Just Another Mobile Monday

When most people think of the Wild, Wild, West, they think of Clint Eastwood, sheriffs rounding up the posse, and duels at the OK Corral.  Now, sure, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly did play a role in this time.  But for the most part, the wild west referred to the American Frontier.  This had nothing at all to do with The Outlaw and Josey Wales.  Instead, it was simply the westernmost — and usually the most inhospitable — settlements in the United States and its territories during much of the 1800s. 

Life in these frontier settlements was never easy.  To begin, this was the time before modern amenities such as cars, airplanes, instant communication, and indoor plumbing.  Moving from a settlement back to town could take days, and even the mail rode slow in those times.  Life was based upon farming and ranching, and while much of the land was fertile, you never knew when a dust storm could destroy an entire year’s worth of production.  In fact, most cowboys spent their days tending the herd, not chasing bad guys, bandits, or Indians.  Of course, the occasional bandit attack was also a part of life in the frontier, as were the unscrupulous land deals and other dangers.  Thankfully for those times, a gun was never far from most trigger happy fingers.

Such was the life which Astraware presents in their latest release (developed by Binoteq and Sandlot Games), Westward, a game which traces the westward expansion of the United States one frontier town at a time.

Installation and Registration: Installation is accomplished through the usual methods.  Simply download the file to your computer and load it onto your device via AcitiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center.  You advanced users can also download the cab file directly to your device.  Once installed, your can play the game 15 times (and only in the tutorial levels) before the trial will expire.  Purchase the full game to experience the full excitement of life in the frontier.

Overview and Gameplay:  This is a game about building a civilization in some of the wildest, most untamed lands in the United States.  Follow the settlers as they progress from one town to the next, taming increasingly harsh condition, fighting natural disasters (such as tornadoes and fires) and all the while fighting off attacks from the notorious Copperhead gang.  This sounds like a pretty intense storyline, but the game does a fantastic job of keeping things light.  This atmosphere is shown at the very beginning with the tips which are displayed as the game loads.  Some of these tips will help you during the game, others are references to favorite movie lines, and some are just humorous one liners.  My favorite: "Han shot first."

One thing I found interesting in this game was that you follow different characters in each level and adventure.  Usually, games in this strategy subgenre follow the progress of a single character, with everyone else becoming minor characters to fill a specific role.  Not so in Westward.  There is no "main" character here.  Each level will track the progress of a different character, with the storyline, not the characters, providing the links between levels. 

Within each level, there are also a variety of tasks which must be completed and sub-levels to solve.  Some of these are designed to teach you a new skill or provide a new resource, others will simply further the plot.  Again, however, each sub-adventure will require the use of different characters, meaning there are no minor or insignificant characters in this game.  To check on the status of your assigned tasks, just click the task list icon on the bottom right of the screen.

Because the glue of the game is the plot, not a particular character, the story must be a strong one.  And it is.  Once you get past the initial tutorial levels, you will pick up the action with Maureen Fitzsimmons, who has just been sold a plot of land in the fertile Hope River by the mysterious Doc Vostrikov.  Of course, as soon as you begin playing, two things will soon become apparent.  Hope River is not the fertile paradise which had been advertised, and you are not the only owners.  In fact, nearly a dozen people have all been sold a useless deed to the Hope River land by the unscrupulous Dr. Vostrikov.

The rest of the game follows Maureen and a variety of other intrepid settlers as they try to make their way from one settlement to the next, farming, mining gold, and cultivating wood from the trees, all while fighting off the Copperhead gang and tracking down the mysterious Doc Vostrikov.

Of course, this story-based approach, while entertaining, does have its downside.  Once you complete the game, that’s it/  Move on.  The game will be the same every time you play it, with only minor variances.  As such, it is really not the type of game you are going to play over and over again.

Resources: There are four resources which will control your destiny in this game: food, water, gold, and wood.  These are the resources which allow you to develop and build your town, feed your citizens, and purchase tools.  You can track how much of each you currently have by watching the meters on top of the screen.  There are several ways to gain resources.  First, you will find them scattered throughout the game.  While this is an easy way to quickly boost your resources, the gain will be temporary and you will quickly find yourself dwindling in that area. 

