Stranger’s Wrath smashes genre walls down and does so flawlessly while immersing the player throughout the entire game.
Our new hero’s name is simply Stranger, which adds another level of immersion into the entire western feel in the game. Since in most westerns the character is referred to as stranger in a new town he or she visits outside of their hometown as the people there don’t know the character’s name. The same is true with Stranger.
Stranger is your typical protagonist. He has a secret to hide from the world, and only one person has the expertise to help him. A guy by the name of Doc, another creature from a prior Oddworld game who last time were some of the antagonists. You quickly lean that Stranger needs an operation to fix his “problem” (as Doc refers to it as). The only stipulation is that the operation will cost a huge sum of cash - 20,000 moolah.
The story is told through some of the most beautiful computer graphics used in video games today. At several points in the story your game will cut to one of these scenes to set up the next part of the game, and it not only works very well for a story telling purpose but you pick up in gameplay exactly where you left off in the pre-rendered scene giving you another push into immersion with the character you play.
You earn money in the game by going to the Bounty Store, and getting a price for whomever’s head and then going to bounty them. The price is always higher if you get the criminal alive, but the payout is decent if you have to or decide to kill your target. The money you earn this way doesn’t actually go into the money you need to pay off the procedure, instead it’s your own personal spending money. After you take the criminal back to the Bounty Store you can head over to the general store and buy upgrades to your weapons, armor, or stamina.
The most interesting feature of the entire game is the perspective. The game is both fully 3rd person and 1st person, and it works perfectly. For climbing ropes, and generally running around you will be using the third person perspective most of the time, but should you encounter and enemy you can quickly and effortlessly snap into first-person to take them out and bag them for later payment at a bounty center. The fact that these two perspectives work so fluidly with each other allows you to assume full control over the character as well as being drawn all the way into an experience that most games would leave you half way.
Another aspect of Stranger’s Wrath that’s both unique to itself and a cunning feature is the ammo system. In the game you have over 8 different ammo types that are later upgraded to be even more deadly, although that’s very late in the game. Each ammo type is actually a different animal, and you can hunt for these in the game to get more. You have 1 ammo that’s unlimited that you can shoot at the wild animals in the game to knock and then walking over them allows you to collect them. So it’s basically deer hunter but with fuzzles.
The combinations of the ammo works really well and it’s apparent that the creators spent a lot of time working strategy into the ammo itself. For instance two ammo types you have are chippunks and fuzzles, you can lay a bunch of fuzzles on the ground and then shoot a chippunk into the middle of it, which will draw the enemies right into the trap you set. Unfortunately this only works in a totally ideal situation and very few of these are ever presented to you in the game.
You basically just go from town to town getting bounties and completing them, at one point the town you are in gets torched and burnt to the ground – that was fun. Each criminal has a different set up in his base, which makes for some minor puzzle solving elements throughout the game. The most difficult puzzle in the game is figuring out which weapon will affect the criminal’s stamina more than his health so you can take him alive – and that’s only trial and error.
Stranger’s Wrath is in my top 10, and if you haven’t played this game yet – you have been missing out on one of the best platforming shooters of all time.