Since the dawn of video gaming, the great majority of titles have provided the intrepid player with an on-screen surrogate to manipulate as they see fit, provided they adhere to the rules of the digital world it inhabits.
Mostly-third-person shooter The Gunstringer acknowledges this connection explicitly by providing the player with a surrogate that is actually a marionette which, via Kinect technology, is controlled much in much the same way one controls a puppet. That is, with one arm is bent at the elbow at a right-angle and with a their palm facing the floor, a player moves the titular stringer of gun left and right, or makes him leap by quickly raising their hand.
Their other hand is held like a gun, and shooting involves using this hand to paint targets using an onscreen reticule, before jerking it up to their shoulder, the way movies have taught us all guns recoil. This isn’t as tiring as it may sound, however, as small hand movements translate to large sweeps of your reticule onscreen. The Gunstringer himself is propelled toward the horizon at a constant jaunty skip by the game, or perhaps the seriousness of his mission.
So far, so Kinect, so casual. However, introducing small variations on this simple mechanic, Twisted Pixel have crafted a responsive and addictive shooter that should appeal to the core market as much as it will Dance Central fans.
There are several reasons why this game rides on when many Kinect titles lie wheezing in the dust, but the biggest is the responsiveness of the controls. Unlike so many motion control titles, here a player feels empowered by the technology rather than hindered by it. Even during two-player co-op (which simply adds another targeting reticule rather than another entire character), even smaller movements register accurately. On top of that, a tiny dose of aim-assist smooths out the targeting experience nicely without making the game so simple as to be dull.
Indeed, The Gunstringer achieves what all Kinect games aspire to but few reach; an intuitive control system that is at once precise, incredibly fun and most crucially, amusing as hell for any spectators.
A third-person style of play dominates the game’s three-to-four hour running time and never wears out its welcome, but the developers were smart and creative enough to throw in some first-person on-rails shooting sections. These allow the player to use both hands to tote six-shooters, with the number of target reticules onscreen doubling. There's also some side-scrolling platform jaunts and a few marginally more strategic cover-based shooting sections.
All sections utilise the same basic controls, yet – or perhaps because of this – all succeed admirably. A temporary shift in gameplay styles for many games marks a steep dip in player enjoyment due to suddenly-unfamiliar controls being foisted upon them, or maybe the newer gameplay style being at odds with that of the rest of the game (Dead Space’s asteroid section anyone?). Fortunately, here not only do these gameplay switches not inspire a creeping dread, the controls work so well that no additional instruction is required and the transitions are fluid and fast. To quote an aging rich man who inspires a bewildering level of devotion to his overpriced products; “it just works”.
Being a Twisted Pixel game, The Gunstringer is full of loopy characters, wry stabs at a plethora of things (including videogames themselves) and general silliness. Much as ‘Splosion Man warped the platforming genre, The Gunstringer distorts the western; at once a love letter to its traditions as it is a critique of its pomposity. That said, the ‘stringer’s unrelenting march through waves of cowboys, hot lead, dynamite and most of the Old West’s animal population lends credence to the thought that perhaps all that highbrow philosophising stuff is merely incidental. After all, one of the game’s most plentiful powerups does come in the form of a taco, delivered through the dirt of the Earth by a skeletal hand from the underworld; the “El Taco Diablo”.
Players that weren’t forced into literary criticism classes as kids will probably be too busy marvelling at the colourful, cartoony visuals, and cracking sound effects to spend too much time contemplating what it all means anyway.
The Gunstringer isn’t flawless: three to four hours is a mighty short campaign even for a game that was initially supposed to be an Xbox Live Arcade release, and the inability to fire willy-nilly without having first painted a target might very slightly irk pickers-of-nits. On top of that, as with any Kinect release the simple gameplay won’t appeal to all, and the game is a hair on the easy side. To mitigate these factors, included with the game are free codes for the first Gunstringer DLC (“The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles”, out now) as well as the excellent Fruit Ninja Kinect and a whopping two-day Xbox Live Gold membership. Further, completion of the game unlocks a hardcore difficulty setting which extends the campaign’s life further.
The Gunstringer spins a familiar yarn – a double-crossed outlaw is back from the grave and out for revenge – but the conceit that it’s all a play (complete with cuts to a live audience whooping and hollering a victory or booing the introduction of a corrupt banker) works brilliantly, and it’s impossible to participate without a grin mysteriously emerging where a player’s game-face scowl normally resides. Fun and funny, it shows that perhaps Kinect has a use beyond dance and exercise games after all.
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