Weird West legends meet eldritch horror in BLOOD WEST, an immersive stealth FPS. Become the Undead Gunslinger, doomed to roam the barren lands until he finds the means to purge their curse and free his soul. No, this isn’t your typical Wild West desperado redemption arc. This is a damnation arc....
Weird West legends meet eldritch horror in BLOOD WEST, an immersive stealth FPS. Become the Undead Gunslinger, doomed to roam the barren lands until he finds the means to purge their curse and free his soul. No, this isn’t your typical Wild West desperado redemption arc. This is a damnation arc.
The Canyons, the Swamp, and the Mountains. Each swarming with abominable monsters and unholy demons, these are open-ended worlds for you to explore freely at your own pace. It will take the player over 20 hours on average to complete all three scenarios, and over 35 if they want to see everything the barren lands have to offer.
Blood West is a stealth FPS inspired by the genre classics such as the Thief series (whose fans will be happy to hear the voice of Stephen Russell, the actor voicing the master-thief Garrett, returning here as the protagonist), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, or - from the contemporary catalog - Hunt: Showdown. The gameplay rewards the careful approach: scouting the area, stalking your enemies, and striking from the shadows. Can you figure out a way to clear a fort full of ghouls and monsters without raising an alarm?
The Barren Lands present the player with a nightmarish, twisted vision of the Wild West legends. The curse that has befallen the realm has corrupted every living thing, defiled the land itself, while summoning restless spirits and dark entities. In this mixture of gunslinger pulp and Lovecraftian horror, dark occult magick presents just as much of a threat as sudden lead poisoning.
In Blood West you will meet many colorful, yet strangely twisted, fully-voiced NPCs. Just as much prisoners of the Barren Lands as you are, they will sometimes share their unusual stories and send you on various missions. Play nice and they might reward you or become your allies. Cross them and risk their wrath.
The game won’t hold your hand. You’ll have to explore the land for yourself (buying a map from a vendor might prove useful!), and figure out your own way to approach quests. As you poke around the three expansive maps, keep an eye out for hidden places and secret stashes. There’s gold in the mountains! Fair warning - it’s probably cursed.
If sneaking around isn’t exactly your thing, or you feel that you have a power advantage over your enemies, you can always take the head-on approach and meet your enemies guns blazing. Blood West comes from the creators of the fan-favorite boomer shooter POSTAL: Brain Damaged, so much gratuitous fantasy violence and pixelated blood splatter is to be expected!
One man’s hell might be another hoarder’s paradise! From simple one-use items like bandages, through medical tinctures, explosives and incendiaries, straight to arcane artifacts that - once slotted - can change the way you play the game, the Barren Lands are just filled with STUFF. There are tons of useful items to discover, and there’s a special player’s stash crate for all those super-rare potions that you’ll hoard and never use.
A gunslinger without a gun would be just a regular slinger. Where’s the fun in that? Blood West makes sure you’ll have plenty of weapons to choose from. Revolvers, rifles, shotguns, carabines - a great variety of firearms, from standard army-issue to those infused with powerful magic, or straight-up possessed. And if you prefer not to cause a ruckus, there’s a wide selection of hand-to-hand combat weapons and archery weapons to pick your favorites from.
The RPG-like perk-based progression system in Blood West will allow you to highly customize the gameplay experience to your liking. Become a stealthy hunter, a revolver-fanning gunman or a relentless berserker. You will gain experience and progress through the skill tree, while discovering new artifacts in each of the scenarios that will bestow on you additional abilities. Combining skills and load-out creates more possible playstyles than you’d normally be able to explore in one playthrough.
Are you ready to take back the frontier from the dark forces of demonic corruption and earn the right to move on to a better world? The Barren Lands call you, Gunslinger!
You might look at the screenshots and think "Thief the Dark Project", then read the description and read "Stalker" and "stealth-shooter." So you start up and when you find a gun and ammo they go straight into the inventory. Some with every consumable drink, cigar, birdskull, special ammo. Spec right into stealth because I had painted this picture of a world extremely scarce with ammo and only, ONLY, should I fire a shot or use a valuable consumable if I had spent five hours trying to stealth past.
By the time I reached the second zone my Stash had so many consumables, ammo, artifacts and weapons the game lagged several seconds when I tried to put something more into (please dont do what I did thinking you need to collect ALL the waterlillies.) It was around this time I also had snoke my way through the entire second map, almost without dying once because stealth bonuses stacked, I could literally scamper right out into the open, walk up to a scallywag's face and introduce him to Mister Stab. Suddenly, this Wyrd Western had turned into Diablo 2. Or Dark Souls. Diablo Souls if you will. And I only draw that comparison to attempt to paint a picture in your mind where youve gotten into the swing of things, you pick up and item with a unique effect, and you mind immediately goes back to "hang on I picked up an artificate that does..." or "I saw an item at the vendor that gives..." Im barely even through the last act and Im already planing new runs with new builds.
Since most unique loot seems to be placed by hand, I also had fun discussing the game with others and learning the location of weapons or artifacts that my run a little more smoother.
Playing through the first area, the canyon over a lazy sunday for about 8 hours and I was hooked, fun action and stealth with a good art style and interesting story.
Getting into the second region the swamps and issues start cropping up as there is a massive difficulty spike and ran into a bug that despawned NPCs and enemies. While resting brought the NPCs back I had a feeling that some of the more challenging enemies never came back. I also had a bug where some of my arrows went straight through and enemy without doing damage.
Overall the stealth is fairly fun but the gunplay is punishing, its trying to do both a stealthy imsim and a boomer shooter and I dont think either works great, I wish they had focused on one playstyle instead of being stuck in the middle. I will likely come back to this but I encourage you to wait for a sale unless you have patience with some jank.
Pro :
- Very satisfying discovery of the game. It doesn't tell you much, you have to learn by yourself. It makes the world feel dangerous. Demons are frightening. Then you learn, and master. And new impressive demons shows up.
- Immersive and stressfull game with good sound design for the demons.
- I like the slowpacing and methodical gameplay you need to have. Always carefull, death is close.
- Well designed ennemies that forces you to find new ways to kill each of them, with cool arts
- Well tought stealth mecanic, that tells you when ennemies hear you, and when they see you.
- Satisfying kills, with gore and ragdoll, good feedback.
- Guns feels great and powerfull
- Story and world lore are ok, but I didn't expected much from this kind of game
Cons :
- Stealth + open world is a bad idea. You spend way too much time travelling very, very slowly across the map because there is a lot of monsters and you need to sneak the entire time
- Dark souls mecanic of ennemies respawning when you die is a bad and frustrating idea for a stealth game. I spend so much time cleaning entire zones ! If I die for a little mistake, it's very disengaging to have ennemies respawn, even if not all
- Repetitive gameplay. Game is hard, so when you find a good and reliable way to kill ennemies, you stick to it, making things boring. Some ennemies have cool designs that will need a new approach, but it's not enough.
- Chapter 3 made me stop. Too many demons, that have too many health, and have too many damages. And it gets very difficult to get rid of death penalty.
- Music are very often too loud, and start at seemingly random moments
- Artistic direction is very dark, sometimes too much.
- Guns feells powerfull only if you shoot heads, otherwise some monsters are bullet sponges.
- Perks are just passive upgrade of the character. No new gameplay.
- No codex for the notes that gives you tips for the monsters, so you read them once and forget
Concept is good but overly difficult just to mask that there are only 3 maps.
If you die you start at the main checkpoint and enemies respawn. No manual save and upon dying you get debuffs as well. First map was enjoyable, but abolutely hated the second map and couldn't progress due to difficulty.
