Reviewed on PC

We Happy Few is an open-world game set in a dystopian 1960’s Great Britain within a fictional location named Wellington Wells. Gameplay is from a first-person perspective and there are three playable characters, all of them have their unique abilities and story as each of them has their own burdens to carry, but the end-goal is the same: escape Wellington Wells.

I Story and atmosphere

The dystopian setting of the 60’s Great Britain is extremely imaginative and quite akin to the book “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, although it somewhat borrows from other dystopian novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George Orwell. This is the strong suit of the game, paired with the cartoonish aesthetic and the post-war world aura, where people are high on a drug called the “Joy” which makes the population happy and forgetful of the past, due to a tragic event from the past, which I would not spoil. There is the city where people are high on Joy and then there are the outskirts of the city called the garden district, which are populated by outcasts who have refused to take their Joy.

Also, the fact that this game’s main story has three protagonist who are somewhat interconnected in their story and quests, giving the missions a layer of purpose, although it does not happen as much as I would like it to happen. For an example: when playing as Arthur, you are tasked with bringing Sally some cod liver oil, the reasons are unknown at that time, whereas when playing with Sally it is revealed that she needed the cod liver oil for the child as she had fallen ill.

Each character had their own reasons for not wanting to remember, and more details were revealed through collectible golden masks, which will trigger a memory sequence, although they were a bit too similar and tad overplayed as most of them did not really reveal any new information, and ultimately were not too interesting as they were not interactive nor they boasted an animated cutscene, rather it was a black and white still image which had a few sentences of dialogue over them – a neat idea, but they felt rushed and underdeveloped. These masks were scattered around the world and were optional.

II Gameplay

This game starts of strong. The first character you play as is Arthur, as he works works as a news censor, who suddenly remembers that he had a brother named Percy, he goes off the psychedelic drug of “Joy” and starts seeing the world as it really is, before making his escape into the garden district. The first few hours are good, especially the part when you make your way back into the city.

One of the first mechanics the player will find themselves faced with is the inventory, crafting and the “need” system. The crafting in this game is robust, but effective, the player can craft weapons, food, drinks or clothing. Different types of clothing is required whether you are in the city or in the garden district to blend in, otherwise you will be attacked by everyone. I like that they dialed down on the survival aspect, your character still needs to satisfy his/her sleep, hunger, and thirst, but instead of dying the player will instead face setbacks like lowered stamina, increased stamina consumption, or lowered ability to carry loot.

The positive emotions quickly fell off as the main-quests dwindle into mere fetch-quests. It also does not help that the cities are identical in almost any way possible, you cannot tell in which city you are without looking at the map, which is just poor world-building. I realize that may be a problem due to cities being procedually generated, although I would have liked to see handcrafted cities with more personality and distinction. Also, the side-quests, while they are plentiful, are empty and boring, where the main-quests are meager and uninteresting the side-quests are so much worse.

The combat is very bare-bones. Though not broken by any means, but shoddy at best. All engagements in this game are fought with melee weapons only, one would expect a greater degree of movement and a diverse move set and weapons, but no. You can block indefinitely and do an attack, also you can push the enemy, but the latter is extremely underpowered and best not used, the best way to engage an enemy NPC in combat is just to block until you get an opening to attack, as they hit you a few times and then stop for whatever reason, and rinse and repeat until the bad guy(s) dies. It’s repetitive and mindless. Although the stealth mechanic is OK, as you can choke anyone from behind until they are unconscious, you can also carry their body out of sight, sometimes I found piling them in a staircase good fun.

All the problems are worsened when playing with Sally, as she is less proficient at combat and cannot stealth attack anyone without crafting very expensive knockout syringes. Plus, she must tend to her baby regularly, she needs to feed her, change her diaper, and must caress her as well, if you fail to do so, then the player will be faced with penalties like decreased ability to carry loot. On paper, it might sound immersive, but in practice it is tedious and horrible, especially with the lack of a proper fast travel mechanic, although there are some hatches through which you can fast travel through, but you have to do so often, and they are quite far apart. Which leads me to this game’s main problem aside from fetch-quests and skirmish, the game world is far too big for its won benefit as the distance you have to travel, especially in the garden district is very long and tiresome, this sort of practice eliminates all fun out of this game and end result is a game which is a painful chore to play.

III Optimization

Firstly, I would like to point out that the lip sync was bad on most characters. Secondly, and mainly, the performance of this game on PC is just atrocious. I have a GTX 1070 and I could barely keep a steady frame rate of 40fps, often dipping sub-30fps, on medium settings at 1080p resolution, this is bad especially considering that this game is no Crysis nor Battlefield, graphically speaking, as the textures felt muddy and almost all NPC’s were exactly the same in appearance (this does not apply to the policemen, as they were all exact copies, only that some wore a gas mask, and that some wore red clothing).

I played this game at launch, and there is a good chance that at the time you are reading this the performance is better through patches, but that is no excuse, games have to be polished from day one, as I will not condone the mindset that “buy our broken game now and perhaps we will patch it in the future”. It is just simply untolerable. There is not much more to say, this game runs so bad, that I will say that this is one of the worse optimizations I have seen in quite a time. Not to mention that this game is packed with bugs and it crashed at least five times, I got stuck in walls, corners, and shafts and many other problems I encountered through my playthrough, there were a lot of them and they hampered gameplay very much.

I cannot speak for Xbox One or the PlayStation 4 performance, as I do not own either console or have experience with this game on it, but I have read that things are not great on there either. I will link a reddit thread on this game’s PC performance at the end of the article.

IV Value

So, they decided to price this game at full price – 60€. This is insane for a rushed game, with uninteresting gameplay, and abysmal performance. At the time of writing this review, the game is more expensive than GTA V (30€ on Steam), Fallout 4 (30€ on Steam) or The Witcher 3 (30€ on Steam). Now, I realize that these games are old, but they also are multi-million projects from established developers, where this one is indie game born from Kickstarter.

I do not have anything against indie developers, but rarely are their games as huge undertakings to warrant a full price of 60€, as even PUBG, Rust nor Subnautica ask this much money, and they all are superior games, when compared to We Happy Few. While this game has a lot content, as you can easily sink many, many hours into this game, but so have other games, and this game lacks quality, which other, cheaper games have.

V Verdict

As a huge fan of dystopian novels, I wanted to like this game very much, but sadly I did not. The game is far too expensive at 60€, compared to other better indie games, like PUBG, Subnautica or Rust. Furthermore, while it does have an extremely interesting and a refreshing setting, and an interesting art style, it still is plagued with countless bugs, crashes, and very bad performance. The gameplay, missions, and combat are tedious along with a too huge, empty world, making this game a failure. I regret playing this game and there is no one I can recommend this game to. This is not worth the money, play Bioshock: Infinite instead.

1/5 – Substandard

Link to the Reddit thread on the state of PC performance (enter “reddit.com” infront of the url as WordPress would add a huge, annoying pop-up here otherwise) :

/r/wehappyfew/comments/97gys6/ive_tried_and_tried_to_play_this_game_but_the/

Written on 14th of September 2018