We Happy Few is an excellent sport to have a look at. Everything, particularly the character designs and settings, is gorgeous: it boasts a wealthy, vibrant 1960s dystopia paying homage to TV reveals like The Prisoner, and movies together with A Clockwork Orange and Brazil.
What it owes to these classics extends to the story, too. We Happy Few takes place in an alternate model of post-WWII Britain on a fictional island known as Wellington Wells. The Second German Empire has invaded and despatched all the youngsters away, dividing the remaining British inhabitants into three teams: wastrels (who’re resistant to a mind-altering drug often called Joy), downers (who voluntarily stopped taking the drug), and wellies (who’re well-and-truly hooked).
Subsistence would not must be a downer, and here is our checklist of the best survival games to show it.
Over the course of the sport you play as three characters — censor Arthur Hastings, chemist and it-girl Sally Boyle, and retired soldier and explosives knowledgeable Ollie Starkey — as they survive and work together with the opposite inhabitants of Wellington Wells.
Each of those characters’ tales is dealt with with grace, developer Compulsion Games understanding that, reasonably than merely inform us why the scenario in Wellington Wells is so dire, it’s significantly better to point out it by three private tales of survival. Throughout Arthur’s story, for instance, you see him continuously come up towards the borders which have been put in place on the island, and encounter the underclasses out within the Garden District. You subsequently want to barter his place over and over, placing on disguises and doing favours, to maneuver freely and with out provocation.
It’s a fascinating battle and one which ends in a few of the sport’s most memorable moments. What could begin out as a comparatively easy quest to cross a bridge or enter a constructing can out of the blue remodel right into a quiz present, or an indoctrination seminar, or perhaps a sport of Simon Says. These moments strike the precise steadiness between comedy, horror, and drama — however that makes it all of the extra disappointing when the sport fails to reside as much as the excessive requirements which have been set elsewhere.
We Happy Few isn’t all first-person exploration and scripted interactions. Instead, these moments are reserved for the start and finish of particular questlines, with more often than not in between spent gathering vegetation to heal whereas evading offended mobs and discovering the precise substances for quest objects. It’s whenever you’re let unfastened to do that within the open-world sandbox that the expertise rapidly turns into an actual slog.
The survival components really feel massively underdeveloped, and although you possibly can technically customise them previous to enjoying or decide one other issue degree to tweak them, it’s laborious to know what impression your decisions may have earlier than getting began on a standard playthrough. While finishing quests, you‘ll need to keep a constant eye on multiple status bars detailing your level of hunger, thirst, and the amount of sleep you’re getting. On high of this, you additionally must take Joy to mix in with the inhabitants inside extra prosperous areas. These mechanics do nothing however inflate the sport’s size and take a look at your endurance, reasonably than add any actual worth.
To give an instance, I ran out of Joy whereas exploring a district populated by wellies and spent roughly 20 minutes making an attempt to get away from the mob chasing me. I will need to have travelled down each alley and each avenue to flee, with new enemies at all times aggroing barely forward of me and dashing any try at hiding or mixing in with the surroundings. You may assume this could make for a tense or horrifying expertise, however the entire time I by no means felt I used to be in any hazard. The mob solely served as a minor annoyance that was stopping me from progressing, largely simply filling the display with extra muddle.
The different downside is the implementation of the crafting. You can get by a lot of the sport with out crafting, past making the odd consumable or story merchandise. I anticipated crafting to be extra central to the expertise and provides me the possibility to get artistic, however you possibly can strategy practically each battle the identical method: you simply must hit your opponent, block, after which repeat the method till you win. You’re by no means inspired to go deeper than that with the instruments you possibly can assemble. And, even once I actively tried to make use of the caltrops, tranquilliser darts, and vomit bombs, it felt far much less environment friendly than merely stepping into and thrashing somebody with a cricket bat.
The upgrades are a little bit of a letdown, too, appearing extra as an act of contrition. Most of the upgrades merely take away the survival mechanics that bathroom the sport down, which begs the query of why these mechanics are there within the first place.
Perhaps the largest challenge, nevertheless, are the numerous bugs and technical points that plague the sport. The UI for Dig Spot chests typically doesn’t seem. Characters typically hover within the air. And it isn’t unusual to see an NPC get caught within the surroundings, or to get caught your self. I needed to reload an outdated save a pair instances, in truth, on account of getting trapped inside the extent geometry and ducking down what I considered an alleyway earlier than realising that it was truly an asset that hadn’t loaded in correctly. It’s grievances like this that additional detract from the general expertise and make it laborious to get correctly invested.
Beneath We Happy Few’s flaws is a wonderful story, some intelligent first-person exploration, and a bunch of beautiful design work. But the remainder of the expertise feels profoundly self-conscious and not sure of what it truly desires to be, imposing on you in some areas whereas remaining hands-off elsewhere. If you’re completely set on choosing the sport up, I like to recommend ready for a patch to deal with these points and reducing your expectations within the meantime. Otherwise, you’re going to be in for an actual downer.
5/10
Source
