Dillon’s Rolling Western: The Last Ranger

Genre: Action / Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

Dillon’s Rolling Western: The Last Ranger is an Action game with Tower Defense elements released on Nintendo 3DS in 2013. This is the second game in the Dillon series, following up the previous year’s Dillon’s Rolling Western. As with that game, this game features anthropomorphic animal characters and a Western-style atmosphere (as the indicated by the game’s title), and has players taking the role of an armadillo named Dillon who finds himself helping towns protect their livestock (piglike “Scrogs”) from invading rock monsters called Grocks.

The visuals in this game are mostly pretty good, with decent-size 3D landscapes and fairly detailed 3D characters, with everything overall having a colorful, stylized look to it that works well for the game. This is backed by a fittingly Western-themed soundtrack, with some pretty catchy tunes.

Much of the gameplay here is the same as it was in the first Dillon’s Rolling Western game. You’re still mostly using the stylus to charge Dillon into a roll that lets him zoom across the landscape and bash into enemies, something that’s initially a delight but soon becomes tedious and repetitive, and you still have Tower Defense elements that don’t really fit well with the rest of the gameplay. Nothing has really been changed here, and none of the problems have been fixed.

At the very least, a few new features have been added, though you’ll need to get at least a few hours into the game before you see them. Dillon is now joined by helper AI characters who can be directed to take action at different points on the map, and there are now moving trains that the player needs to defend in addition to the villages. While certainly not bad additions, neither of these does anything to address the problems I had with the first game.

As such, much as with the first Dillon’s Rolling Western, Dillon’s Rolling Western: The Last Ranger is a game that has a lot of good pieces, but that doesn’t come together to form a cohesive whole. This sequel does add some nice new content into the same formula, but doesn’t really improve on that formula. As such, if you enjoyed the first game, you’ll probably like this too, but if the game’s frustrations made you lose interest, there’s little to recapture that interest here.

tl;dr – Dillon’s Rolling Western: The Last Ranger, like the first game in the series, is a game that combines Action gameplay with Tower Defense elements. This sequel doesn’t do much to shake up the gameplay we saw in the first game, still bearing all of its good qualities, and all of its bad qualities. As such, how you feel about this game will largely come down to how you felt about the first game. This is, for the most part, just more of that.

Grade: C+

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