Video Game / Westward

The Westward game franchise is a series of games developed by Sandlot Interactive beginning in 2006. They are based on the idea of the game Virtual Villager and its clones, but they feature a lower emphasis on the population and society aspect with a better focus on resource gathering, town growth and combat. As their title implies, the series is set in the American Old West, sometime in the late 1800s, on the west coast. The first two games are directly connected by a running plot, while the third and fourth titles are unrelated but feature cameos.

The fifth game in the series, Westward Kingdoms abandons the Old West theme in favor of a medieval plot. As one would expect with such a genre shift, the plot and characters are unrelated to the previous titles.

The five games are-

• Westward: Build your settlements and fight against the Copperhead Gang, led by the evil Doc Vostrikov.
• Westward II: Heroes Of The Frontier: A direct sequel to Westward, take control of one of the citizens of Westward as you try to build a new town while dealing with Vostrikov and a reorganized Copperhead Gang.
• Westward III: Gold Rush: Play as either Polly Hatchet, Amos Cutter or Shawnee Longfeather, mining gold in California while working to fight a greedy politician who wishes to become the new governor of the state.
• Westward IV: All Aboard: Expand the railway west with either Anne or Henry Turner as they rebuild their family's rundown rail line and fight against a vicious rail tycoon.
• Westward Kingdoms: A prequel set in medieval times, take control of either Prince Fenwick or Princess Catherine as they travel the land, rebuilding broken down kingdoms while they uncover a plot by an evil warlord and his army of barbarians to take control of the land.

The games are primarily released for the PC through digital sale and download, though the first game has seen ports to the iPhone and Windows Mobile platforms and the second game saw a Mac release.

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Westward contains examples of..

• Alcohol Hic: If a citizen is jobless for too long, they will get drunk and will remain so until dragged off by a sheriff or deputy to sober up.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Pretty badly done. You may even find them in heavily forested areas.
• Artificial Stupidity: Pathfinding for characters can feel a bit dodgy at times, mixed with areas that look passable but are not and characters may sometimes get stuck due to attempting to take the shortest path rather than a path they can actually travel. This is worst in the first game as the 2D sprites often have larger hitboxes than they suggest and characters can get stuck inside of buildings or even each other rather easily. Moving a group can become an exercise in frustration especially if trying to get them over a bridge or around a large group of trees as the AI gets confused as to where to move every character at once.
• Art-Shifted Sequel: Westward used a totally 2D art style that's a bit realistic. II through IV used 3D character models and a slightly different, slightly more cartoonish art style. Kingdoms is brightly-colored, far more cartoonish and tries for a cel-shaded look.
• Artistic License – Religion - Churches exist in games 1 and 3 but don't seem to serve any religious purpose.
  • In game 1 they exist as a destination for any citizen to sober up drunks, where the sheriff's office is usable only by peace officers. And they give one more employment slot for a pastor.
  • In games 2 and 3, building one raises town happiness a bit but it's only real purpose is allowing the building of cemeteries which is necessary only on one side quest in game 3.
• Bloodless Carnage: Gunslingers, lawmen and bandits can be killed in gun fights but there is no blood. They simply fall over and vanish.
  • Starting with game 2 and the Hero system, Heroes will fall over if severely wounded but will heal and get back up. They do not bleed.
  • This is lampshaded somewhat in Kingdoms. When Princess Catherine is knocked down, she will often quote, "It feels as if some precious life-sustaining fluid is draining from my body...", though she still doesn't actually bleed.
• Chekhov's Volcano: One of the optional levels in the fourth game is to build a town at the base of an active volcano. It erupts every few minutes.
  • This also serves as a Chekhov's Gun, as it was mentioned in the third game that this would be happening.
• Credits Gag: Statistics provided after completing each quest give stats including the amount of food, wood or gold collected, number of bandits defeated... as well as total nonsense such as number of campfire songs sung, cans of beans eaten, times bitten by snakes and other stats which have nothing to do with the gameplay.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game in the series is vastly different from the rest-
  • The game uses 2D sprite artwork with an overhead view as opposed to the 3D isometric design of the other titles.
