Way back at E3 2016 during the Microsoft Xbox Conference a trailer for a new indie game was shown that just grabbed my attention straight away. That game was then announced to be entering the Xbox One Preview Program and I immediately put it on my gaming list. The preview was only a sample of what the full game promised to deliver and the early build surprised many by revealing it was more of a survival focused game than the Bioshock style game the trailer hinted at. Following a series of delays and change from being an Xbox One exclusive title to now a multiplatform release under AAA publisher in Gearbox Software. Now in 2018 the game has finally released completed but sadly the name of the game has never been more ironic as We Happy Few managed to both surprise and disappoint me equally.
I really wanted to like We Happy Few having followed it right back from 2016 to today but instead of delivering on the promises over the last two years, it became for me the biggest disappointment of the gaming year so far and quite frankly just left me feeling angry about it the more I played it and suffered under the weight of the shambolic broken mess that the Xbox One final version was. The full game is actually far more broken than the original preview build and it just had me scratching my head every time a bug and glitch took me right out of the story and each game crash left me close to hitting that uninstall button. I chose to give this game two weeks to get updated and patched in order to complete my review but having been patient and spending time submitting technical support tickets to Compulsion Games I feel that enough is finally enough.
But to start on a positive, the story and world of We Happy Few is an amazing one to experience if only the game allowed you to enjoy it as intended. The opening twenty minutes which was shown in the original 2016 E3 reveal trailer and the preview program version, really prepares you for a very dark and different kind of world, the very reason that We Happy Few caught my attention to begin with. The Story really is the only satisfying thing about the game and even through all the technical bugs and issues, it is strong enough to keep me fighting to complete the game.
You begin in the role of Arthur Hastings, a man going about his work in the Information Redaction centre whose job is to monitor and check the newspaper stories that come across his desk and must choose to either allow it to go through to the public or to be censored instead. Things are going well until a particular news story comes before him and forces him to remember that he had a brother Percy triggering a memory flashback that makes Arthur reach for his ‘Joy’, a powerful drug that people must take in order to fit in and conform to society. Joy also has the effect of making the person taking it forget any and all things negative, making them see the world as a happy and wonderful place. The Player is then asked to make a choice to take the Joy and forget everything or to throw it away and continue to remember his brother and therefore seeing the world for how it really is. Throwing the Joy away will see Arthur starting to break away from its effects but soon his co-workers notice this and declare him to be a ‘Downer’ who is someone who has come off their Joy. Forcing Arthur to try and escape he is soon cornered by the ‘Bobby’ police force and beaten and left to rot in the sewer system.
We Happy Few is really about Arthur and his desire to escape the town of Wellington Wells and try to locate and reunite with his brother Percy which will take Arthur on a dark path as he must navigate the world of Wellington Wells in order to try and find a way out of there whilst at the same time his journey to break free from Joy and the regime that forces the population to take the drug in order to keep them drugged up and oblivious to the truth of their reality. One of the first things I noticed with the full game compared to the preview build is just how much of the survival game aspects showcased in the preview build have actually been dialled back for the full game. Originally the need to eat, drink and sleep played a huge part of surviving in this world but now they are more of a nuisance that never really prevents you from playing but they are just there and far too easy to manage to really make them a factor in how you play. Now should you become tired, thirsty or hungry it will have an effect on your stamina bar which you rely on to move around and to fight. The issue is just how easy it is to top your levels up, in fact you never really know how hungry or thirsty and tired you are until a red icon appears at the top of your HUD and you simply use the food and drink in your inventory to resolve them. Sleeping was a huge criticism of the preview version and back in 2016 the game would force you to sleep at the end of every day but now getting access to a bed is relatively easy.
The only real survival system that does play a big role in how you play is Joy and how you manage its use in order to fit in and not stand out. Fitting in with the people around you is vital in order to make any type of progress through the game so for example if you are around other Downers but you are dressed far too smart, they will instantly want to hurt and fight you because you remind them of the world they are no longer a part of. On the flip side in order to fit in with the people who are still fully under the influence of Joy then you must take the drug again in order to fit in with them and remain undetected by the ‘Downer Alert’ security systems and Bobby police force all over the Joy parts of Wellington Wells.
