The Westerner Review
Sia 'Garrett' Manzari, 2004-04-24

After Pendulo's Runaway and with Runaway 2 in the works, and after Revistronic's own adventure game Three Skull of the Toltecs (1996), Spain is slowly emerging to the number one adventure game developer of the world. Their latest work, The Westerner, is a sequel to Three Skulls of the Toltecs and puts Fenimore Fillmore in his second adventure...

The first thing that jumps into one's eye is the full 3D look of the game, similar to Monkey Island 4, Broken Sword 3 or Grim Fandango. While the game looks very good, and has a not too serious comic style, the common adventure gamer is immediately worried he has to play it with his keyboard again, as is all other full 3D adventure games. Way to go...The Westerner totally plays with the mouse, it is a classical point and click adventure in new clothes.

Fenimore Fillmore is a cowboy as clumsy as he gets, as one can see in the introduction, which completely runs in the game engine. In the course of this intro, he saves a farmer from bad boy Starek's scoundrels and in the course of the game becomes the hero of a western town and the defender of the people.

As said, The Westerner plays like a classical point and click adventure: When you left click an object, Fenimore is investigating it more closely, a right click switches into action mode, in which you pick up items, open doors or talk to characters. This controls work out pretty well all over the game. The Westerner is not too serious about itself...how could it be, starring Fenimore, who is a clumsy Guybrush in the wild wild west? Thus there are some really nice jokes in the game which will giver you a good laugh.

Thanks to the full 3D look of the game, the characters act quite naturally. The facial expressions range from fear to surprise and to angry, not only for Fenimore, but for all the other characters in the game. The rest of the graphics looks quite nice, reminding me of recent movies like Find Nemo. The character animations are quite smooth as well, and the environments are beautiful and look vivid. What more can one expect from an adventure game?

As there is no English version yet, we have played the German version kindly provided by the German publisher dtp. And the German version is dubbed as great as all the others games by dtp. The german voices of Bruce Willis or Salma Hayek further add to the atmosphere. The music is unobstrusive, but adds some more points to the wild west style.

The most important part in any adventure game are the puzzles of course. The Westerner offers a lot of classical puzzles, and thanks god no mechanical puzzles a la Myst. Puzzles are solved step by step, contributing smaller pieces of a larger puzzle. I won't tell about any puzzle now, but almost any of them can be solved by logical thinking. There are also some minor action sequences, which can be mastered easily though. All in all, the difficulty is not too high here, but always challenging and keeping you busy for far more than 20 hours!

All in all, The Westerner is a really fun game, with no real annoyances...wait, with one annoyance: Horse feeding! You need to grow carrots for ye horse, else it won't go nowhere. You best spend the first 30 mins growing enough carrots for the rest of the game, which you can fully enjoy then. Adventure fans, grab a copy of this. This game could be a milestone in the ongoing rebirth of point'n' click adventure games. And someone please tell LucasArts!