Re: A WESTERN DRAMA WILL BE RELEASE 9th OCTOBER 2020
Okay, I haven't bought the game yet as I had to get a new iPhone and I'm waiting for my next salary to arrive, but I'll definitely be buying it Monday or Tuesday, as soon as I get the money in my account. From watching Liam's streams, I think I already have a pretty solid opinion though.
It certainly seems to have drawn inspiration from Blind Legend in a lot of ways. That's not a bad thing per se but it's just quickly becoming old news. Blind Legend was good for what it did back at the time, as I believe its largest, and perhaps the only, innovation lay in the fact that it was the first accessible game of this kind and relatively complex that was released for mobile devices. So if you're not into that kind of thing, you may not like A Western Drama as it's basically the same concept with just a few twists. It's absolutely linear and scripted, like many others already said. No randomness, no exploration, no optional quests or activities, thus no replay value whatsoever, I believe.
However, the soundtrack, sound design and story are its strongest point, and frankly I was quite surprised. I know Tribit Studios is a new developer but I tend to expect the worst among the worst whenever something new comes out that's published by the Audiogames Association. I still wanted to approach them with an open mind though, and the little hope I had was not failed here.
If you like westerns, you should be able to enjoy this for what it has to offer. It's certainly the first attempt at an accessible western game as far as I know, and in my opinion it certainly deserves a lot of credit for that alone. Sure, I would welcome more freedom to walk around and explore myself, more real-time and fluent action feel rather than the endless pattern of hear and react, hear and react... It gets really repetitive after a while. But I liked the wagon combat, the stealth sequences, and particularly one sequence that I'm not going to spoil which involved a female villain. They tried to mine the limited mechanics to the fullest and to mix them up somewhat to make the gameplay a bit more interesting at certain places, which I certainly appreciate. And I'm digging the story for what it is.
Sure, the voice acting and translation could be improved, such an interactive drama rather than a fully-blown modern game would certainly deserve that. But come on, this is the very best among all the games published by this association so far when it comes to story, the sound design, and actually even the voice acting and gameplay. I think the inspiration by Blind Legend was really that, inspiration, rather than bluntly copy pasting that game. For a first attempt at a game, this deserves appreciation. Among all the Audiogames Association releases so far, there's A Western Drama, then there's nothing else for like a thousand miles, and only then there's the rest piled up in a toilet. Sorry I have to put it like this but I really do, there is no better way to say this and still be honest. I would grant the other Italian developers more respect if they learned from past mistakes and if there was any progression whatsoever to be seen in the followup releases, but there was none. So, by labeling A Western Drama as an Italian audiogame in my head, I'm not doing them disservice because the label is free from all the past negative connotations in this case, and it's associated only with the things they can actually be proud of, i.e. Italy being the craddle of the spaghetti western genre.
The implementation is also obviously thoughtful. I agree with Liam's opinion about the cool use of binaural audio. Clearly a lot of work and care went into this game, although it may not always be obvious at first glance. There are some genuinely brilliant lines and scenes where I was really surprised by the good quality of the writing. I've started learning Italian last month, and I did so once before, about 9 years ago when I had an Italian girlfriend (who spoke perfect English) for about three months, so this is not my first encounter with the language and I think I'm picking it up pretty fast if I can say so myself. I'm mentioning this because I wanted to say that I'll play this game in Italian as soon as I feel up to it to be able to compare the quality of the original versus the English translation. I'm really looking forward to that day!
So, as I said, I'm buying this the second I can afford it, and I'm sure I'll enjoy it, even if just once. I definitely want to support this developer and I'll be intrigued to see what they can come up with next. Good work, guys! Keep it up and do afford to have greater ambitions for the future! :-)
Lukas
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