LinuxGameCast Reviews – World To The West

Your intrepid heroes squish bugs, run from grues, and play the longest tutorial… in the world. World To The West faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: World to the West
Webzone: World_to_the_West
Devel: Rain Games
Engine: Unity
Price: 19.99 / CDN 21.99

Wazzat: World to the West is a pulpy, cartoony top down action adventure inspired by European adventure comics. Take control of four unique characters —Lumina the Teslamancer, Knaus the orphan, Miss Teri the mind bender and the gloriously mustachioed strongman, Lord Clonington—, each with their their own motivations, skills and interweaving storylines, as they seek to escape the dark shadow of an ancient prophecy.

Mandatory Disclosure: They Sent us keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Bugs, bugs everywhere.
Not going to call them game breaking but they are 100% attention breaking.

J-

Has some issues with non xbox controllers, but we’ll get into that later

P-

You can tell it’s a Unity game because it starts on the wrong screen and the first thing you see is that dark blue screen of nothingness.
Thankfully, it seems to remember which monitor is the right one after you move it and, even though the options menu says 3840×1080, it remembers the resolution is 1920×1080.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

J-

The art style is alright
I like the look of the grues
Honestly, I can’t think of anything that particularly stands out about the visual aesthetics other than they’re consistent and well done
There are some background noises, but the music here isn’t really doing all that much for me

P-

I don’t hate the cartoony look!
The background music is a bit of a mixed bag, some areas have a really awesome upbeat tune but others have “generic adventurous music” which sounds like budget Jeremy Soule.
I can’t help but feel like voice acting would have made the playable characters feel less like chess pieces and more like actual characters. Assuming it’d be done properly, of course.

Total-

Control

V-

Welp, you got some suggestion buttons.
Unfortunately the suggestions fall on deaf ears when you are forced to defend yourself.
Creating a 3D adventure game without any sort of camera rotation sounds like some sadistic shite I would come up with for Brick Simulator II: Shadow of Mortar.

J-

Aiming in this game can eat a bag of dicks
Also, it’d be nice if the context sensitive menus had a bit more margin for error. I didn’t realize I could ride frog things until I accidentally triggered the prompt
There’s a definite delay between pressing a button and the corresponding action happening
Also, you need to play this with an xbox controller. By default you can’t do any actions with the Dual shock 4, and remapping things don’t seem to work too good either

P-

Oh my fucking fuck!
What the hell happened?!
Default mouse and keyboard has you moving the characters Diablo style.
Change to keyboard+controller and the Steam Controller doesn’t respond.
Turns out, it wasn’t bound by default and I had to bind it my way.
Until Friday, Knaus’ Ice Skating ability would shoot you off in some random direction rather than where your cursor was, if you were playing with the mouse. They fixed it, though.
What they didn’t fix was the unresponsiveness that got me killed or, at least, had me taking stupid damage because the characters would outright ignore button presses.
I get what they were going for with the limited movement and obstacle traversing abilities each character has, but the lack of a jump in an exploration, metroidvania-type, isometric game doesn’t feel right.

Total-

FUN

V-

This game really needs to at least attempt to explain what and or why i’m doing something.
E.g. right now I’m running around in a cave opening what best can be described as “light plants” with zero direction.
No idea what they do or how many of them I need to open.
You made a 3D platformer without the ability to jump, fascinating.
Four hours in and i’m not even done with the tutorial.
I had nothing (not really, but close) to do Friday but put time into this game.
I ended up favouring the nothing.
I’ve still not reached the Avengers Assemble moment and @ 4+ hours in I never will.
You should have tightened this shite up, son.
Hell, just cut it down to an hour and add some story vs. endless “wandering” followed by solving the occasional puzzle, followed by more wandering, followed by… well, you get the idea.
Did I just accidentally summarize the entirety of World to the West?
Yes I did, Brad, yes I did.

J-

There’s a good game in here. I liked the “The Cave” style puzzles where you need to make your dudes co-operate to progress
What I don’t like is the mindless backtracking
As you unlock more characters, you figure out, “Oh, you need dude X to clear this obstacle”
Which quickly turns into “Oh fuck, I’m going to need to play this segment 8 more times to clear this obstacle
Dear lord, I haven’t cleared the tutorial yet?
So far, the difficulty I’ve seen is grappling with the innacurate and clunky controls to bypass relatively easy puzzles, or exploring every corner for that one area you missed that lets you do a thing
Once I sorted the controller issues, I started actually enjoying the game a bit, but the thing drags it’s feet.

P-

I don’t mind the fact the game doesn’t really tell you much in the way of what to do.
Instead, it has a 6 hour long tutorial until the “mysterious old lady” then basically tells you: “Now that you’ve learned the necessary skills in order to progress (the hard way), here’s the big open world and here’s where you need to go to make story happen. Do what you want!”
Now, this is the point where you will have to traverse the world and, while I agree with Venn, that this is a 3D platformer without a jumping ability, I also get what they were going for.
As the indirect “sequel” to Teslagrad and seeing as it was made by the exact same people, it retains the same metroidvania, unlocking skills to be able to progress, style of gameplay but handed to you in a different “style”.
It’s not a 2D platformer, it’s an isometric 3D platformer.
And even though there’s no jumping, they doubled-down on that decision and crafted the levels to be navigated with just the chess-piece style abilities of each of the characters in mind.
To be fair, though, during that 6 hour tutorial, of all the areas I couldn’t access with the 1 or 2 characters I had available at the time none of those bits had anything that made me want to go back once I had the full lineup.
So, that’s a negative. You created entire sections of maps I just can’t be bothered with.
The thing that saves this game, in my not so humble opinion, is the “Show, don’t tell” approach to letting figure out how to make progress and the well crafted puzzles.
Because, make no mistake, the platforming puzzles in World to the West get a whole new level of “How the fuck do I get up there?” when you can’t jump.
But these puzzles are not obtuse; the game gives you everything you need to figure it out and just lets you fail miserably.
I could have given it 4 chairs here, weren’t it for the fact that in those precision platforming bits it simply didn’t register a few needed key presses.