Far Far West is the rare multiplayer game that respects your time

Far Far West, a new friendslop-adjacent game that’s taking over Steam, is a bit like Helldivers 2, only with ghosts and skeletons instead of aliens. And robot cowboys instead of soldiers. There’s no satire, though, and no time limit. Anyway, structurally, the two are very similar, with one very important exception: Far Far West isn’t trying to take me away from anything else.

Far Far West has you pick a mission with a single objective, such as firing a big cannon or shooting a laser, and then fight a big boss at the end. Once a flying train takes you to the mission location, you’re free to explore and find side quests or loot or just rush to the objective, where you’ll fend off waves of enemies while trying to do your job. The boss appears after you complete the main task, and then it’s time to summon the train again, survive one last big push from the local skeleton mobs, and leave. Then you do it again, either in the same place or somewhere different.

There’s a lot of good about Far Far West, but the thing that struck me the most is how little it cares about taking up your time. I enjoy Helldivers 2, but lengthy missions, easy fails, and downright stingy XP rewards make progress feel like a slog. That’s something I could also say about most multiplayer games of the last 10 years. Meanwhile, in Far Far West, you can take 30 minutes scouring every part of a map, looking for camps to clear and side quests to start, or you can rush the boss and get out of there in 10 minutes or less. It’s a game you can enjoy without having to block hours of time off your schedule.

It also allows you to see satisfying progress without devoting weeks of your life. Progress in Far Far West comes in the form of weapon and skill upgrades. You start with two weapons — a rifle that looks like an old western relic, but fires like an automatic, and a sidearm with an elemental affiliation. You get slots for two basic spells: fire, poison, electric shock, “voodoo” (which starts out as just a life drain thing), and a cactus mine. Using your weapons and spells earns unique XP to them. When weapons level up, you can increase things like rate-of-fire, power, and reload speed, and once you hit certain tiers with your spells, you access more powerful versions of them.

Since XP is tied to how often you use a thing, you can make serious progress in just one mission. Every map has a few hive-like points scattered around, where enemies spawn endlessly until you destroy their base. But even if you don’t farm those relentlessly, you’ll find enough undead horrors to level up every weapon and spell at least once during a job. Far Far West‘s difficulty levels affect things like how much damage you take — not how many enemies you face. If your friends can’t play one night, and higher challenges levels are off the table as a result, you can still knock out a few jobs on easy mode (which, despite the name, is tuned just right for solo play) and get a blueprint or level up your gear.

The blueprint thing is an even bigger deal. After you defeat a boss, you get a blueprint for a new weapon or utility piece (stuff like emergency ammo or health packs). That sounds exciting, except you need six blueprints before you can unlock a new thing. I almost noped out when I saw that requirement, as my tolerance threshold for that kind of grindy repetition is through the floor at this point. Then I managed to get three more blueprints in 30 minutes and a boatload of weapon progress, which was when I realized Far Far West is that rare breed of multiplayer game: one that respects your time.

Image: Evil Raptor/Fireshine Games via Polygon

It helps that the game’s just plain fun, too. Sure, the maps I tried are a bit same-y, with big, empty expanses separating points of interest. Despite just having launched in early access, Far Far West does an admirable job of giving you bonus things to do that make exploring worthwhile, like trying to kickstart a sequence of events that ends with a new skin or something else nice. Wander off the beaten path, blow up some skeletons, get a little reward. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

Your elemental effects add a nice boost, too. Tagging multiple enemies with electricity sparks a chain reaction that zaps any nearby foe, and even your starting poison spell turns a large chunk of the surrounding area into a bubbling deathpit. Filling standard encounters with explosions, magic, dancing lightning bolts, and walls of fire is a pretty effective way to keep them interesting. That’s before even getting into Jokers, the game’s randomly selected modifiers that offer special effects such as:

• A chance to get gold after defeating an enemy
• Making your shoes squeak like rubber ducks
• Faster rate-of-fire while aiming
• Magicking pigs out of thin air, which then explode after you shoot them

Among other things. Jokers are good for one round only, but you can spend souls (currency harvested from defeated enemies) to attach jokers to weapons as permanent modifiers, too.

Far Far West isn’t the kind of game I’d normally see myself spending a lot of time with. That’s okay, since Far Far West lets me have fun in short bursts, which has the bonus effect of making me want to dip into it more often than I otherwise would. Being impressed by a game for respecting my time (and not being based on something like gambling) sort of feels like having an out-of-body experience. This should be the norm, for god’s sake, not an exception. But it’s one I’m happy to deal with. I just hope other developers take note and realize the best way to break through isn’t monopolizing the player’s time.