Wild Guns Reloaded

Genre: Arcade / Shooting Gallery

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Wild Guns is a classic Shooting Gallery-style Arcade game. In the original version, released 25 years ago, you played one of two characters shooting enemies in a wild West setting, dodging bullets while you aim at enemies. Reloaded takes the original game, cleans up the visuals (but doesn’t update them), and adds two more characters.

Purists will likely celebrate this version of the game, as it’s certainly a definitive version of the original experience, and aside from the new characters, nothing has changed. However, I’d argue that this is the game’s greatest flaw.

The controls in this game are stiff and unyielding. Characters move slowly (more so if you choose new character Doris, less if you choose new character Bullet), and generally must stay still to fire.

What’s more, the targeting cursor does not move independently of the character, meaning that if you want to aim to the left, you need to move your character left. In the age of two-stick shooters, this feels outright archaic, and it really shows when your cursor is to the far side of the screen and you need to walk it back, or when you need to move around to dodge, leaving your cursor far from where you last used it.

These control oddities combine with a really high difficulty level to make this game punishingly difficult, which really saps much of the fun out of the otherwise great concept.

It’s a shame too, because the level design and character design in this game is fantastic, with Wild West robots, giant tanks, and all sorts of other imaginative takes on the genre. Even though the game has done little with the visuals of the original beyond cleaning them up for HD, the game still looks pretty good.

But even if the visuals of Wild Guns have aged pretty well, the gameplay has not. Those nostalgic for the arcade classic brought into the modern day might find this game a dream come true, but I suspect that for many who took an interest in this game, it’s more of a “careful what you wish for” sorta’ thing.

tl;dr – Wild Guns Reloaded takes the arcade classic Shooting Gallery game, where you target enemies onscreen while dodging bullets with your character, and adds two new characters while cleaning up the visuals. Unfortunately, the gameplay has not aged well, and frustration with the controls and punishing difficulty make it hard to recommend.

Grade: C-

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