In the year 1876 stereotypes were rampant. You may think it is bad now, but way back then things were different. Every Mexican wore a sombrero and tunic. Every native American was referred to as "Indians" and they all wore feathered headdresses regardless of their rank. Every Chinese man wore a straw hat and worked in a mine or as mercenaries. Women were barmaids and whores. And horses could be shot a few times but shrugged it off as delicious fresh oats were there to be munched.

You play an escaped slave who goes on a killing spree, who's sanity could slowly be slipping as you anger various factions and make a few friends.

You might be called Juan. You might be called Jesus. Don't call him Shirley, but you may call him "The Mexican". This is a western pulp setting, and I have to believe that eventually even the writers gave up as the writing slowly gets more flaky and there is an achievement for skipping the dialogue.

Let's be honest, most people are not going to be playing this for the plot. But it does involve the flippant remarks made at the top. And at one point you can execute a would be prophet. So consider the story something that is simply here to allow you to move from one chapter to the next. And when it needs to; there's a cut-scene where you get knocked out to move things to the next Act.

On looking at other reviews and coverage afterwards I found it referred to a Poor Man's Hotline Miami. I never played that game. To me this is a rather decent top down shooter, twin-stick game. One that feels like the devs know there are curmudgeons like me out there that only want to use mouse and keyboard. Really, aside from a few missions that begin with a hot start requiring quick reflexes, rarely did I feel like I should be using some kind of non WASD controller. Again, I don't give points, but you can have some imaginary ones here.

It is 3'C to 10'C as I've been playing this the last few days. Even with the horrific (for an Australian) cold weather and my slow 39 year old adult hands and reflexes, the game was on the easier side. Sure, there were a few missions that took me a dozen or more attempts, but the balance here allowed me to adapt and learn, rather than feeling like I'm being punished for not being a sugar pumped pre-teen on crack.

The style is what really stands out here. A pencil/pen art style I've seen since I played Paper Train Traffic way back in the pre pandemic year of 2017. 12IBT6 uses far more clean lines making each object and enemy distinct. Only becoming a mess when you end up committing a little murder and bodies start piling up on each other.

The AI is dumber than a sack of rocks. Basic pathfinding causes them to bee-line for where gunshots were fired from. You can end up using this to your advantage quite easily, taking out one baddie and hiding around a corner. Mr. AI will happily allow all the baddies to walk around the edge and line them selves up to be taken out with your trusty revolver.

Each weapon has a different reload, firing mechanism. Revolves must be cocked. Shotguns just need to be reloaded. Rifles must be prepared. Ammo must be manually reloaded and enemy guns do not auto pickup, causing you to have to swap out and remove ammo to your own storage. Later on you get a bow, instead of reloading you have to draw the string to fire, and if in melee this becomes difficult to do so., but you can recover fired arrows. And I played through the entire campaign without knowing I had a melee knife weapon! It is useless! Utterly useless unless you can do a sneak attack! And on stealth missions there is inevitably a shovel, pickaxe, or hatchet sitting around anyway.

I enjoyed this one. The visual style, decent soundtrack, and challenging but easy to learn mechanics made it a good 4 hours well spent. If you like this type of genre, it is worth a go at playing. Plus, there appears to be an expansion out if you want even more of this.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (Indie Legends 5)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 28 August 2021
PC Used: Scorptec Master-RTX2070 2019 MK1

OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8.1
Processor: Intel Pentium 2.9 Ghz or equivalent
Memory: 2048 MB RAM
Graphics: 512 Mb DirectX 9 compatible video card with shader model 3.0 support
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 300 MB available space