Westbound Review: What, Would You Rather Talk to Someone on the Bus?

Stranded in an unexplored canyon, your unlikely group of settlers must band together to survive the overbearing sun and nearby outlaws. Shelter, food, resources; the fate of your group lies in your ability to make the most of the land.

OK, not really.

Westbound, the latest mobile game from Kiwi, does indeed take place in an empty canyon, but claiming the land for your own doesn’t require more than two things: tapping and waiting. While the Western setting provides some entertaining dialog and cute graphics, Westbound is still like most every other town-building sim. That’s great if you’ve never played one, but there isn’t much in Westbound that will pull you away from your other virtual residences.

Setting Up Camp

Westbound opens with your caravan breaking down. While you explore the area, you’ll immediately meet the Southern belle Ruby Mae and begin what is basically Westbound’s tutorial. As you clear out sections of the canyon in search of Ruby Mae’s missing daughter, Norma, you’ll become familiar with constructing buildings, expanding your settlement and planting crops. I really enjoyed how Westbound used the opening hour or so to organically outline its mechanics.

In just a couple of hours, the foundation of your town will be established. The early quests help you build houses, inns, outhouses and a variety of resource-producing structures, including the cooking fire, ferrier and pine thicket. From there, you can begin to accept a number of quests or just set out making the town of your dreams. The whole process is pleasantly addictive.

Now What?

To make matters worse, you can’t queue actions, so if you need to collect potatoes and nail to complete a dining table, you will need to check back in after every task.

After the smart introduction, though, Westbound grinds to a halt. Soon, completing buildings to finish quests begins to take entire days. Not only does collecting the requisite amount of wood, adobe, bricks and other resources to begin construction take hours, actually erecting the buildings can take anywhere from four to 10 hours. While there are small tasks you can complete while you actively play Westbound, the majority of your time will be spent dolling out tasks and then simply closing the app. To make matters worse, you can’t queue actions, so if you need to collect potatoes and nails to complete a dining table, you will need to check back in after every task to assign the next step.

Of course, this issue is exacerbated by the fact that there just isn’t much to do in Westbound. Sure, you can build a sprawling town, but all that requires is a few taps and then waiting. Between building one house and then the next, there is nothing else to do. Tap the shop, tap the product you want, tap where you want it to go, wait, and repeat forever. Having something else to do in your town, anything to break-up the monotony, would make Westbound’s downtime so much more acceptable.

This is also where Westbound begins to really pressure you into paying real money to continue. Pickaxes, for example, are essential to clearing out the canyon for new structures and completing a variety of quests. The catch is, you can’t make your own pickaxes. While you can sometimes find them in chests, you will mostly get them from leveling up, which happens about once a day.

Meanwhile, every time you open Westbound, a few screens will pop-up reminding you that for just $5 you can instantly get your hands on nearly 30 pickaxes. Granted, that’s not a lot of money, and there do seem to be daily sales on important resources, but it still makes the “free” in free-to-play feel disingenuous.

Darn Varmint

Westbound would often freeze and crash, requiring me to completely close and restart the app.

Westbound is also littered with bugs. Playing on my Kindle Fire HD, Westbound would often freeze and crash, requiring me to completely close and restart the app. Also, my buildings would sometimes disappear, so I would again have to restart the app so it could resync with the game’s server and bring all my buildings back. There are weird glitches that worked in my favor, too. For instance, there is the Daily Bonus wheel that will reward you with extra resources. After I used my three spins for the day, the wheel instantly refreshed and gave me three more spins. This happened four times until, finally, the wheel decided I’d had enough handouts.

Speaking of syncing with the server, Westbound does require a constant internet connection to play. Obviously, this isn’t much of a problem if you choose to play on your Android phone, but tablets that don’t support 3G/4G won’t be able to run Westbound on the go. Playing on my Kindle Fire HD, this only further slowed my progress.

The Mild, Mild West

Even with its bugs and numbingly slow progression, Westbound has grabbed a hold of me. While I’ve written this review, I’ve stopped a few times to gather my potatoes, finish production on a donkey mill, and gather wood. That certainly speaks to Westbound’s tried-and-true town-building gameplay. Still, there is nothing about Westbound that sets itself apart from other popular sims (at least not in a good way). It’s an OK way to kill a few minutes when you aren’t doing anything else, but I wouldn’t put your other virtual home on sale to move in.