Second, you can build structures to increase your resources (farms, mines, lumbers mills).  As they say, "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime."  So, if finding berries on the bush and gold or wood lying on the ground is giving a man a fish, buildings are how we teach you to fish. Buildings allow you to develop a sustained and replenishing stockpile of each resource.  For example, wells will provide you with water, farms will produce food, lumber camps mean wood, and mining camps will increase gold.  The more citizens you assign to each building the higher the production. 

Third, you can build a trading post where you can buy and sell resources.  Are you flush with gold?  Trade some for food to keep your citizens well fed. 

Watch your resources carefully, though.  If you are using more than you are producing then you will run out of that resource.  Run out of food and your citizens will grow hungry and leave town.  Run low on water, and your production of other resources can grind to a halt.  To check your resource production, you can tap info from the map screen to see how much you are producing and using each day.

Which brings us to one of the oddities of the game.  While you can determine how much of each resource you are producing and using each day, there is no measurement of time in the game.  As such, there is no predictable way to measure a day (or turn) and determine how long it will take you to produce new resources.  I found this to be an extremely odd omission.  Strategy games like this will typically display some form of measuring time, or even graphically show the passage of time as the days grow dark and turn to night, etc…There should have at least been a clock which would allow you to measure the passage of time within the game.

Additionally, the game has no measurement of the mood of your citizens.  While they will eventually leave if there is not enough food, the game had no measure of the morale of your town.  I think this would have been a great addition to the game.  If the morale of your citizens was high, then they would work harder, producing more resources in a shorter period of time.  This also would have lent a number of new buildings and options in the game which could be used to improve morale.  This is obviously not necessary, and the game played fine without the addition of a measurement of morale, but I think including it would have added a new element of difficulty to the game.

Buildings:  As I mentioned, buildings allow you to develop a sustained and replenishing stockpile of each resource.  At the same time, however, you may use up one resource in building another.  For example, a farm will use water to create food  A ranch, which will produce more food than a farm, will also utilize gold from your resources to make food.  

One of the things I liked about the game was that it does not reveal all of the potential buildings at the beginning.  As you progress, more advanced buildings such as ranches, gold mines, and lumber mills are made available, as well as town halls, banks, and many more.  Some of these will require that other buildings already exist in your town before they can be constructed, so there is considerable strategy involved in determining how to use your valuable resources and which buildings to construct.

If you look at the Build menu, each of the available buildings are listed, along with the resources and prerequisites (if any) required to build each one.  If you do not have the necessary prerequisites or resources, then the building will be grayed out on your menu.  Additionally, each building contains a description of how it will help your town collect additional resources.   

The only tricky thing I found, however, was trying to locate a building after you have begun significantly populating your town.  It can be tricky remembering where each building was located. It would have been useful to include a button which would jump directly from one building to the next.  This would have saved a lot of time in the game searching for the correct structure. 

Of course, if you do get lost, you can always just tap on the map in the lower right corner and navigate through the map view to find the correct location.

People: Of course, the primary resource of your town are its people.  As your town grows, new settlers will arrive and build your population.  Each new settler will require a home and a job.  Some buildings can house (houses) people, some employ them (gold mines, lumber mills), and some can do both (farms, ranches, mining camps).  When you click on a building, it will show you how many citizens can be housed and employed there.  Employing more citizens in a particular building will increase production of that resource.  Again, there is a considerable degree of strategy associated with employing your citizens in order to ensure that your production of resources is balanced appropriately.

There are several different kinds of people who will live in your town.  First are citizens, who must be housed, fed, and employed.  Next are gunmen and lawmen (the sheriff and his deputies).  They will protect you from bandit attacks and fight your battles.  There are even drunks, who can serve as some useful comic relief throughout the various stages of the game.  They serve no purpose in your town, except to utilize your valuable resources.  You will want to get them sobered up so that they can revert to being useful citizens.   To scroll through your citizens, just tap the citizen button on the bottom left of the screen.  Tap the gun button to scroll through your gunmen and lawmen.

