This was a free game that I decided to try for a bit because it’s been a while since I last played a shooter and I actually liked an earlier game in the series. I did finish it as the game seems rather easy to me even at hard difficulty and it’s quite short but I didn’t really like it at all. I thought it felt extremely linear and the story is just a tour of the most famous names of the Wild West with a classic revenge plot as the connective tissue.

Bounty hunter Silas Greaves walks into a saloon and upon being recognized starts regaling those present with stories of his long career. The storytelling takes a meandering path through time and space and sometimes he backtracks to change his story when questioned on some key details. Nonetheless he explains that he has always been motivated by getting revenge on three men who killed his two brothers and almost succeeded in killing him as well. Along the way, his path crisscrosses those of Billy the Kid, Johnny Ringo, the James brothers, the Dalton gang and many other legendary names to the astonishment of his increasingly skeptical audience. Even as they suspect that he is making up stories in exchange for free drinks, they are unable to turn away from his tales of bank and train robberies, being ambushed by Apache Indians, attacking whole gangs of bandits in their lairs and inevitably ending in epic showdowns.

It’s just Silas by his lonesome here so this is just a straightforward shooter. There are three classes of guns: handguns, rifles and shotguns and there is a simple skill tree for each of these. You can run and duck behind obstacles, but there’s no explicit cover mechanic. Though at times the levels look expansive, it’s mostly an illusion as there is just one path to follow. Generally speaking, there’s usually still enough space to pick your preferred approach: to snipe at enemies from afar with the rifle or approach under cover to fight in close-range. The enemies have basically no AI and are only capable of ducking in and out of cover to shoot. The challenge comes from the very large numbers of enemies the game is happy to throw at you. This includes having scripted ambushes where multiple enemies appear out of nowhere all around you.

That sounds difficult but it’s actually not that bad. As an older game, it uses the old mechanic where healing only requires ducking out of fight for a few seconds. You can activate bullet time to slow time down and you have a power called sense of death that lets you dodge a fatal bullet and instantly retaliate. Moreover some of the skills you can unlock practically transform ambushes into a QTE mini-game to easily mow down multiple enemies. Personally I found the boss battles including duels and having to deal with Gatling gun emplacements tiresome. But the game is very generous with its checkpoints so it’s always possible to cheese your way through the toughest battles.

The graphics are okay and I appreciate the minor cell-shaded effect that helps you spot enemies easier. The little bit of historical lore that accompanies the collectibles are nice to read. Plus it’s clever to include into the story how the myths of the Wild West are constructed out of half-truths and tall tales. All the same, due to the basic gameplay and the impersonal story, the game didn’t grab me at all and any of the fondness I had for Bound in Blood is simply absent.