You ever wanted Mega Man but kinda stylised and set in the Wild West? Boy, do I have the game for you! Gunman Clive's a pretty neat hour long thing; simple as all get out with Mega Man being the obvious template for mechanics. You jump, shoot, get shot at, fight the odd boss, you know the rigamarole. You've got alternate guns, the spreader from Contra, a bomb gun and something akin to the Wave Beam from Metroid, but they're treated like schmup power-ups, rather than Mega Man. Kind of a shame, think it might've worked to the game's benefit to have the more traditional robot master weapon acquisition.

But you know what does work for the game's benefit, kinda? The pacing! Every stage is a bite sized challenge, usually only a few screens long. It makes the game go by at an insanely brisk pace, but also doesn't let every level feel like it's quite getting the time it needs to stretch its legs. Kind of a shame, but I suppose something was gonna have to give. One thing's for sure; if I were playing this in between secondary school classes on my 3DS, it'd be like crack to me. The game's got a few kinda irksome sections, to be sure, with spikes instantly killing you in spite of invincibility frames being chief among them. The antigravity section near the end that had me holding left on the d-pad threw me through a fuck of a loop, could've done without that stage, but ya know, every Mega Man-like has a level or two.

But that's kind of the thing. How much of a game can you complain about, when those bad segments are just brief enough to not get on your nerves too much? Combined with the game's dirt cheap price point, it's hard to not at least suggest you give Gunman Clive a shot. If anything, I don't think either my time or money were wasted, and that's always a good feeling to have, even when you're dealing with a game in the lower end of the good half of the review scale.