In addition, you may also encounter a variety of non-player characters.  These are characters who further the plot of the game, but are not controlled by you.  Frequently, they will offer to teach you new skills or assign tasks which must be completed.  Some of these characters require a trigger event before they will interact with you.  In other words, you must complete a task before their role in the game is activated.  If you encounter these characters before the trigger event occurs, they will not acknowledge you or interact with your character.  This can lead to some oddities in which you encounter a band of bandits before they attack, and can do nothing to them or with them. While this occurred rarely in the game, I felt that gameplay would have been improved if these characters would have been assigned a limited role, even if it was only to run away or shout obscenities at you, in order to make them a more realistic part of the game.

Finally, I have to give a great big Kudos to the developers who obviously put a lot of fun and creativity into naming the various people you will encounter and control in this game.  From the Brown Brothers, who you will lead from one farm to the next tavern rounding up the members of their "posse" to the three gunmen, Ned Nederlander, Dusty Bottoms and Lucky Day.  I thoroughly enjoyed trying to figure out all of the references (both clear and obscure) that the named characters in this game referred to.  It really added to the light hearted atmosphere of the game.

Tools: As you explore the West, you will find various obstacles in your path: a roaring river, giant boulders blocking a road, and completely infertile land, to name a few.  For these problems, and many others, you will require tools such as bridges, dynamite, and irrigation pipes.  These can all be purchased at the General Store (which you should build).  But not so fast.  Initially, you will find the General Store empty.  In order to purchase a tool, you must first be taught how to use it.  The game uses a variety of characters and side adventures to teach you how to use the tools before they will be made available for sale in your store.  You will also want to make sure one of your citizens is assigned to work in the General Store.  You cannot purchase anything unless there is someone standing behind that counter. 

Tutorial: Westward includes as excellent Tutorial, which starts at Camp Chipewa and leads you all the way until you join Maureen Fitzsimmons at Hope River.  The tutorial teaches you all of the basics of the game, including moving your characters, assigning them to housing and employment, collecting resources, and building.  It also teaches you how to understand the information displayed on the screen.  This is a complicated game, and the inclusion of this tutorial mode at the beginning made a significant difference in shortening the learning curve and getting straight into the action.

Graphics and Animation: I was extremely impressed by the detailed graphics and animation.  Different characters were depicted working at their jobs and even randomly congregating and moving throughout the town.  It was a little confusing to see people assigned to a job walking miles away until I realized that they are still producing the resource, even though they are not actually shown working.  As long as they are assigned to that building, they are going to be useful citizens.

Saving: I was extremely impressed with the save feature on Westward.  This seems like a small feature, but when you ride the train like I do, the ability to quit the game at any time can be critical to not missing your stop.  There are eight save slots.  Although these are not particularly finger friendly, they are easy to access with a stylus.  Just select save game from the menu and then tap the slot you wish to use.  No need to even name your game.  It will automatically be named with the level you are currently completing and the time and date of the game.  If that is too complicated or takes too long for you, then simply exit the game.  Your game will be automatically autosaved and the next time you begin, you can just select resume to start right where you left off. 

Conclusion: I have a running joke with the folks at Astraware that they make games which are simply too addictive, too difficult to put down, and this takes away from the time I should be spending doing other things.  Nothing epitomized this more for me than Westward.  Once I started playing, I simply could not stop.  I would quickly lose hours without realizing it trying to figure out how to feed a hungry town of imaginary people (rather than, say, feeding a hungry house full of actual people).  This is the sign of a truly great game.  In reality, I think what I loved most about this game was the level of complexity it offered.  It was not so difficult that you just wanted to give up in frustration.  On the other hand, it was not so easy or tedious that you got bored and left it after a few games. So, get ready to posse up and take a wild ride through the old west with Westward.

Vital Stats:

Name: Westward

Operating System: Windows Mobile 2003 and higher; Windows Mobile Smartphone; Palm OS

Where to Buy: Astraware

Price: $19.95

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