We Happy Few

We Happy Few is a great game that has the potential to be an excellent game with a few tweaks here and there. Perhaps wait a little while for an update to fix the problems if you really want to maximize the enjoyment you get out of it, though. I could easily imagine rating this a point higher after the glitches are patched.

I enjoyed my time with We Happy Few mainly because it both respected my time as a gamer, and also immersed me in an fascinating world that was driven by an equally fascinating backstory. The game’s potential may get a little tripped up on the technical front, but if you can look past the occasional unloaded texture or random loading screen, you’ll find that Compulsion Games’ latest was well worth the three-year wait.

Even though the gameplay comes with its occasional glitches, has a bit too many things going on and is run by some strange mechanics, the story, characters, and overall tone are all brilliant and extremely well put together.

We Happy Few is one of those types of games that are rarely seen in a generation. A title that presents a really interesting and creative proposal, full of symbolism and reflection. But further on, we see how its long development and its difficult period of early access may have conditioned a playable section with attractive ideas of survival that are lost in a non-motivating approach.

Although survival and crafting are fairly manageable, running through randomly generated towns, streets, or abandoned fields unfortunately shows that We Happy Few can’t hide from the ghost of its own past, no matter how much Joy you take.

Through it all there’s just something about We Happy Few that keeps you coming back. It could very well be the quality of the writing, the characterisation, and the setting of a post-war London trying to forget its shameful past through medication and dystopian control. Or it could be that, and the weird blend of ideas and styles. In the end, whether that’s enough to excuse some of the bland fetch-style quest design or the repetitive nature of traveling from one side of Wellington Wells to another, comes down to personal taste.

We Happy Few is an excellent story, and a fantastically imagined world, set in a game with many problems.

Ambitious action-adventure with a strong story and a beautiful visual direction. The superficial mechanics are average at best, though.

Given how much care was put into the rest of the game, it feels weird that much of the combat — when you’re not either hiding or running — basically comes down to swinging your weapons wildly until you kill the other people. In a game that’s so intricately made, it feels oddly inelegant. We Happy Few isn’t nearly as broken as Contrast was, but it’s still frustrating that a game that looks and sounds so good doesn’t play all that well.

If We Happy Few had all of these problems while in Xbox Game Preview and a pre-release state, you'd be more likely to excuse it, but it's rare to encounter so many issues in a full game release. While none were game breaking, they spoil what can be a decent game, with a unique world, interesting characters, and a convincingly damning depiction of the perils of taking hallucinogenic drugs. It's a world to which you want to return, but it's also a world that throws up a new problem with every visit. With several patches, this game could be a fun experience, but right now it can often be an exercise in frustration.

We Happy Few contains moments of enjoyment and artistic brilliance, but they are short lived, and - like a Joy withdrawal - the eventual comedown of the clunky, burdensome reality of the gameplay seeps in. A classic case of style over substance.

There's a general technical ropiness. [Nov 2018, p.80]

For all its intriguing story beats, stylish techno-'60s aesthetic and well-presented characters, We Happy Few can't hide its origins as a run-of-the-mill survival game.

One of the year's biggest disappointments. Though there's a lot of the BioShock fingerprint evident here, this lineage isn't ever lived up to. The story, characters and the character of the world itself are positively to die for and exist as the game's few triumphs. It's a beautiful disaster of a game and was perhaps too ambitious for a developer so green as bugs, frustrating A.I. and a slipshod procedural generation robs We Happy Few of any chance it had to be great.

We Happy Few is a case of quantity over quality. A by-the-numbers venture whose game world seems to have been populated by a script rather than being handcrafted. Despite moments of what could only be described as brilliance, We Happy Few is full of fetch quests, boring busy-work and some of the most baffling design decisions in the history of video games.