In the top left corner of the screen you will see your Joy level meter, the main part of which shows how much Joy is in your system and an outer ring showing your body’s tolerance level to the drug. Take too much Joy too quickly and you will overdose causing you to become sick and prevents you from interacting with people, environment and your own inventory until it passes. The tolerance metre works in the same way as each time you take Joy this bar fills up and if you fill it all the way you will again overdose making you ill until the withdrawal effects pass. Overdosing will make you stand out which again will lead to the people around you becoming scared and alarmed making them violent towards you. Learning to manage your Joy is key to We Happy Few and understanding the sources of Joy that builds tolerance metre slowly allowing you to handle more doses such as whether or not you take a Joy pill which will give you a big hit or drinking tap water that has Joy in it resulting in a lower amount of tolerance decrease but also means the Joy will wear off faster.
Then you have the world which is a beautiful alternate universe which saw the allied forces in World War II surrender to the Germans. As you continue further into Wellington Wells you start to piece together just how Germany now continues to control things by using Joy to force populations to depend on it so much to maintain dominance but also in that the people will believe that everything is just fine and wonderful preventing them from rising up in a revolution. To see the very British town of Wellington Wells this way is quite disturbing but it is a world just rich and so elegantly dark and twisted to make this a universe the player wants to be in and learn more about which brings me to just why it ultimately becomes a complete broken mess to try and play.
Before I get to the bugs that cripple the game experience it is only right to comment on just how much the games on systems betray each other starting with the world itself which as I said above is beautiful as you switch from the Joy induced illusion of happiness to the twisted and dark reality the Joy is preventing people from seeing. As you move through the different regions of Wellington Wells, it can become very tedious to simply walk everywhere as running and jumping to speed up traversing will result in those actions basically pissing off everyone around you enough that they will just attack you and when I say ‘they’ I mean every single person around you will chase you down and attack you unless you can get away and hide. So you have to walk, slowly making sure you Joy levels remain high enough to pass unnoticed which becomes so boring and frustrating as you often have to move long distances to reach story mission objective points. Then you start to notice the NPC’s are also really dull and all look the same, I mean literally there are so many old women who all look the same, move the same and have the same voice you would be forgiven for thinking that someone ordered a boatload of old lady clones for each region in the game. For the first few hours in the game you are really too busy to notice but once you hit the eight to ten-hour mark and every old woman is the same old woman and NPCs are so forgettable it just drags the pace down to a crawl.
But it really is the technical issues which destroy any positives this game would have and after being in preview for two years they are simply unforgivable at this point. Whilst crouching in order to sneak pass some Bobby police I suddenly found myself underneath the world as you can see in the picture above and this happened in multiple locations. I even suffered falling through the world for no apparent reason when riding a lift to complete a main story mission resulting in me re-spawning outside that building with no way of getting back in because of how the story mission was structured. This forced me to lose seven hours of progress and had to restart all over again. Speaking to some NPCs would result in them just disappearing right before me and the clipping, oh dear lord the clipping is ridiculous in We Happy Few with defeated enemy bodies becoming merged with walls and the floor and being unable to interact with switches simply because they just didn’t work.
The bugs really overshadow what had the potential to be a real contender for GOTY because again the story is so strong with surprises along the way as you discover that Arthur is not the only character you will get to play as but the bugs and glitches just put the breaks on enjoying this far too often. The real kicker came for me as I was nearing the end of Arthur’s storyline and the came crashed on every cutscene meaning I actually missed the end of his story before finding myself as the next character you play as which just blew my mind in how this was given the ok to launch as broken as it did.
We Happy Few is not a game to buy right now as it requires multiple game updates to fix the many technical problems it is suffering from. With silly season in gaming about to start with the years big and heavy hitter names all releasing, this could probably be one of the fastest games to land in the bargain bucket in 2018. This is a mess of a game that learned and benefitted nothing from being in preview for as long as it was and it really is a disgrace to see how poorly the final version released as and even now, a good two weeks since it launched, I fired the game up only to have it crash three times in an hour to make me have to put it down until it is patched, something that has not happened on Xbox since launch.
Sadly there is not enough Joy in the real world to make We Happy Few something I would recommend to anyone to buy right now which is a real shame because if the game could just hold itself together, the story would be one worthy of winning awards but a long two year wait for what is a travesty of a game making this the lowest review score of 2018.
Avoid this game until it has been fixed and even then….wait for a sale.
