In many ways, West of Dead is simultaneously the antithesis of AND the perfect model of the roguelike dungeon crawler. You got your consumables, different realms, rapid game reloads, short sessions meant to be replayable, and procedurally generated levels. I think what most sets it apart from your Hades or Enter the Gungeon is its particular emphasis on slower combat.

You learn this very quickly.

Instead of being "encouraged" to use cover generously, you’re all but forced to even in the first underworld area. When cover is destroyed our outside arm’s reach, you also have access to your main proactive defensive maneuver, the dodge. Your savior and condemner. This floaty dash is very inconsistent in its ability to actually dodge incoming shots. Try to use it only when necessary. While you can and sometimes have to spam it in swarm scenarios, I find it’s even less consistent in its pathing and distance you gain from using it when spamming the move.

So long as you can adjust your expectations for a slower, more methodical experience, you can enjoy yourself plenty with the combat, jank and all. In fact, the game is quite easy. I didn’t die once before I was already at the end in a minuscule four and a half hours. The only difficult sections - excluding getting used to the cover movement - was the final boss and the preacher, and the latter only because of his gargantuan health pool and seemingly neo-like ability to dodge your shots. Since it’s a roguelike you can obviously keep playing for more secrets and upgrades, but honestly? I had my fill by the end of my first session. In a pure dollars to hours exchange, West of Dead probably isn’t that great of a deal, but I didn’t regret my time with it at all. Luckily, I got it on sale, and so should you if you have any intention of playing it.

Also, as a side note: It’s odd how frequently I incidentally play games that are roguelikes or Metroidvanias, with this one being one of the former. I don’t know if that speaks more to my not looking into prospective games deep enough or just the prevalence of those genres, or both. Not that it’s a bad thing, it’s just funny how many titles from those genres I’ve played without knowing ahead of time. But I digress.

The procedurally generated maps here are much smaller, refreshingly small in fact, and are well designed in the sense that it makes you feel like you’re outside while still in actuality being in dank, claustrophobic rooms better suited for close-quarters gunplay. There’s little to no backtracking, and realms take less than an hour to clear.

And while the game is blink and you’ll miss it quick, it will at least be a visually stunning time for the night it takes you to beat it. The comic book art style is undeniably the biggest beacon of awesome West of Dead possesses, and what I’d wager is the largest draw the game has. One that I’m afraid has caused a lot of unfortunate expectations, like the assumption that the depth is as good as the art direction. And I admit that as someone who is in the 90th percentile of people who played and actually enjoyed the title. Even I can agree this is missing some much-needed variety in the gun and tactics department. That said, I certainly had a better time than Ron Perlman did, who appeared to have been threatened at knifepoint to provide the VO for the main character for the game. Which is a shame, because he really is a great choice for the role.

To anyone considering buying West of Dead the two roadblock questions I’d ask would be: are you ok with a shorter, easier adventure than most roguelikes, and are you content with this being a cover shooter focused on methodical gunplay? If both of your answers are yes, then the game isn’t such a hard sell when it’s discounted. Otherwise, I’d steer clear.

Hellboy meets the wild west!! I really liked the look of this game and the flow of gameplay.

Really cool variety of weapons that I never used and fighting styles. The game would be like "hey you can use this frozen pistol in combination with this neat rifle, or you can use the different kind of pistols while melee range and-" and I would just straight up take 2 shotguns at the same time and continue my run. I would lie if I'd say that I didn't had an absolute blast, the perfect combination of something nostalgic and adrenaline inducing.

But I would also lie if I'd say that the game doesn't have its problems. Sure, it has the anticipated vibe of an indie game from the start but I still have a hate/love relationship with the cover systems - It's frustrating at times. I would've loved to see more attention to this game regarding the voice acting (the Plain walker is the only character that talks) and maybe more lore since it had amazing potential and after finishing it has great chance of being extremely forgettable.

West of Dead is probably the worst roguelike I have ever tried so far, and I am not even kidding.

While the art style could be a positive, I found it very distracting and borderline annoying. The camera is placed in all the wrong places, the shooting feels slugish and unfun, the VA from Ron Perlman feels like he did this for a bottle of whiskey or something, because he sounds so tired and bored out of his mind.

You can easily do everything in this game under 7 hours, if you are not bored already, so if you want to experience style over substance, go on, try it.

Eu particularmente gostei muito.
É um roguelite com um estilo de gameplay mais lento e diferente, por ser a distância. Dá pra ver inspirações de Bastion no narrador, que é muito bem narrado, mas é um jogo que é sofre demais da falta de conteúdo, como linhas de diálogos e caminhos extras.
Tive alguns Bugs que mataram minhas Runs durante o jogo e dá pra ver que o final foi um extendido pra dar um tempo de jogo maior.
A história se encaixa conforme a progressão mas é bem decepcionante, ainda mais pelo mistério que é feito em volta.
Tinha tudo pra ser um jogão mas ficou no acima da média, independente do quanto eu gostei.

Rating: 7.2/10 - Good

Pretty basic roguelike with a rough start.

This game tries to do the Dead Cells thing of having you get points that allow you to choose the next weapon you're going to unlock, but it worked with DC because they had plenty of gear from the start.

The gameplay is good, unresponsive but good, everything feels slow but that works in your advantage since it gives you plenty of time to react and think of what you want to do next. This makes the game incredibly easy but at the same time, also provides a breather from the slew of roguelikes that market themselves as "hard as souls-likes". So if you want something a bit easier that won't punish you much, this game is here.

The story is ok, Ron Pelrman is in it and he does a decent job with the work he is given, but the story and the dialog are too cut and dry for him to properly shine. The plot is a simple revenge narrative that is mostly there as set dressing. they do stablish the protag as someone who lived in hardship, but they never do anything with it, so it lacks impact.

