Far Far West Fear Fear West Review: Best Update Yet?

Last updated: November 10, 2026 — based on my hands-on runs from the video.

Yes, I’m really happy with Fear Fear West: the Vulture rework, Redwoods map, and Pumpkin Lord are the highlights of my Far Far West Fear Fear West review, while the jetpack’s damage, two slow Woodlands quests, and the Saloon no longer staying in the world are my biggest disappointments.

I played several full runs to try the new stuff rather than judging it from a menu. For the patch details, see our Far Far West Halloween Update 2026: Fear Fear West Deep Dive and the earlier Far Far West Halloween Event: New Region, Boss, Rewards, and Release Date Speculation. This is my hands-on verdict.

Quick verdict: What worked and what didn’t?

Feature	My verdict	Why
Dealmaker modifiers	Welcome addition	I can choose a modifier for uranium and bonus XP, and my Jackpot run was a lovely start.
Disturbance	Good pressure	Objectives, danger zones, and storms raise it; at max level, enemies speed up and the boss gets tougher.
Halloween objectives/Pumpkin Lord	Event highlight	The Pumpkin Lord was my favorite of the three possible event side objectives.
Giant Buzzsaw objective	Ridiculous in a good way	It asks me to do more than stand around waiting for a bar to fill.
Saloon rework	Better fight, one sad loss	I like the new flow, but I miss the Saloon remaining in the world after defeat.
Vulture rework	My favorite rework	Its movement and attacks finally make it feel like a proper boss fight.
Necromancer tweaks	Nice, not huge	Two new moves add variety without transforming the encounter.
Jetpack	Fun, needs work	Mobility and camp clearing are neat; damage and survivability are harder to defend.
Woodlands quests	Mixed	Tea delivery got under my skin, while the other two quests felt slow and boring.
Redwoods map	Big fan	Vertical routes, clearer sightlines, and a spooky look make me want another run.
Payload/TNT objective changes	Mostly good	Payload wastes less time; Overloaded TNT adds pressure while powering the factory.
Train boss	No changes	Nothing new for it in my runs.

What does the Dealmaker actually give you?

The Dealmaker gives mission modifiers a proper place in my runs. I found it on the starting platform, and it can also turn up while I’m roaming. I pick a modifier, then get its listed uranium and bonus Mission XP when I finish the mission. Most modifiers make life harder. Naturally, my first menu offered the one positive modifier.

Option I saw	What the menu offered
Gary	“Gary is here” — +52 Uranium, +700 Mission XP
JACKPOT	Enemies are twice as likely to drop Jokers — +0 Uranium, +100 Mission XP
Random Modifier	“Do you want to try your luck...?” — +48 Uranium, +800 Mission XP

I took Jackpot. More Joker drops sounded much nicer than volunteering for trouble before I’d even warmed up.

Trouble found me on another run anyway. Double or Nothing gambled each Joker I found: I could get four choices instead of two, or no choices because the Joker was deleted. I also picked up Greed, which hit me for 20% of my max health as damage whenever I picked up a Joker. Thankfully, Greed didn’t trigger when Double or Nothing ate one. I appreciated that mercy.

What did all that uranium buy me?

Modifiers pay out, and on my Woodlands run that mattered. Early on I picked up a Vampiric Joker for 4% life steal on my weapons. That mission also had a copy press, which copies a Joker for 40 uranium a pop. With over 200 uranium in my wallet, I bought four more copies of Vampiric for a total of 20% life steal, and did it comfortably.

Copy press math	Number
Life steal per Vampiric copy	4%
Cost per copy	40 uranium
Extra copies I bought	4
Total life steal	20%

How does Disturbance make runs harder?

Disturbance builds while I complete objectives, clear danger zones, and trigger storms. It’s a nice bit of pressure because doing useful things around the map also makes the remaining run meaner.

At its maximum, enemies move 30% faster and the boss gets 10% more health. The sky also turns blood red, and lightning starts striking across the map. The lightning hurt me a little, but the spectacle made a bigger impression than the damage. I’ll take an ominous red sky over a difficulty increase I can’t even see.

