Recent reviews by Cinnamon Santa

The easiest way for me to summarise Blood West: A Single-player Hunt Showdown experience with a nostalgic touch.

My first playthrough ran me about 18 hours and Blood West delivered on exactly what's on the tin. This is a stealth focused FPS RPG with a weird west aesthetic, and I couldn't put it down until I completed that first playthrough.

As an RPG Blood West offers a small variety of builds for your character to follow, focused around your level based perks and the equipment available to you as your progress. Build diversity starts off small in your first playthrough, as you are limited to the equipment available and a smaller perk list, but by time you've reached Act 3 you'll really have a wide variety of choice. Thankfully any subsequent playthrough will give you the full perk list from level one, and most of the later unlocked perks are broader additions to your character like inventory size rather that combat focused anyways.
For my first playthrough I followed what I imagine is the most common build path, a stealthy gunman focusing on revolvers and rifles, which served me very well for majority of the game.

Separated into 3 acts, each act has a unique local and set of objectives that helps keep each act fresh as you progress. Each act performs well as a standalone experience. Act 1 made for a great starting experience, both gameplay and aesthetically. Act 2 was a big jump from Act 1 with a significant increase in difficulty as the variety of the enemies widens drastically, but felt great once you learned the ropes. Act 3 took a smaller jump in difficulty, but changed up the formula to deliver another fresh experience as you explore. I really enjoyed how each act changed from the prior to keep it fun and exciting.

Each act is inaccessible after defeating the act boss, which means you have to make sure you've explored every nook and cranny to make sure you've found all of the unique equipment you can before taking on the bosses. A change I'd like to see in the future is a New Game+ feature that lets you cycle back to Act 1 after you defeat Act 3's boss, as currently the credits roll and your save file is simply left in a limbo saved at the final boss arena (you can get out and return to exploring Act 3 but that is all).

Outside of headshots and backstabs with melee weapons, enemies feel very spongy, and when 2-5 are rushing you down you'll very rapidly have to switch to a run and gun approach of emptying your guns and reloading as they chase you. If you do not land those headshots some enemies will easily take 3 to as many as 10 or maybe even 15 bullets to down. My limited experience with shotguns felt just as bad outside of headshots, the only difference being I was basically in melee range when they discovered me. Stealth and precision is king.

The boss fights in Blood West do unfortunately fall short for me as individual experiences, as none of them reward the stealth based gameplay the overworld basically requires. That being said, I can't as a player think of ways to make FPS bosses that would reward stealth gameplay, so I would call that a consequence of the genre rather than a failing of any developer. Boss 1 was my most difficult fight, but that was likely due to a lack of tools in the early game. Boss 2 was easily the weakest experience (and very loud). Boss 3 could have been more impressive as a final boss, but worked overall.

The final comment I have is that there is a feature that lets you turn down the rate of the player character's commentary, and I personally needed to make use of that and almost considered turning off the commentary entirely. No hate to any of the voice actors, they all did incredible work! But by default the player character makes out of pocket one liners about just about every single action you take. Killing enemies, picking up items, healing, suffering from bleeding I really do mean almost everything. Even with reduced voice lines turned on it was still near constant commentary about picking up ammo, treasure and killing enemies. It just didn't work for me personally, but this didn't effect my actual gameplay experience at all.

All in all, I heartily recommend giving Blood West a playthrough! I personally hope to see an Act 4 in the future, or (given the proper tools to support it) a community driven custom Act maker.