  • The town happiness and experience point systems hadn't been created yet. New buildings are automatically unlocked as the plot progresses.
  • The main town map covers any unexplored portions in solid black, requiring characters walk around to expose them. This was abandoned in later games.
  • Food can only be gathered from farms, ranches and berry bushes. Animals can't be hunted.
  • Most buildings offer housing for settlers, whereas all later titles require specific houses to be built.
  • The tutorial can not be skipped even if you have played the game before.
  • Combat portions tend to be much faster as bullets hit at a much quicker rate with no misses
  • You can not move characters by right clicking- they must be selected with the button held and the mouse cursor dragged to the new location.
  • Trees can't be replanted, limiting how much wood lumber camps can collect on any given town map.
  • There are no Hero characters.
  • There are no logs or small gold rocks that can be independently mined.
  • The minimap has no overlay on the main play screen and can only be accessed by a submenu.
  • The map view can't be zoomed in or out, or rotated
  • The gun upgrade is bought one time from the blacksmith for the current map- later games force the player to buy a separate gun upgrade for every combat character.
  • Health kits can't be purchased- combat characters simply lose health until they die and must be replaced.
  • Dynamite, irrigation tools and bridges are purchased from the general store and used directly from a player's toolbox. Later titles would reassign bridges as a building rather than a tool, and the tools must be placed by characters as opposed to being placed directly.
• Expy: Amos Cutter, a Hero from game 3, is a loose expy of General Custer. By loose I mean they have very different personalities and historical roles. Amos Cutter is actually friendly with Indians
• Fanservice: The female bandits in 3 and 4 have rather heavy cleavage in their portraits.
  • There may be some aimed at female players as the portrait of a male farmhand/ranch worker in 3.
  • And the male bandits w/ their shirts open to their (non-evident) navels over pretty good torsos.
• Forced Tutorial: The first several missions in Westward IV are mandatory tutorial missions that micromanage your every move while you perform basic tasks as commanded (mostly involving looking for resources).
  • Whereas every game after 2 allows you to ship the tutorial if you've beaten the game once before, Westward forces the tutorial every new game regardless- although if a player keeps a save file right after the tutorial, they can bypass this manually.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Not exactly, as they don't affect the main quests, but a side quest in III involving a sunken shack can often become unwinnable to many players because of a bug involving where to build a well(the going theory is that if any part of the quest chain is done out of order, things become broken), and in certain earlier release versions of the first title, using the irrigation tool in certain spots will crash the game.
• Genre Shift: Kingdoms, despite keeping the Westward title, moved the action back a few hundred years to medieval Europe
• Guide Dang It!: All 5 games feature secrets that are not in the least bit obvious, either to their solutions or that they exist at all. None of them are required to beat the game's story mode, but may be needed to unlock certain buildings or achievements.
  • ... and thanks to II's untested and difficult experience system, it may be required to use a guide to even play that game properly as it is very easy to render the game unbeatable.
• Heel–Face Turn: In a way- beating the story mode in 2-5 unlocks the game's main villain as a bonus gunslinger/extra Hero in sandbox mode, which gives you an extra character to gather resources from the start.
• Humans Are White: Games 1, 2, 4 and 5 feature entirely white casts. Game 3 is the only game to feature any other races- Polly Hatchet is black, Shawnee Longfeather is American Indian, (Wordof God is that these two were meant to have separate story lines from the Custeresque cavalryman but scheduling forbade), and the male gunslinger is black. This could also be a result of Inexplicably Identical Individuals — see below.
  • The original design of the female gunslinger in 2 seemed intended to be Hispanic judging by the saloon portrait and 3D model skin, but the main portrait is of a white woman. Strangely though, the saloon portrait and model have blue hair, while the portrait has brown hair.
  • Although considering that one of the optional gunslingers in game 4 is a dinosaur of all things, and the number of modern allusions in all games, the designers never intended these games to be a serious take on the Old West anyway.