Is the Pumpkin Lord worth hunting?

Absolutely. On some missions, I can find two of three possible Halloween side objectives. They give spooky resources that I can use with other materials to buy event skins in the lobby.

My first one sent me after haunted crows flying around a cemetery. Hitting them made them drop feathers. Simple, spooky, job done. Then I headed up the mountain for the Pumpkin Lord, which was easily my favorite of the event objectives I played.

What was the Pumpkin Lord fight like?

It was fun without dragging on. I wouldn’t call it much more complicated than the pre-update Necromancer, but it doesn’t need to be: this is a side objective, and the fight gives me plenty to enjoy.

The swing-attack telegraph is the star. I could read it clearly, and it looked fantastic. If this was my introduction to what the boss reworks were aiming for, consider me sold. Once I won, the Pumpkin Lord dropped a blueprint and some deeply suspicious pumpkins, and I carried on with the run.

How does the giant buzzsaw objective work?

The objective is called Fueling the Giant Buzzsaw, and yes, it really is as silly as that sounds. I activated fuel launchers that fired comedically slow canisters into the base of the saw. Sometimes a launcher sent out a bomb that I had to destroy. Other times, I had to reactivate it through a coordinate mini-game.

After enough fueling, the blade revved up and launched across the map, opening the boss arena. The launch itself felt a little anticlimactic after all that preparation, but I liked the objective. It gave me things to watch and react to, and it was a welcome change of pace from some of the older main objectives.

What changed with the Saloon boss?

Bad news for my spells-only plans: the Saloon’s panels now work as weak spots. I can’t simply throw big spells into the arena corners and burst it down like I used to. That asks a little more of me, which is probably good for the fight and personally inconvenient for my future nonsense.

The bigger change is how the whole encounter moves. The Saloon now follows a fixed cycle, flings itself across the stage, summons a whole lot of horses, and puts mines around the arena edge. It still keeps some of its old attacks, but the fight has a much clearer shape.

The second phase is gone, though. After defeat, the Saloon disintegrates instead of becoming a structure in the world. That’s the one change here I genuinely dislike. Coming across my defeated boss as part of the map was a fun little payoff.

Change	My reaction
Panels are weak spots	Good for the fight, bad for my corner-spamming habits.
New moves and fixed-cycle flow	A more interesting encounter overall.
No post-fight Saloon structure	I miss it. Bring back my weird victory landmark.

Are the new Woodlands quests fun?

The tea quest asked me to brew tea for 5 Marauders. The tricky part was balancing a kettle on a platter while carrying it to a table. Turn or move too carelessly and off it goes, meaning I have to make more.

I acted like this was the hardest thing the game had ever thrown at me. In reality, I finished it in a couple of minutes. Those were an unusually irritating couple of minutes, but I can laugh about them now.

I’m less keen on the other two Woodlands quests I tried. One had me escort Granny to her shed; the other had me repeatedly duck into a cramped storage room for soup ingredients. Both felt slow and boring to me. That doesn’t ruin the Woodlands, but when I’m eager to get back to fighting, neither quest is the detour I want.

Is the Vulture rework the best part of the patch?

For me, yes. The Vulture actually moves around the stage now, which sounds like a modest request for a boss until you feel how much it improves the fight.

It summons three tornadoes instead of one, slams in a ring around the stage rather than staying planted in the center, and can leave the arena before sending shadow clones flying across it in parallel. I had to pay attention to where it was going, not just where it was sitting.

It still felt a bit squishy to me, especially next to the Necromancer. But I enjoyed the encounter much more than before. Of the boss reworks I played, this is my favorite: the Vulture finally feels like it wants to fight back.

What changed for the Necromancer—and did the train boss change?

The Necromancer got a couple of new moves. It can summon kamikaze skeletons, and it can dip into the ground before popping up beneath me. They’re noticeable additions, though nowhere near as dramatic as the Saloon and Vulture overhauls.

As for the train boss: I saw no changes. I checked out the new fights, reached the train, and the train was still the train. Bummer.

Is the jetpack any good?