One of those roguelikes that would've been better if it wasn't a roguelike. All its faults could be forgiven if you had the sense of making real progess each session but instead its a slow and pretty easy experience until it gets a bit hard then 2 hours is wasted.

Commits a lot of the sins of the genre in that it starts out as pretty barebones and you have to repeat multiple times to unlock more interesting items. It doesnt hold up for multiple runs though and each time you play the slowness and clunkiness gets more annoying.

The moments I enjoyed just reinforced to me that this would have made for a pretty great 4-5 hour linear game instead of being a 3 hour game stretched out by half arsed roguelike ideas

The game looks really good, but it has nothing going for it in gamplay.
The shooting itself is alright, altough aiming is clunky. A main mechanic is covering behind graves(?) or other objects, but you have to hug them really close, and the animation between standing and covering is very little, so you'll of course get damaged. Literally everything is clunky and feels slow, you have to wait like a second between rolls, not giving enough time to get to safety. When going into cover you again have to wait a second before you can roll or do anything.

Upgrades, weapons, perks are usually what makes rougelites(k) but this game lacks everything. Like 4 gun types, sometimes with debuff modifiers like making the enemies bleed. Upgrades and perks/abilities have nothing really. Everything is basic and boring.

A year later and I remembered I didn't rate this one

West of Dead is unique and mostly well-made, but this is one of the most "Made by a 3-6 dev team on a shoestring budget" games I've ever played, that is not dogshit or extremely barren. It is barren by the genre standards, mind you - after 15 hours spent with this game, I've unlocked everything it has to offer and have beaten the game more than enough time to totally exhaust all of its enemy and tileset variety, plus getting all but 4 achievements. West of Dead's gameplay is not deep enough to be a forever game you keep perpetually installed on your SSD, and it's item and weapon lists are not long enough to keep you playing for dozens of hours. While it's better than 70% of roguelikes on the market, it struggles to stand out or, for lack of a better term, give you more bank for your buck than other games in the space. I have to stress, again, that this is a pretty swell game all things concidered, but it's a decidedly finite experience in a sea of infinite ones, and it's shorter runtime is not better than a similar length of time spent playing the competition.

Hope Web of Wyrd is better!

The guns can be pretty satisfying and the game has many great little ideas in it, but it fell short for me overall.

The core gameplay is lacking a bit of depth. You shoot things from behind cover, weapons and lights you can activate deal stun damage... and that's kind of it.
It's fine to have few mechanics, but none of these were enough to carry the game for me.

Aiming feels bad no matter the control scheme because the reticle is offset from the actual barrel and it's next to your character, which forces you to look away from the enemies, meaning you can't appreciate the impact your attacks have.

Weapon types are distinguished in pretty cool ways (the trigger acts differently for each type), but the aiming makes them less fun and the different guns you find in runs just aren't exciting - they don't provide huge twists or big bumps in power.

The cover mechanics are functional and pretty smooth (though I'd prefer no hard sticking to cover and a dynamic ducking system instead), but there's not much to them either - you don't need to time the moments when you pop out to shoot, and other than flanking particularly passive enemies, there's no reason to leave.
One good thing is that the cover breaks over time (and respawns after a period of time), which introduces some dynamism into fights without making longer shootouts annoying.

The stun mechanic is also very basic. Attacks typically have stun damage, and lighting lamps that hang around in some arenas can stun all enemies around them. Stuns are useful, but they don't make you play differently - weapons aren't divided into strong damage vs strong stun archetypes, most enemies will die before they get stunned by your attacks, and stuns don't allow you to deal that much more damage compared to just shooting an active enemy.

So that leaves the pressure of making the game interesting to the enemy and level design.
Level design is obviously not going to work because this is a roguelite. Rooms are basic, very repetitive, and arena layouts never introduce anything that would affect the gameplay much.
More over, there's plenty of backtracking, and it's slow. Your dash isn't faster than just running, there are plenty of rooms where you have to use a teleporter with a drawn out animation just to get to the other side of a gap/drop and pick up an item, and even with teleports being placed around the map, you'll still end up running through empty rooms and watching slow teleport animations a lot.

Enemy design is alright though. It's nothing crazy, but they all have a different way of forcing you out of cover and different ways they're best tackled, so I'd say the roster of opponents is a positive overall. The only problem I can think of is that Outlaw fights (reoccuring minibosses) end up taking way longer than they should because of how few openings you get to attack.

Overall, it's a perfectly middle of the road game.
If you happen to really gel with something about it, I can see how you could enjoy it, because it doesn't have any massive flaws.
If you end up disliking anything about it, there's probably nothing here to keep you coming back.
However, most people would likely think "it's alright, but a little underwhelming".

No es el mejor rogue like que existe, eso está claro. Los textos son pesados saliendo siempre, la rejugabilidad no es la gran cosa y los enemigos acaban haciéndose repetitivos. Eso si, gráficamente tiene un estilo muy bonito, unos buenos efectos de iluminación, y muchas armas diferentes con las que probar. No diría que están super bien equilibradas, pero muchas veces te ves obligado a tirar con lo que tienes. Las zonas podrían ser mucho más diferentes de lo que son y los mapas más interconectados, eso si. No se, a bajo precio no es un mal rogue like, aunque en 8 h se puede finiquitar sin problema, yo mismo hice casi la mitad del contenido en mi primera run (sin contar tutorial).

La esquiva es bastante satisfactoria, aunque según avanzas hay enemigos que disparan tantas veces que aunque hagas una esquiva perfecta te vas a comer balazos. El control con ratón y teclado es un desastre, jugad con mando si o también

En general es satisfactorio, aunque tirando al final se hace repetitivo hacer las primeras zonas, pues tardas bastante en ellas.