There’s a lot going on in Wild West Dynasty: roleplaying, survival, life simulation, resource management, and city building, according to the game’s Steam page. You can see a bit of that (or a bit of some of that, anyway) in the first gameplay trailer above, which includes a cowboy shooting a boar before exploring a mine shaft, chopping down a tree, hitting a rock with a pickaxe, and then building a house.
Standard survival game stuff, in other words. But our rugged hero isn’t just knocking together a homestead. He’s building, growing, and managing a town around it in an effort to “become the most powerful man in the West.”
“Survive the harsh environment, find a place to settle, build a ranch, raise a family and eventually become one of the most famous real estate tycoons the Wild West has ever seen,” says the developer. “But be careful: The more fame and respect you garner, the more you’ll be in the crosshairs of outlaws.”
It’s ambitious, sure, and I’d be pretty skeptical that developer Moon Punch Studio could smoosh together resource management, satisfying survival systems, a town sim, and gunslinging action in the same game. But Wild West Dynasty is being published by Toplitz Productions, who also published Medieval Dynasty, a game that successfully blended a first-person survival RPG with a town building and management sim. Along with hunting, crafting, building, and keeping your belly full, you had to attract villagers to your town, determine what jobs they’d be best suited for, and keep them happy. As a bonus your villagers would take some of those repetitive chores off your hands letting you focus on other things. I played a bunch of it in early access a few years ago and it was pretty good.
It’s hard to say if Wild West Dynasty will be a lot like Medieval Dynasty—it’s a different developer and the trailer doesn’t really show all that much—but I’ll keep my fingers crossed and my six-shooter at the ready. It’s due out sometime before the end of the year.