Casual Review

Full Review

You are not going to be impressed with this game at first glance. It is going to seem somewhat cheap and kitchy, and you are going to wonder why we liked it. But trust us on this one, if you play it for a few levels, you will find yourself drawn to it. Like a little brother that is just too cute to be really annoying, Wild West Billy somehow manages to take a very simple game with some pretty average production values, and make it strangely endearing. And that’s worth something, right?

Basically, the game is hangman. You are given a word or phrase, and you have to sort out what it is by shooting the letters through choosing them with a mouse or typing them on the keyboard. You’ll likely find that you are quickly moving over to the keyboard, where the game is a lot more fast and fun. While the basic gameplay is almost criminally simple, the implementation of a wild west gunslinger bellying up to the bar and shooting bottles is compelling enough to make it more fun than it really should be. Especially when you use the “special trick Billy learned from his dad” which lets you guess the word and then shoot all of the bottles automatically, there is a certain visceral thrill to the whole thing.

There were some special features, like special weapons that help you open up some letters and a duel at the end of every level, where you have a limited time to try to spell the word before your opponent. These were a nice change, and made the basic hangman game that much more interesting. The game could have used a few more of these minigames to make the whole package more interesting.

Sure the graphics are basically a step up from a simple flash game – but that’s no big deal. In fact, they are kind of cute that way. The story is shown as a series of cartoons that are all in perfect English (all too rare for imported Asian games!), but somehow touchingly… different. The characters and villains are all somehow more cute than cool, and somehow come together into one of the cuter stories in a casual game we have seen in a while – which was really surprising.

My biggest gripe about the game is the way it allows you to choose topics for each level. While it seems like this level of control would be interesting, it ends up being more annoying than fun, and I would have much rather seen the phrases chosen randomly, with the topic being used for a hint.

In all, it’s a simple little game that will probably be quickly lost in the mass of “nice try” games that rise and fall on portals like Big Fish daily, but it actually deserves a little more love than that. Why don’t you download it and give it some?

Review by Nick Kojima