We Happy Few

[Ross Scott]

Genre: Exploration

Year released: 2018

Ross's Notes: Great atmosphere and environment.  Game doesn't really live up to its potential, story is focused on the most mundane parts of a much more interesting world.  Gameplay is like a cross between Oblivion and Sir You Are Being Hunted, didn't quite care for it. 

 

Ross's rating: Hazy

Link to game:

https://af.gog.com/game/we_happy_few

Free to play: No

GaaS: No

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

[Bluephilosopher]

I got this early on but it was a real drain. It's all the fun of balancing the different meters from a sims game, while trying to explore or progress the story. You can only do one, and it gets really old fast having to take a break to go raid supplies when you would rather discover more about this world you are in. Have not played the newer version but the glitches and bugs were unacceptable for a game at its price. I regretted this game 2 days after I bought it.

Some may like this multitasking challenge of, sneaking, scavenging supplies, weapons and figuring out where and what to do for quests but I would honestly rather go to work instead of playing this again.

[Tisulan]

The game is very okay. It's very, very rough around the edges, and the team that developed this definitely took on way more than they can handle. It has a lot of questionable design choices (why is the game procedurally generated when all of the interesting areas are basically the same in all playthroughs?), but the core game, especially when you get into the towns, is pretty fun. It's pretty fun to get in trouble in a town, frantically run into alleyways and side paths looking for some place to hide, only to find yourself locked in a bathroom with the cops busting down the door next to the body of the homeowner you had to beat to death with a cricket bat so that you could get up the stairs.

 

The story is kind of interesting , but the serious elements are sometimes in direct conflict with some of the wackier tones the game goes for. For example, a lot of the characters are way too stupid to be believable... even if they are crazy or under the influence of crazy drugs.

 

I'd recommend it deeply discounted, though you should only play it in a way that seems fun to you. For example, trying to beat the game without killing anyone at all can be a nightmare, especially with some of the bugs that pop up.

[Arseniy Yavorśkyi]

this game would've worked much better if it was a linear story-driven shooter/brawler.

[TheMG42]

First thing I noticed about We Happy Few is it's retro-futuristic art direction, akin to the BioShock games. We Happy Few pulls this off well enough and it creates a nice looking game world.

Sadly, the game's art direction is about the only positive experience I can relay about the game.

The game's open world feels rather soulless and lacks any sort of personality. NPC's walk around the streets and that's it. No conversing or interacting with other NPCs and will only interact and talk to you if you engage them. The game's open world also feels unnecessarily large, a good chunk of the game's run time is just tedious commuting, until you unlock fast travel areas.

The game crashed on me, well over half a dozen times, kicking me back out the Xbox One dashboard. The game's loading screens are unforgivably bad, lasting nearly a minute in some instances. The traversing of the open world environment also triggered slightly less long loading screens while still being in the same level area. This happened well over a dozen times and then I stopped counting.

The game also has a serious issue with texture loading and streaming. Some textures would fail to load altogether, leaving a garbage bin to look like a blurry mess or a sign on some one's desk looking like the raised dots and dashes of brail. Some textures would pop in well after a second or two, others would slowly load in over time.

The game's AI is among the worst I've ever seen. In one case, I was choking out a police officer who was not more than 2 feet away from his buddy and his buddy kept walking on like nothing was happening. There were also times where I was clearly trespassing in an area, stared right at an NPC a few feet away, and nothing happened, no reaction at all. The NPCs essentially have no peripheral vision and can't see past their own nose, so they're easy to cheese, run around and pick off.

The game is also just a buggy mess. There's at least one area of the map that I can reliably clip through and see underneath the world. Several times an NPC's walk cycle **** up, so they just looked they were gliding around on rocket skates. One of my favourite moments was a woman NPC moonwalking backwards while doing the "happy strut" and then clipped through a building.

The game relies on survival crafting elements for health, food and drinks, clothing, weapons etc, which weren't bad, but just took a back seat to all of the criticisms listed above.

We Happy Few is a game that has some nice ideas that were poorly executed, serious optimization issues and various bugs and glitches. I bought this game for 50% off and still feel like I overpaid for this game.

 

Overall, I'd give this game a rating of Pass.

[DoctorIan7]

At launch it was a mess. Now, after TONS of patches, some new mods added for free, and several high quality story DLCs, it's a solid experience.

FANTASTIC writing, amazing atmosphere/setting, interesting and intense gameplay, with lots of customization to tweak it to how you want to play.

Not to mention the amazing side quests you can find yourself in. Takes some time learning how things work, but it's well worth full price, if you can't wait for a sale.