At last the time has come to check if the hopes we had placed in We Happy Few become reality, or all is in good intentions and little else. Compulsion Games, the parents of the child, have spent the last two years shaping their Early Access, which has been available since E3 2016. More than enough time to get an adventure to live up to the expectations created. However, it seems that this suit has come a little big to the study.
The first thing to remember is that what we have been playing in the previous version for PC and Xbox One was far from being the complete game. Yes, it allowed us to take a first look at this dystopian retro-futurist world, in which British society survives drugged to the eyebrows with a drug called Jubilee ... But in reality it is in ruins after several catastrophic events of the past. An interesting premise, which attracted the eyes of users, eager to taste anything that would remind minimally the award-winning Bioshock series. We will not say that the initial argument premise, and even the setting, do not remember the games of Levine and company, but everything else is clearly different.
As we could see in the Early, everything revolves around the collection of objects for the creation of others, with touches of survival along the way. In fact, by then all that was available was a survival mode that, in the final version, is not yet available, arriving for free during the next few weeks. What is, and is the great novelty of We Happy Few for its official premiere, is the campaign mode, in which we follow the footsteps of three inhabitants of this peculiar world, each one having its own abilities and playable evolution, while we check the miseries and misadventures that made what is the world of this title.
We Happy Few screenshots
This is an interesting premise, starting with the attractiveness of the universe created for the occasion, and the contextual narrative, which allows us to guess little by little what has happened to reach the situation in which they find themselves, after starting from a past in common with our world (imagine something similar to Fallout, but less radioactive and post-apocalyptic). However, the problems arrive soon for We Happy Few, and we do not refer to the technical edges that it presents, of which we will speak later in this text. Rather, we talk about certain playable patterns that the game of Compulsion Games adopts as its own, and that do not end up working perfectly. For example, we refer to the mechanics of survival and intensive collection of objects, which seem almost children of another time ... The one that was there when this game began its development.
Both potholes are avoided to a greater or lesser extent. First by presenting a series of automatic aids that allow us to face a simplified crafting, which makes things very easy, although the intricate menu system of We Happy Few is unnecessarily complex, almost to be considered disastrous. Then, making the survival mechanics not of mortal need, except at the highest level of difficulty. That is, we will not die of hunger, sleep or thirst, but our statistics will be affected by it, running less time, for example.
As for the development of the game itself, the truth is that we find a traditional adventure for the times. That is, we are faced with a semi-open world in which there are lots of objects to collect, secrets to discover and wrongs to undo. Some of these are part of the main plot, and others are not, arriving in the format of secondary missions. So far nothing new, nor anything that sounds bad. However, the truth is that the basic game mechanics in We Happy Few do not just convince us, taking the palm stealth, clumsy and clumsy, largely due to an AI without too many lights that, at times, seems to act random form. If we add to this that the combat is not exactly brilliant either (Skyrim's body-to-body is tired by now), the result ends up tiring before time.
As if that were not enough, we find the small errors and technical obstacles that we talked about above, with decreases in the rate of images per second 'just because', uncomfortable climbing animations, glitches here and there ... OR the fact that Compulsion Games has decided to save animations for the braves, for example putting a fade to black every time we want to climb stairs or hide under something (which breaks the rhythm of the action and is quite rare). The developer is already working to fix many of these failures but, in general, it gives us the feeling that they still have too much way to go until the final version of truth.
The sound does not offer so many problems, with a good work of the voice actors and an adequate accompaniment for the situation. However, there is a small problem: the closed British accent of the actors, and some subtitles to Castilian that comply, but that sometimes leave us with the 'ass on air', having to interpret from a language of Shakespeare complicated to understand . We see it with the contextual dialogues of the world, in which we will rarely see the subtitles. However, normal conversations are translated without problems.
The truth is that it is a pity that there are all these moles in the curriculum of We Happy Few, as it has flashes of brilliance in various areas of the game. We refer to his interesting narrative, the magnificent setting or the interesting level design he presents. However, the errors are, right now, too many to let them pass without further. That is to say, that the game of Compulsion Games has ended up being far from what it promised in its beginnings. And that there is no Jubilee to fix it.
THE VERDICT
In its current state, we can consider We Happy Few a small disappointment. The expectations we had about the game of Compulsion Games were high, and the game has not quite lived up to it. This is because the title gives the feeling that it is still half-baked, with outdated menus, old mechanics and too obvious failures of performance, AI or approach. However, not everything is bad, as both the setting and history we liked, and if Compulsion is still working in this game, I could get to polish the rough diamond we saw in the original premiere of the game, already a couple of years. We Happy Few still looks like a game in development, due to the lack of polish in many of its plots. Its history and setting are promising, but in the current state of the game it is not too enjoyable.
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