be sacrilege simply by virtue of being a direct rip-off of their beloved Monkey Island games. For me, the whole thing was a fiasco primarily because the “insults” simply weren’t funny! The lack of humor in the actual exchanges turned them into sheer mind-numbing tedium.
Into the sunset
I find myself in real turmoil about summing up my overall impression of Wanted. Half of the humor worked… half of it didn’t. Wonderful original graphics but some lackadaisical voice acting. Great and fun inventory puzzling, but offensively difficult arcade/shooting sequences which will prevent most players from finishing the game. Great parody storyline combined with the most blatant and gratuitous rip-off of another game I have ever encountered.
With a few changes, Wanted could have been a really good game—one of the best of the year—despite some of its flaws. But the twitch requirements and the insult sword — errrr… sarsaparilla duels, combined to cast a deathly pallor over the entire experience. If Revistronic had left out the insult dueling and provided a workaround to the shooting scenarios, I’d be giving Wanted an A-. As the game exists now, I have to give it a much lower grade as well as providing my opening caveat that I don’t recommend purchasing it to the vast majority of adventure gamers.
Final Grade: C
(find out more about our grading system)
System Requirements:
- Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP
- 850 MHz Pentium® III (or Equivalent)
- 128 MB RAM (256 MB Recommended)
- 24x CD-ROM Drive (or PC DVD Drive)
- 64 MB Graphics Card
- Direct®X 8.1 Compatible Sound Card
- Mouse, Keyboard and Speakers
