Genre: First Person Shooter
ESRB: M (Cartoony blood splatter, profanity)
Estimated hours of gameplay (thorough play/quick play): 8/4
Developer: Techland
Another DLC stand-alone game from an established franchise like Farcry 3: Blood Dragon. I'm not entirely sure what this trend is, but I kind of like it. I'm worried that it means big companies are trying to invade the sales space of Indie games, but they're still quite nice. So far, each has had a $15 price tag on day one. Now these games are much smaller than the "legit" entries of the franchise, but considering the length of them they are a deal and a half (at least in terms of "gameplay hours," which gamers often make more important than we should). I find myself hoping a franchise I like- say, Mass Effect- would try it out as well. Not every game needs to be some $60 giant budgeted affair with a ridiculously long development time. And I don't want to always dedicate so much time to a game. There's nothing wrong with a quickie, yo.
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| Oh yeah! Wait, this game features like one cutscene total worth of female. What is this ad for? |
The story of this game is basically the draw of it. When someone wants a cowboy game, they want to enjoy a good cowboy setting with lots of cowboy cowboy'ing. It functions well, for the most part. Nothing that astounds me or is too immersive. Just a fun romp of a tall tale from a drunken guy with a southern accent. I will complain that the music wanders around in genres, making me wonder if it's just some leftovers from other games. I know this isn't something that is generally worth noting, but in this case it becomes downright distracting to enjoying the setting. The cutscenes and levels follow a simplified format, but it's well suited to this lower-budget attraction. The ending does wrap the game up well, but it does something that offends many: a binary choice is given with no precedent to it. Quite precisely, the game just pauses and asks you to either spare the final bad guy or kill him (in a rather awkward menu, I might add). I chose to spare him, which made no sense. Especially considering the crazy amounts of people Silas (the player character) kills during the story to find him. I'd have preferred there be no choice at the end at all, but Techland probably wanted to give us a reason to play through the game a second time for more of those precious gameplay hours.
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| Bullet time! Everyone's favorite! |
A bit ago I reviewed Max Payne 3 and shot it down for relying too much on bullet time. I will admit that being able to slow time to make perfect head shots is still fun, it definitely works better in a shorter game. It also helps that this game has a mini-leveling system with skills. Once you get to a high level, you can do some ridiculous crap like create infinite bullet time combos (so long as the enemies come at you fast enough). But this is where the game is showing its "not terrible but not great" aspects. Like a realistic shooter, you spend the entire game using the same guns to shoot the same kind of enemies over and over. Which is weird because this is a game about tall tales from the west at their tallest. Why not throw some Frankensteins or Gundams at us? I don't know. You do get to fight ghosts, but they are the same as regular people. There are boss fights and duels, but neither of those are ever interesting. I found myself dreading them and being happy when they were over.
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| They even manage to squeeze in a turret section here and there. Really? |
Conclusion:
A fun, cheap vignette. But not strong enough in any category to feel vital for any kind of gamer.
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