Far Far West Review

A Robot-Cowboy Co-Op Shooter That Became an Overnight Phenomenon

Far Far West entered Early Access on April 28, 2026 from eight-person Spanish studio Evil Raptor, and within days it turned into one of the year's biggest indie breakouts: 250,000 copies sold in the first 48 hours, a million players by mid-May, and a "Very Positive" score sitting at 31,223 reviews (95.3 percent positive) by review time. The pitch is a 1-4 player co-op horde shooter starring robot cowboy bounty hunters who sling both guns and spells against occult monsters in a weird-west setting. Reviewers reached for the genre's biggest names to describe it, and mostly agreed it earned the comparisons. "It feels like 8 friends, sat down together, struggling to answer the age old question, 'What game can we play that we will all enjoy?'... they then proceeded to take their favourite little bits of each of those games," one wrote, listing Helldivers, Borderlands, Balatro, Payday, Warframe, Red Dead Redemption, Deep Rock Galactic, and Vermintide as the ingredients. Another put it more bluntly: "Helldivers but it has cowboys and horse robots, and skeletons with the added bonus of the devs that don't hate its community."

The Loop: Deep Rock Galactic-Style Gunplay With Spells and Skeletons

At its core, Far Far West is mission-based horde combat: drop into a map with a squad (or solo), fight through waves of monsters toward an objective, and extract with your loot. What consistently won reviewers over is how the shooting and movement feel, praised repeatedly as unusually polished for an eight-person studio's Early Access debut. "The devs are lying to you. There is nothing about this game that feels early access, everything is polished, haven't had a single crash or seen any bugs in my 75 hrs of gameplay," one reviewer with 9,475 minutes logged wrote. A more measured but still enthusiastic account praised the specific mechanical texture: "Guns feel good! They're varied, fun to shoot, and (largely) feel powerful. Elemental combos are well thought-out and reward you for using multiple cooldowns in quick succession." The genre mashup extends to its central joke, robot cowboys who cast spells instead of relying on tech gadgets, which reviewers found charming rather than gimmicky: "Robot space cowboys silly extraction horde shooter (adjacent) game with flying trains and low-tech old west themes? It's like this game was made for me specifically."

Recurring Praise: A Small Team Moving Fast and Listening

Beyond the mechanics, the single most repeated theme in the positive reviews is how responsive Evil Raptor has been since launch, a small team shipping frequent balance and content patches while directly engaging with community feedback on forums and Discord. That goodwill shows up as a specific, recurring point of comparison to less community-friendly live-service competitors, and it's part of why so many critical reviews stop short of a full recommendation reversal even after listing serious complaints. It's also worth noting the game's community developed its own running joke almost immediately after launch, a fishing minigame the game doesn't have, which produced a wave of nearly identical tongue-in-cheek reviews: "Early Access and still no fishing? Literally unplayable." It's a joke, not a genuine complaint, but its sheer repetition across dozens of reviews says something about how quickly this playerbase formed its own inside jokes, a reasonably good proxy for genuine community engagement.

The Recurring Complaint: A Loop That Runs Out of Room Fast

Set against all that polish and goodwill is the single most consistent criticism in the review pool: the mission loop is fun for the first stretch of hours but flattens out quickly once players lock in a build. "Game is fine and fun for maybe 10-15 hours until you figure out your build and lock it in, then its the same thing over and over until you just lose interest," one reviewer wrote, a sentiment echoed almost word for word by several others. A more detailed critical review broke down why: "Very repetitive gameplay. It can be fun for a few hours, but after that it gets really boring. There's basically no enemy AI since they just walk towards one player in a straight line... They will never attack you. Frequently they get caught on invisible walls and they just hold still without even trying to attack you." Several reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the game agreed the content ceiling, not the core feel, was the issue: "It needs a lot of work to create replayability, but so far has decent bones," while another compared it unfavorably on this specific point to its clearest inspiration: "This is like DRG but with only 1 class and no digging mechanics, which kinda just means that it is a generic horde shooter."

A Second Complaint: Save Corruption, Controller Support, and Accessibility Gaps

A smaller but still notable cluster of complaints centers on rougher technical edges. Save-file reliability drew genuine frustration from multiple players: "It could be a great game but no matter what i do it keeps saying corrupted file every time it saves. loosing 10hrs 2 of 5 hr game plays and lv 9 and other lvl 10." Controller support was singled out as a specific weak point months after launch: "Controller support SUCKS... Good luck trying to pick up an item off the floor... Proper controller support was requested in April 2026. With a developer responding it will be looked into." Accessibility concerns came up independently from two different angles, motion sickness from persistent camera shake and head bob even with settings adjusted, and photosensitivity risk from the game's flashy visual effects, both flagged as real barriers to entry rather than minor nitpicks.

Verdict

Far Far West earned its breakout success honestly: the core shooting, movement, and spell-combat feel genuinely excellent for an Early Access debut from an eight-person team, and the studio's fast, visible post-launch support has kept a huge, initially skeptical audience largely on its side. What keeps it from an outright must-play recommendation right now is the same thing that eventually cools off most horde shooters in this genre, a mission loop that a large share of reviewers say runs out of meaningful variety somewhere around the 10-to-20-hour mark, compounded by real technical friction around saves, controller input, and accessibility. At $19.99 for what's already one of 2026's most-played co-op shooters, with a small studio clearly still building out content at pace, Far Far West is an easy recommendation for genre fans willing to treat it as a promising Early Access foundation rather than a finished product, robot cowboys, wizard skeletons, fishing joke and all.