  • A particular offender is the character of Mr. Wong from the first game- despite the name he uses the generic male settler sprite. Yeah, it could be an inherited family name, but still...
• Improbable Infant Survival: Played straight by simply not having children appear. The issue of village population is fixed by abandoning any sort of childbirth system in favor of having new settlers simply movie in automatically whenever a new home is built, and the only characters that can actually die are outlaws, gunslingers or lawmen.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Settlers, citizens, gunslingers, bandits, lawmen and mayors will all use one character sprite set/model for each character of that type. In fact, the only characters who do not get recycled are the major Hero characters and villains.
  • Lampshaded in a quest where 2 identical mayors are rescued and whichever one you pick is always right.
  • The only character in the first game with unique sprites is Doc Vostrikov. The tutorial instructor gets a portrait but not sprites.
• Instant Illness: In game 4, citizens can suddenly become sick, rendering them unable to work. They either heal after so many minutes or can be taken to the doctor's office for a quick heal.
  • Kingdoms adapts this from a simple illness into being turned into a frog by means of a curse, for the same effect
• Lovable Coward: The deputies in game 3 seem terrified of their jobs but do them anyway because you're paying them.
• Medieval European Fantasy: The setting of game 5.
• Mythology Gag: Quite heavy-
  • Game 2 follows directly from game 1 so many cast members reappear
  • Haris Pilton appears in all 4 western games
  • The main villain of games 1 and 2 is Doc Vostrikov. One of the random building names for the stables in game 3 is "Vostrikov's Stables"
  • Joe-Jack Jebediah, a quest character that appears early in game 2, is followed in game 4 with Joe-Jack Jebediah, Jr., for a similar quest.
  • The crazy-eyed old prospectors from the first game show up again in 3.
  • This may be due to lazy programming but many of the building names in game 2 show up throughout the rest of the series. Though it's a bit odd for a medieval gold mining operation to be named "Clementine's".
• Nintendo Hard: The second game. This entry introduced the experience system to unlock new buildings. The problem was that many buildings and upgrades must be unlocked to advance the game's plot, but there was never any indication of what needed to be unlocked until a certain point. This was complicated by the fact that many buildings serve no plot purpose and luxuries used to raise town happiness rarely were required. Experience gain was also limited due to a low amount of optional side quests which could render a game unwinnable if the player did not unlock all the right buildings. This was fixed starting with game 3 which added extra side quests to help with unlocking necessities.
• No Animals Were Harmed: Subverted, technically, in all the games as 1 through 4 have ranches that raise animals for food. Starting with the third game, animals running around on the level map could now be hunted for extra food stocks and fish in streams offered fishing opportunities.
  • Kingdoms abandons ranches in favor of vegetable farms exclusively, but keeps hunting animals and fish that can be collected on the town map.
  • A side quest in game 4 has the player hunt multiples of several types of animals for a fur trader. This is almost borderline cruel as the trader actually claims that rabbit fur must be warm because of "the concentrated cuteness" which implies that the fur trader knew this was cruel but she didn't really care.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: There is no functional difference between male and female versions of settlers, sheriffs, bandits or gunslingers. All combat units have the same abilities and all citizens function identically, and the game lacks any sort of marriage or childbirth system whatsoever. Even Princess Catherine and Prince Fenwick of Kingdoms are functionally identical. Semi-subverted in II and III as each hero unlocks a specific building at the start if the game, and in IV each character has their own unique main town map.
• Rich Bitch: Subverted in 1 and 2 with Maureen Fitzsimmons, the daughter of a banker, but she's rather kind and protective of her town. Played with in Kingdoms as Princess Catherine starts out as spoiled royalty who thinks every peasant should fawn over her but this quickly changes as the story progresses(Prince Fenwick is about the same). Perhaps played straight with female bandits to some degree.
  • Every male villain is an example of this.
