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Wild Wild West: The Steel Assassin

Had Southpeak known Wild Wild West was going to tank they probably wouldn't have bothered making a game out of it. Perhaps they had some suspicion, as the game they produced is a little bit shoddy. Like the movie, it's a hit and miss affair.

In Wild Wild West you alternately play James West and Artemus Gordon, West using his gun and Gordon his brains to protect the life of President Grant. The game put me off with its first puzzle, in which West has to fix a cork-pulling machine. You can't really see the workings of the machine, and while I fixed it by using the right thing in my inventory, I have no idea how that fixed it.

Then there's a shoot-out, and I didn't like that at all. Even on easy mode I was getting killed a lot, and I went on to other games until I was out of other games. And I didn't really like the VirtuaCop-style interface. When I came back to West I realized that I was going about things all wrong. While some villains have to be shot, most can be taken care of by more ingenious methods, and this first shootout turned out to be one of the more enjoyable parts of the game.

Unfortunately, much of the game was less compelling. A tremendous amount of it is taken up in filling up your inventory with difficult to find objects or searching your screen for tiny little hotspots, some of which are almost impossible to find even if you're using a walkthrough that tells you where they are. On top of that, in many places you have a very limited amount of time to find and use something before you are killed. I've never liked solving puzzles with a gun to my head (except for games that automatically restore you to the last place you could have avoided dying, a rare but wonderful thing). One thing I'll say in favor of the game, though, is that every time you solve a major puzzle the game is autosaved, so you never have to go too far back if you're suddenly dead.

There are a few of the gadgets that the series was known for, but not very many, which is a pity, and there was nothing on the scale of the big traveling machine in the movie. The best gadget, and perhaps the most interesting puzzle, involved a booby trapped chessboard (I'm a sucker for chess puzzles). The guns are gadgets of sorts, but I didn't really feel like trying to figure out what they all did, so I just grabbed a few and shot at things with them. Gordon has a couple of gadgets, but they're not very interesting, and while an adventurer might assume that Gordon's puzzles would be more interesting than West's, it's generally the reverse.

The people all move like marionettes. Not cool marionettes like those in Being John Malkovich but standard, stiff marionettes, and this is true even in the cut scenes. This would have been fine in 1995, but with games like Grim Fandango and Omikron: The Nomad Soul in the world it a surprise that anyone would even consider putting out such a cheesy looking game.

I cheated a good deal in this game without feeling I was missing anything. I just kept feeling like it wasn't worth the bother, particularly in one section that is not much more than an endless scavenger hunt. I suppose there are people who find waving the mouse over every little pixel of the screen to find hotspots fun, like a Where's Waldo for adults, but I am not one of these people. I thought that with the high-quality graphics of modern games that pixel hunting was a thing of the past, but West wants to take you back to those days.

In the end, Wild Wild West the game is pretty much like Wild Wild West the movie; it's not really bad, but there's no real good reason to bother with it. If the movie is on TV and there's nothing else on you might enjoy watching it. If you find the game in a bargain bin for $5 bucks it might be worth playing. But you'd be better off watching reruns of the series either way.

-- Charles Herold -2000

Related Links:
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