image Based on the PC game Westward (available from BigFishGames), mobile version was developed by Astraware for Palm OS, Windows Mobile Standard and Professional. It bills itself as a Wild West adventure, and it mostly delivers. Graphics are great for a mobile game, gameplay is very engaging and deep and it is an overall fun game.

You experience the life of a frontier settler by building towns, giving your folks places to live, employ them to produce food and gold, defeat bandits as you track down Mad Russian to bring him to justice. There are over 20 levels in the game and it will give you plenty of gameplay. The game is perfect for you to be playing in short bursts as it is easy to save and return to the game later.

It isn’t exactly bug-free though. On several occasions, I encountered game-stopping bugs such as characters not responding to commands. It is also pretty difficult to control multiple characters at the same time when your town grows to a certain size, particularly with the limited input options on the Smartphone version. You basically move the d-pad to select and issue commands, and when maps get big, it’ll take a long time to scroll anywhere.

Nonetheless, if you’re interested in a town-building game with some action/adventure components, this is perhaps your only choice. Priced at $19.95, it is a reasonable deal for the amount of fun you can get out of this game provided you don’t encounter too many bugs.

[Download trial/buy game from Astraware]

*Reviewed on T-Mobile Shadow running on Windows Mobile 6.0 Standard