Home Page / pc / W / WANTED: A Wild Western Adventure / Review Listing / Review

Wanted: A Wild Western Adventure is one of those games that’s reasonably hard to review. Not because it’s a hard game to play, but because I wanted to like the game. There’s a lot the game gets right, but a lot that could have been improved. In the end, we end up with a decent adventure title that, while is better than a lot of the stuff The Adventure Company has released in the past few months, could have been even better with a bit more time in the oven.

Our story is a simple one, as you’ve likely heard it before. A thousand times. There’s a bad guy, and he’s taken over a small defenseless town, and bought up most of the local farms. Our hero, Fenimore Fillmore, is a freedom fighting cowboy with a heart of gold who means to help the locals reclaim their town as their own. Of course, Fillmore is clumsy, and not the brightest bulb in the box. Let the humility ensue.

To be honest, the game is actually pretty funny. While playing, you’ll be reminded of the kind of humor you used to be accustomed to during Saturday morning cartoons. Whether you still enjoy that kind of humor is a personal matter, but I found the humor to suit the environment and feel of the game perfectly. Some of the jokes fall flat, admittedly, but for the most part, you’ll find yourself chuckling along with the game.

Being an adventure game, Wanted is a series of puzzles, one after the other until the game is over. While I’m not talking about your Myst-style mind bending machine puzzles or anything, everything requires something else to do. For example, at the beginning of the game, you need to leave the resident farm to go to town, but you need your horse. Once you get to your horse, you notice he’s really tired. He needs to eat before he’ll take you anywhere. Now you have to go and feed him carrots, and that will get his energy up. Yeah, I know, it’s not rocket science, but it shouldn’t be. The game isn’t meant to be a brain twister, it’s just here as some casual fun on the side.

One of the issues with Wanted is the camera. The game uses a mostly stationary camera system, though you get a bit of sway with it. The issue with the games camera is that, since moving Fillmore is done strictly using the mouse to click and move, you’ll find Fillmore getting stuck a lot, or that you accidentally clicked the wrong object, etc. A manual camera system could have cured these issues easily, but unfortunately, you’ll be fighting with it on more than one occasion throughout the game.

On the control side, things don’t get much easier. Move Fillmore by clicking the spot you want him to go to. Right clicking an object interacts with it. Combine different items in your inventory to solve puzzles. Very simple, nothing too difficult here since the whole game is played via the mouse.

Visually, Wanted reminds me of Toy Story in it’s visual presentation. Of course, I’m not saying it’s on the same technical level, far from it, what I mean is that they share something of the same art style. The game is light hearted and very colorful. You can tell that the games main audience will be the younger generation simply from the look and feel of the game itself.

Wanted boasts some pretty generic audio for the most part. The voice overs aren’t overly inspired, but they do a competent job. Sound effects and music sound like they’ve been pulled from a bin in a back room somewhere and slapped in. Not to say they sound bad, they just sound like everything else, and not overly exciting.

So, in the end, Wanted isn’t too bad. It has it’s share of issues, sure, but for the most part, you’ll find yourself in an enjoyable experience. Wanted isn’t overly difficult, but the light hearted atmosphere of the game is a welcome change from the dark face the game industry has been wearing as of late.