• Shout-Out - Probably far too many to list or even notice as these games seem full of them-
  • Westward-
    • A rugged male character named Marion Morrison. Another character ridicules the name asking why he can't have a "normal" name like Wayne... or John.
    • One plot-relevant side mission parodies both the Blues Brothers and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure- Bill & Ted Brown, the Brown Brothers, must go on an "excellent adventure" to "get the posse back together". A character in this mission is named Jalisco County, Jr.
    • Recurring characters Haris Pilton, a male parody of Paris Hilton is famous for being the son of hotel owners and... not much else. In the first game he teaches how to build hotels. In the second game he appears again with the goal of building towns in dangerous locations and does so in the next two games. These locations go from tornado valley to an earthquake-prone valley and finally to the base of an active volcano.
    • Upon sobering up a gunslinger as part of the main plot, he will say, "I can see clearly now, the drunken fog is gone!"
    • Doc Vostrokov is named after Vitali Vostrikov, the founder of the St. Petersburg, Russia branch of Sandlot Games and the creator of Cake Mania.
  • Westward II-
    • If a male settler builds the blacksmith building, he may sing "I am Iron Man!" to the tune of the Black Sabbath song.
    • Monty Python's "The Lumberjack Song" is referenced. Building a lumber camp will often result in a character singing the first line and the male lumberjack's portrait has him holding a book with a pressed flower hanging out of the pages.
  • Westward III-
    • Polly Hatchet is named after rock band Molly Hatchet
    • The female sheriff will reference Judge Dredd by proclaiming, " I AM the law!"
    • The horseback bandits will say various George W. Bush quotes when killed
    • when a general store is damaged sufficiently, the sign switches to read S-Mart, from the Evil Dead franchise- this may have been intended as the building's original sign, with a single beta texture remaining
    • a potential name for the blacksmith is "Hammer Time" and the citizen that builds the shop may even say "it's hammer time!" when completing the build, referencing the M.C. Hammer song
    • "The Lumberjack Song" is referenced again, this time with a lumberjack making a reference to flowers.
  • Westward IV-
    • The accent of the female sheriff imitates that of Marge, the female sheriff in Fargo (1996), played by Frances McDormand.
    • A male character may say "Mr. Plough, that's my name, that name again is Mr. Plough" after finishing a farm or ranch.
    • The character that introduces you to the fossil quest is named Arizona Bones- hero of archaeological studies such as "Triassic Zoo: Electric Boogaloo" and "Dial M for Micropachycephalosaurus".
  • Westward Kingdoms-
    • Various references to Monty Python & The Holy Grail. This is perhaps to be expected considering the game's setting.
    • In a side quest to defeat a tree-loving giant, a traveling bard makes a reference to vegetable mascot Green Giant.
• {{Sidequest}]: Westward IV features an optional side quest through the entirety of the main story mode to find 36 hidden fossils. Finding all of them will unlock a velociraptor which will serve as a "gunslinger" in any subsequent playthrough. It is exceptionally strong as it's bites do heavy damage and it also has very high health.
• Spell My Name With An S - "Harris Pilton" in the first and second games, "Haris Pilton" in subsequent games.
• Take That! - Haris Pilton is an obvious jab at Paris Hilton and her fame for simply being the daughter of famous people. This is even lampshaded as characters in the first game know he's famous but don't have a clue as to why. This is turned rather vicious in the second game as one side quest mentions his upcoming wedding and games 2, 3 and 4 all deal with him taking on various useful ventures of building towns.