The jetpack is the patch’s wonderfully strange new secondary. Early on, my lasso couldn’t reach a Dead Eye, so I flew up to it instead. Letting go of the boosters also lets me slam down and make a small explosion around the landing point. That first climb sold me on the idea immediately.

Actually using it through several runs left me more conflicted.

What I like	What holds it back
It reaches high places, especially with enough stat investment.	The thrusters dealt around three damage per tick in my testing.
I found it surprisingly useful for clearing camps.	Dealing damage puts me uncomfortably close to enemies.
A slam can carry momentum into Boing or Cube movement.	It lacks the built-in survivability I want when diving into a crowd.

The dive bomb hits harder than the thrusters, but it has the same proximity problem: I have to put myself right next to whatever I’m trying to hurt. Elemental explosion Jokers can produce a silly number of combo pops under the right, fairly tight conditions. That’s fun to pull off, not a fix for how risky the weapon feels in ordinary use.

I like the jetpack. I kept using it. I just wish its damage were easier to justify, or that it had more survivability—or even knockback on the slam to stop enemies swarming me afterward.

Is the Redwoods map worth unlocking?

I think so. I unlocked the Redwoods after enough missions to prestige my jetpack once and my lasso several times. That’s what happened in my runs, not an exact unlock requirement I can promise for yours.

The map’s height is its best trick. Many trees have platforms I can traverse, and pairing those routes with the jetpack gave me more ways to move through a fight. I wish the upper layer had a bit more going on, but getting up there still opened up fun possibilities.

I also prefer how the Redwoods looks and plays compared with the Woodlands. The taller trees block my sightlines less, so I found combat easier to read, while the forest still has a properly spooky feel. I’m a big fan, and I expect to keep playing it.

Which objectives got changed?

In Overloaded TNT, the storm while powering the factory is now infinite. That makes taking too long to turn on the power a more dangerous choice. I noticed it during my Redwoods run, where I also found a Goliath Joker and rerolled it into Almighty for a build using Cube and Blizzard. A good run is still a good run, even when the objective wants me to hurry up.

Payload got the change I appreciate more. Its starting section was redesigned, cutting down the time I spent hopping between levers trying to work out how to start the cart. The cart moves faster now, too, so the objective takes less time overall.

I still find Payload a little easy—sometimes even boring—but these changes remove some of the waiting without pretending it needed to become a completely different objective. That’s a win in my book. Other objectives received smaller changes, but these are the ones I can speak to specifically from my runs.

Far Far West Fear Fear West review: Is it the best update yet?

I’m really happy with it. The Vulture is my favorite rework, the Redwoods is a map I want to revisit, and the Pumpkin Lord made the Halloween objectives worth chasing. Throw in the delightfully absurd buzzsaw and a cleaner Payload, and I had plenty of reasons to start another run.

I can’t give every addition the same praise. The jetpack is more fun to move with than to fight with, two Woodlands quests dragged for me, and losing the Saloon’s post-fight structure still stings. But those complaints didn’t stop me enjoying the update. The event cosmetics are a nice extra reward to chase, too; that Scarecrow legendary skin certainly fits the mood.

Here’s what my time with it looked like over a few days:

My Fear Fear West runs	Result
Length of each full run	30 minutes to an hour
Lasso levels after my first run	60+
Jetpack levels after my first run	2 (I forgot it was even there)
Prestiges by the end	Lasso several times, jetpack once
Where my souls went	Almost all gambled chasing a Coin Flip Joker
Event reward I could afford	The Scarecrow skin

So, best update yet? Overall I’m really happy with this update, and I’m excited to see what the team cooks up next.

FAQ

Does Greed trigger when Double or Nothing deletes a Joker?

No. In my run, Greed didn’t activate when Double or Nothing deleted one.

How much faster do enemies get at max disturbance?

They move 30% faster. The boss also gets 10% more health.

Did the train boss change?

I saw no changes to it in my runs.

How do I unlock the Redwoods?

I unlocked it after enough missions to prestige my jetpack once and my lasso several times. My runs don’t establish an exact requirement.

For the full walkthrough, check the

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