The thing is, I never set out to kill Fred Rogers. But when I got to him, he was a low-down good-for-nothing bandit who was terrorizing the local townsfolk. He’d even taken over the local traders, and well, I had plenty of wood and not near enough food. So, I gave him a warning, which he defied, and then I shot him dead.

Plus, I unlocked a new building type, which was good for the folks back in town. And since I’d completed the quest, I got experience for it, which would help me unlock some other buildings. And buildings are the primary goal of Westward III: Gold Rush, with the possible exception of the gathering of “that there gold.” (Sources tell me it’s in “them hills, over yonder.”)

Westward III is a real-time strategy game mixed with a city-building simulation. In a traditional RTS, the focus is on building your base enough to produce fighting units to send out and destroy your enemies. Westward III doesn’t have organized enemies, but you do need to defend your town from bandits and bank robbers. The focus is largely on building your town.

This is done very similarly to other RTS games. You have resources — gold, wood, food and water — that you need to gather by building buildings and setting your population to work doing the gathering. Tents and cabins get you more people; farms, ranches and wells get you more food and water. Gold mines and lumber camps get you gold and wood. The last resource in the game — experience points — is used to unlock more buildings, giving you more options, and is gained by doing quests, such as the one in which the unfortunate Mr. Rogers and I ran into each other.

Later buildings are important to your overall success. The saloon lets you hire gunslingers to protect your town; the sheriff’s office gets you lawmen (or women) who keep the gunslingers in line and also get you more protection. The general store lets you buy dynamite to open up areas of the map and seedlings to ensure that you don’t run out of wood.

While the town is your main focus, many of the quests take you to a separate map that allows you to accomplish some goal that furthers the game’s story and your character’s goals. Often you gain a new building type, some population or more resources. The sheriff’s office opens Wanted: Dead or Alive missions; the trading post opens resource gathering missions that test your knowledge of how to use the buildings. Neither is required, but some of that is necessary if you want to purchase all the buildings.

There are minor upgrades for characters and buildings — just enough to keep things interesting as you move forward, but never so much that you feel overwhelmed. In story mode, your character attempts to rescue the family that helped her in the initial stages of the game. This mode moves forward at a guided pace. You have a list of active quests that keeps the building and play moving, but you rarely have a time limit pressuring you to finish (with the possible exception of the resource gathering side missions).

I started writing this review as I was finishing what I thought was the primary scenario in the game. There’s a sandbox mode that can be played freely without any story, and I thought I was done. As I wrote — and continued playing — I finished that scenario, and a new one that felt as large and complex opened up. It almost felt like the first scenario was a guided tutorial in building my village, and now I was left to operate on my own.

I was pretty excited by this, as I wasn’t ready to give up on the game. It wasn’t a complex RTS. The ideas and controls had been simplified and brought into the casual games space. There wasn’t a huge twitch component, and I could play it at my pace and leisure and still have quite a bit of fun. Even as I finish this review, I’m sure I’ll return to the game to explore it all, try out all the buildings and finish the story scenario.

If you’re a hardcore gamer looking for a crunchy, twitchy RTS, Westward III is not for you. But, if you’ve played other village simulations and are looking for a slight but not overwhelming challenge, Westward III is great choice. If you’re looking for something entertaining with a light-hearted western flair, Westward III is an excellent game. Personally, I enjoyed it. And it’s free, so why not give it a try.