  • They may have also been jabbing at the Haris Pilton character seen in World Of Warcraft, which showed up 2 years after Sandlot released the first Westward.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Provided you've unlocked the dinosaur in Westward IV, the train conductor when you arrive in the main map after the tutorial will casually say, "and don't forget your dinosaur!" when you disembark. No town citizen or even bandit comments on its presence, either.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: The previously-mentioned town happiness system can cause this, as well as the experience system. Town happiness directly affects resource production and the mood of your citizens- at average things are normal, high happiness increases rates, and low happiness reduces rates and makes it more likely for citizens to randomly leave, aided by the fact that reduced food production will also cause them to move out. Many building types can raise this as well as having a variety of food types and hiring a sheriff and deputies. It can be lowered by having too many gunslingers in your town or a high population with nothing to counter-balance such negatives. If a town is too low it can be impossible to raise it to normal with your citizens fleeing, rendering a game unbeatable. Likewise, the experience system can be botched horribly if you randomly buy buildings, upgrades and luxuries while leaving yourself without enough points to buy whatever is needed to advance the plot when it is required. As mentioned before, Westward II was the worst regarding both due to the new system being poorly planned, while later games offered more options to earn experience, and kingdoms abandoned happiness totally.
  • Deliberately wasting all your resources to the point you can't replenish them or spending all your experience on junk items on purpose.
• The Wild West - The setting of the first four games
  • Games 1 and 2 have generic Western references and scenery
  • Game 3 definitely takes place in California with multiple Gold Rush references.
  • Game 4's volcano might place the action in Washington state near Mt. Saint Helens, the only active volcano in the US. The North Dakota accent of the female sheriff and the general Artistic License – Geography ambience (see below) militates against this.
    • Well, the sheriff could have moved west so it's not really a solid piece of evidence either way.
• Valley Girl - The female bandits in 4. Definitely. Their dialog is hilarious.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Outside of combat parts, this is a primary element of the games-
  • Water- obtained by building wells, which supply an infinite source. Used mostly by farms and ranches to generate food, although certain other buildings may also use water. Technically abandoned in Kingdoms, though wells still must be built as farms must now be built next to them. Wells only allow a certain amount of reserve storage with water towers expanding your capacity. They are also used to put out fires that occasionally break out, a well's distance to the burning building factoring into how fast this is done.
  • Wood- a main building material. Found by harvesting trees with a lumber camp, chopping up stray logs or by collecting item pickups on the ground. Trees offer a limited supply of wood, though starting with Westward III and onward, trees can be replanted using an item that may be purchased. Kingdoms adds in stumps, which may be harvested separately after a tree is fully harvested, for a little bit of extra wood. Trading posts also sell wood if you need it and have gold to spare. Storage capacity is infinite.
  • Gold- used for building structures as well as buying supplies via stores, hiring gunslingers or lawmen, etc. Mined mainly from gold deposits, but can be picked up as stray loot, loot from defeated bandits, generated by certain buildings or via animal skins. Deposits have a non-renewable finite source of gold and will eventually exhaust themselves, rendering a gold mine useless. Food and wood may be sold at a trading post as a further means to generate this, and if deposited in a bank it may generate interest. Storage capacity is infinite.
  • Food- used to feed the citizens. Generated mainly by farms, which is produced in infinite supply but depends on how well each farm is employed as well as what specific crop/animal they are producing. It may also be collected by stray item pickups, hunted via animals or purchased through a trading post if you absolutely need it. Gunslingers and lawmen may also consume this even if they do not count towards the population total. You have limited food storage per farm, which can be expanded with granaries.
  • Population- Your town's citizens. They move in mostly when homes are built, but may already be there and require a house to be built quickly. They work the buildings, but the population will be capped until other specific buildings are placed. If left homeless, unemployed or starving, they will most likely move out. They may also become drunk if they're jobless, requiring a lawman to deal with them, and in IV and Kingdoms, can become sick, which renders them temporarily unable to do anything. Also separate from lawmen, gunslingers and your main hero in that they are not combat units.
  • Coal- exclusive to IV, it is functionally similar to gold in how it is collected and how finite it is. As IV's main theme is trains, this is used mainly as a resource to operate your rail line, though factories will also use it. Trading posts also sell coal if you need it and have gold to spare. Storage capacity is infinite.
  • Stone- exclusive to Kingdoms, this is yet another building material thrown into the mix and used by all but the simpler early structures(at the exchange of removing water as a resource). It can either be mined from large rocks, collected as stray pickups or gathered from chunks of brick wall or purchased with the right building. Storage capacity is infinite.