While Wild Guns Reloaded plays it a bit more safe than Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, it is nonetheless everything I could've hoped for and more. Wild Guns is a great game, one of the best arcade style shooting galleries on home console by a wide margin, though perfectly capable of going toe-to-toe with arcade counterparts. Reloaded provides more than a graphical facelift, adding two additional characters with unique movesets and a handful of extra stages to breathe new life into classic and ultimately making it the definitive way to enjoy Wild Guns.
Of course you can still play as Annie or Clint, and they control about how you'd expect them to, but the real draw is newcomers Dorris and Bullet. Dorris uses explosives and lassos to clear out rooms, making her a valuable addition to a multiplayer session. Bullet, who is perhaps my favorite character in the whole lineup, is a wiener dog that attacks using a drone. This essentially gives him two hitboxes as the drone is vulnerable to being stunlocked, which helps balance out his ability to lock on to enemies. Bullet can also grab onto the bottom of his drone and fly around for a bit to dodge enemy attacks, which is just cute as hell.
Did you know? Bullet once bombed a civilian hospital but was not charged for war crimes.
The difficulty balancing feels off compared to the original. Normal feels harder than it did in the original game, and Easy feels about what Normal should be. The gameplay loop is still satisfying though, and like Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, getting a game over never truly feels punishing. Levels are short enough that a failed attempt is at worst an excuse to learn enemy patterns, and each subsequent run feels better than the last as you start to develop a rhythm for each level. I don't know if they balanced this game to factor in multiplayer as I've yet to check that out. Everything else you can expect from this game is more or less on par with the original, which is to say it's still pretty damn good.
Wild Guns Reloaded is frequently on sale for about ten bucks, which is a great price point for what you get. Buy it. Buy the damn video game. Buy it right now it's on sale!
Of course you can still play as Annie or Clint, and they control about how you'd expect them to, but the real draw is newcomers Dorris and Bullet. Dorris uses explosives and lassos to clear out rooms, making her a valuable addition to a multiplayer session. Bullet, who is perhaps my favorite character in the whole lineup, is a wiener dog that attacks using a drone. This essentially gives him two hitboxes as the drone is vulnerable to being stunlocked, which helps balance out his ability to lock on to enemies. Bullet can also grab onto the bottom of his drone and fly around for a bit to dodge enemy attacks, which is just cute as hell.
Did you know? Bullet once bombed a civilian hospital but was not charged for war crimes.
The difficulty balancing feels off compared to the original. Normal feels harder than it did in the original game, and Easy feels about what Normal should be. The gameplay loop is still satisfying though, and like Pocky and Rocky Reshrined, getting a game over never truly feels punishing. Levels are short enough that a failed attempt is at worst an excuse to learn enemy patterns, and each subsequent run feels better than the last as you start to develop a rhythm for each level. I don't know if they balanced this game to factor in multiplayer as I've yet to check that out. Everything else you can expect from this game is more or less on par with the original, which is to say it's still pretty damn good.
Wild Guns Reloaded is frequently on sale for about ten bucks, which is a great price point for what you get. Buy it. Buy the damn video game. Buy it right now it's on sale!