Rarely do I sit down to play a game, finish it and instantly start a new playthrough; this is one of those games. Westerado is a great package with lots of replayability and can easily be recommended for fans of westerns or revenge flicks. No other experience that I've played has done revenge so well.
It's well written, the pixel art and animation are nicely done, and the fact that you can draw your gun whenever you want, and that you can shoot key characters dead and just keep on playing, gives it a great sense of freedom.
A true 8-bit spaghetti western mini-epic, Double Barreled is a true shotgun-blast-to a belly-full-of-whiskey,good time. Frantic action, a reasonably large open world and complete freedom of action make this a truly standout and absolutely thrilling ride.
None of this is anything like progress—Westerado isn’t exploring new frontiers when it comes to genre work—but the romance inherent to the game’s emphasis on freedom sometimes comes close to overpowering a bitter remembrance of the very real history it cribs from.
One of the best games that I ever played on my life. I was so invested in the story. It reminds me of the Lucasarts adventure games and Westworld. Anyone who likes a good western, pixel art and the previous things I mentioned, this is a game for you.
good stories, beautiful pixelated graphics, huge scenarios and nice game mechanics that combines action with old adventure/detective games and also rpg mechanics when you have to talk with every npc to advance in the story. It also has great humour with references to movies and games.
Very basic indie game. Funny to play with for an hour, but really not that fascinating to deal with exploring superficial characters, broken economic system and shooting.
Westerado: Double Barrelled looks, at first glance, like a cheapie indie game. The graphics are extremely primitive and blocky, and the game itself is extremely simple.
And yet, when you play it, you realize that some real love went into making it. Unfortunately, while this game has some real charm in its Western theming, and it certainly is clever in some ways, by the end of it I was left feeling as if it never really delivered.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Westerado is a pretty simple game – you move around in a top-down 2D fashion, you can talk to people and interact with (a very small number of objects) with A, you pull out your gun with the right shoulder button, you **** your gun and shoot it with right trigger (and you must **** your gun before firing it), and you reload with the left shoulder button. That’s it.
Where the game is interesting is that it is a mystery game – the central driving theme of the game is that your family was murdered and you, the Gunslinger, are going out into the desert to the nearby towns to collect clues. You’re given one random clue by your dying brother at the start of the game, and you must collect additional clues by talking to people – and, mostly, by completing various tasks on their behalf. The Native Americans want you to drive off the farmers and help them kill the soldiers and take over the nearby town. The Sheriff is depressed and needs to get back in the saddle, and his cowardice leaves you responsible for looking after the local people. The local railroad has had its tracks blocked off by some bandits, who are being paid off by the Banker, who in turn is in debt to the Oil Baron…
There’s a bunch of pretty standard Western tropes at play here, and the game plays with them, simultaneously poking fun at the tropes while simultaneously mostly playing them straight. For instance, your health is represented by hats, and when you get shot, your hat gets shot off – at which point you put on another hat. If you are shot when you are hatless, you die. You can buy new hats at the hatteries, which are definitely not at all suggestive of brothels, and you can also get hats by shooting them off the heads of enemies.
And yet, the game is often pretty serious – people can and do die, and you can even kill off main characters (or get them killed off when they follow you around on quests). Moreover, it is a revenge plot, as you try to track down your family’s murderer, and it plays that revenge plot quite straight – the murderer really is a terrible person, and when you gun them down at the end, your own homicidal tendencies are put under close examination.
The game has a lot of quests, and these quests, though short, are how you get most of your clues. Helping out various people with various deeds – some moral, some evil, some gray – helps you accumulate clues, and completing entire questlines with people will often reshape the world in some way.
The intent of the game’s multiple endings is to make these plots matter – if you follow a plot through to the end, the ending of the game will reveal that your family’s murder is related in some way to what you did during the game.
It also makes the game replayable – if you only complete enough quests to get enough clues to find the (randomized in appearance) murderer, who poses as one of the townsfolk in the towns, you can then play the game through again, do a different questline, and then track down the murderer again and get a different ending.
However, you can do a great deal of the content in a single playthrough, and this at times makes the game exhibit some odd bugs, such as the oil baron getting to take over a lot of land despite the fact that I never helped him, or a character making reference to some event they couldn’t have seen because they weren’t around at that location to observe it. This was kind of disappointing, and drew me out of the world in my first playthrough.
My other problem with this game is that, in the end, while the game’s simplicity is a virtue, it also didn’t really give the game much in the way of variety – ultimately, you just use your gun to shoot bad guys, and talk to people. The bad guys are all pretty samey in the end, with limited variety, and you have seen all that the game has to offer within the first hour or so of gameplay. And while the game itself is pretty short – and indeed, there’s an achievement for beating it within an hour, something which is eminently doable – after I beat it for the first time I wasn’t left feeling like I really needed or wanted to do so again.
This isn’t a terrible game, but it isn’t a very meaty one. If you play it like an RPG, you're apt to be disappointed. If you play it and try to find the murderer ASAP via a single quest line, you're probably more likely to enjoy the experience.
Everything about this game is horrible, I have no idea why the reviews are so positive.
Of course the graphics are terrible, but I expected that from the screenshots. The biggest negative is the simplistic gameplay. All you do is talk to everyone and get assigned mind numbingly boring fetch quests. This is the sort of nonsense I use to play back in the 8 bit computer days. It was boring then and it is boring now. There are so many better games out there, in fact there aren't that many that are worse than this one.
SummaryBrought to you by the indie game developer Ostrich Banditos, Westerado takes you on a pixilated journey through the Old West where you must avenge the murder of your family. With a deep narrative and a new mystery every time you play, Westerado presents a full experience rarely seen in free casual gaming. So strap on that six shooter and...