Wild West Wendy Review

Intro

Giddy Up! Yee-Haw! (Insert favorite cowboy cliché here)!

The Story

In this point and click western adventure, you control Wendy… a young cowgirl who has grown up alone after her family was (presumably) murdered by a cattle king who wanted their land. Traveling all around the wild west, she makes a living by serving refreshments who cowboys and railroad workers until she decides to settle down and open up her own saloon. But there are devious forces who want to see her fail and are willing to send in thieves and crooks to shake her down and steal her profits to get her to shut down.

The Good And The Bad

When I started playing this game I was really expecting much more from it because of the nifty music and cut scene animation. While the cut scene animation was nothing but still frames accompanied with very predictable and clichéd story text, this is a low budget project so I wasn’t expecting Citizen Kane but still, my hopes remained high as I began the first stage of the campaign mode.

It was then that I realized just how dull this game was going to be as the entire object of the game is to serve bottles of what I presume is soda (though the bottles are green so it might’ve been Heineken) to customers with constant back and forth clicking action which is occasionally broken up by having to stop fights by shooting your guns in the air and stopping crooks before they can reach your cash register by moving your cursor over them and shooting them a couple of times, making them leave from where they came.

With all this pointing and clicking action, I was really waiting for something new and exciting to happen but nothing even came close to breaking up the tediousness of the game play. Even the story moved in a tedious fashion with the predictable direction of the man who wants to make her go out of business the most is the one who killed (?) her family when she was a child.

Luckily there are a couple of different versions of the game to break up some of the monotony including a conquest mode where you have to conquer each territory one by one until you control the entire map which I thought was incredibly ironic since that is what you are trying to STOP from happening in the story mode. Seems that Wendy eventually decides to turn towards the dark side and do exactly what she is against in the story mode.

The third version is a simple time version where you just try to serve as many customers as you can in a certain amount of time and earn as much profit as you can but even this version was nothing spectacular and I found myself growing very bored with it very quickly.

Music

If the story and game play is tedious and predictable, you can imagine what the music was and yes, if you answered ‘tedious, predictable and cliché’ than you answered correctly. Even though the sound quality was quite good, it was still terribly predictable with absolutely no signs of originality. I could swear that I have heard this music from somewhere before but where? Then it came to me, EVERYWHERE!

Overall

While younger gamers would probably find something in this game to be amused by, older gamers will grow tired of it’s repetitiveness very quickly and will be looking for an escape. Even worse is that with absolutely no save feature what so ever, you can’t even take a break if you’re starting to get bored and instead have to go all the way through to the end in one shot (no pun intended) lest having to start over completely and that, my readers, is a fate worse than a desert neck tie party for one.