ild Wild West: The Steel Assassin is a point-and-click adventure
that takes up vaguely where the Will Smith/Kevin Kline movie Wild Wild West left off. Five years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the rift between North and South is finally beginning to mend. That is, until President Grant receives a death threat signed "The True Executioner of Abraham Lincoln."
Steel Assassin is more or less a collection of puzzles with some target shooting thrown in. In the same vein as the movie, Jim West and Artemus Gordon rely heavily on weird gizmos and contraptions as much as raw wits, convincing disguises and good old-fashioned bullets. Players alternate between controlling West, the swashbuckling U.S. marshal, and Gordon, the effeminate gadget nerd with a penchant for garish costumes, in a race against time to uncover the villains and save the president. The plot is slightly more rich than the big-budget movie's premise, which was long on chatter and repartee but about as deep as a mud puddle at high noon. Gamers basically move the cursor about the screen waiting for the icon to appear that identifies interactive objects, people, targets and exits. Each area contains a preset number of tasks that must be achieved before the story moves forward.
West strikes up seemingly inane conversations with various characters who may not offer anything helpful unless he interacts with them just so: Help with a crossword puzzle, figure out how to open a wine bottle (yes, that's a puzzle) or rile a thug until he blurts out some information, that sort of thing. Also, when playing West there is a fair amount of gunplay of the shoot-the-bad-guy or shoot-the-thing-that-will-fall-on-the-bad-guy variety. As Gordon, the more Holmesian of the two, weird tech doohickeys are called into play more often than not, including the "Projected Light Photographical Reference Machine" (a microfiche reader), and the "Non Contaminating Evidence Examiner & Retriever" (a magnifying glass). How quaint.
Methodical, but beautiful
The "locked-in" aspect of this game--the inability to move from an area until all its tasks are completed--can be frustrating for anyone particularly bad at puzzles, but the difficulty settings can be modified to include hints. And the exacting demand will be a boon to stubborn/manic problem-solvers. A basic mandate: Pick up or pilfer every innocuous object around and then see if they'll all fit together to make some grand contraption. Or, if there's an ax just begging to be part of the inventory, odds are a tree will be chopped down in the near future. Not that that's a bad thing, but it illustrates the linear plot that must be endured. It's not overly stringent, however, and there are enough variations in dialogue and weapons and gadgets to offer some semblance of karmic consequence. It's all quite absorbing, really, if not a little confounding.
And from time to time there is, in fact, more than one way to skin a cat. Artemus, for example, can use a disguise to sneak past a guard, or he can bypass said guard altogether by cutting a route out of the wall with his trusty Putty Acid String. In spite of the pretended grand scale of the adventure, gameplay often feels confining. Yet played/viewed as an interactive movie, The Steel Assassin is spectacular. Character animation is somewhat stiff, but the innumerable pre-rendered backdrops are real eye candy. Countless cut scenes and segues offer flashy and exciting cinematics as a reward for methodical pointing and clicking. Each stagnant contraption put together from a mouseful of baling wire comes to life in the grand tradition of over-the-top Hollywood heroism. At its core The Steel Assassin rightly relies on wit, guile, charm and a fistful of gadgets to save the day.
