Six Guns Review

Third-person adventure freemium game Six Guns wastes precious little time before introducing the player to the action. These days gamers have come to expect long intro sequences, providing back-story and scene setting, but here all the player gets is dropped into the map and given an on-screen message telling them to go and beat up some local thugs. Story driven it isn't.

Six Guns is a western, set in Arizona and Oregon. There's an impressively large open world for the player to wander about it, and it's stuffed with 40 missions to conquer. These range from horse racing, to protecting an area, to all-out guns blazing battles against groups of enemies.

Completing missions earns the player gold and experience, which is used to level up. Once the player levels up more items become available to them, such as better guns and fancier horses. Those who like to hoard will be pleased to hear that gold can be used to upgrade the stats of existing weapons.

The controls, for the most part, are smooth. Character movement is taken care of via an on-screen virtual thumb-stick, while tapping the relevant icon will fire whatever gun is equipped. There is also an extremely generous auto-aim, meaning enemies can be dealt with without much hassle at all. The game has a basic cover system, so the player can duck behind various objects and blind-fire. Turning the character is extremely cumbersome though, which is a pity.

Graphically things flit between impressive and extremely sparse. Some of the vistas look fantastic, including some fancy lens flare, but this is spoiled slightly by flat textures and a lot of empty space. I experienced a fair amount of slowdown, too.

The player can also expect a lot of prompts to buy things using real money. Low on ammo? Why not buy some! Oh, the character's health is low, would the player like to buy some elixir? I've never known a game that prods the player to buy things as much as Six Guns. Yes, it's a freemium game, but these notifications actually start to impede enjoyment after a while.

The main issue with the game is the repetitious nature of the missions. On paper they sound great, but they all amount to doing the same thing again and again, and without any narrative drive it all starts to grate a bit.

Six Guns feels like a missed opportunity. While it starts off an enjoyable enough romp, the issues mentioned start to have an impact on the overall enjoyment.

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