I often find myself in long, drawn-out debates with our newest contributor Kody about expectations when it comes to absorbing media. As a general rule, I tend to get overly excitable when it comes to certain genres and my expectations shoot through the roof, and almost as often, I am let down. Comparatively, he prefers to go in almost blind, with little to no knowledge of what he’s signed up for. I almost wish I had gone into Colt Canyon with his train of thought, but hindsight is 20/20. To say the game is an outright disappointment would be a disservice to it – it’s actually quite good. But based on the trailer, I was expecting something more in line with Hotline Miami, and what I got was an experience that strangely felt like it should’ve been The Oregon Trail. With guns. And Gore. Buckets and buckets of gore.

The title is a roguelike twin-stick shooter, in which you step into the boots of one of many Western personas (once they are unlocked) to save your kidnapped partner. On the surface, it looks like an extremely basic throwback to an era where console games reigned supreme and most PC games were limited to the likes of the green and black survival sims. Visually, it’ll be along the same lines, with similarly styled characters all built from white pixels set against sepia-toned backdrops that will look like someone hastily installed a pop-up butcher shop and removed it just as quickly, leaving nothing but red stains as a memory of what happened once you eliminate all of the enemies. Normally, I’d like to see a bit more detail in this type of game, since I personally scoff at the thought of playing anything that looks like it would’ve run on an Atari, but aside from the fact I often lost myself in larger groups of enemies, I had no issue sticking this one out as I attempted to beat this game time and time again.

All of the characters are equipped with a single starting weapon, with additional options that can be swapped or picked up as a secondary option. Each weapon has its own unique style, offering different amounts of damage (usually a one-hit kill against most of the regular enemies) as well as better or worse reload stats. In addition to this, you can go in for stealth kills by hiding behind in-game assets or in tall grass, silently picking off enemies, saving your precious ammo that can only be refilled by breaking pots, barrels, and boxes. Rounding out your avatar is the ability to dodge through bullets, with a significant recharge delay, making for a very well rounded starting character… at least for the first few levels.

Like most of the roguelikes on the market, this is a really difficult title. Dysentery isn’t really a concern, but almost everything else in the world is. I’ve died from gunfire, being lassoed to death, blown up (by the enemies, myself, and my co-op partners), kicked by a horse, and I am sure there are a few I am missing. Unlike Hotline Miami, most of the characters you can select can take a few hits, depending on what they are, and can still dish out single hit kills. Most of the time. The only point of frustration that stemmed from this was trying to figure out how much damage you were risking by setting off a hornet’s nest of enemies since the number of hearts (your health bar) taken from each hit seems to differ greatly on how much the game wants to screw you at that given time. Throughout a few dozen runs, I was hit with the same attack, as the same character, and the amount of damage taken would range from one heart to being fatal. It didn’t take long to learn the solution to this equation is quite simply to not ever get hit.

The game can be played in local co-op, which I highly recommend, but the catch is that you have to progress a bit solo to unlock a secondary character, because… reasons, I guess? This would not have annoyed me as much had I not already mentioned to my son that I had a new game for us to give a go, only to force him to sit there for two to three runs with us swapping off the controller because of this underwhelming feature. Once we were into the game as a duo, the difficulty evened out quite a bit, and while still a challenge, it no longer felt like a completely uphill struggle. This can depend on a few factors though, such as which guns each player is carrying and how forgiving the ammo drops are. Your team will share ammo between the two characters, so planning who is using which weapon really is key to success, and failing to seek out as much ammo as humanly possible will mean life or death at any given turn.

Offering a number of unlockable characters, each with their own pros and cons (different starting weapons, higher or lower stats in speed, damage, and health) means something to work towards outside of the token achievements, but despite this, the game gets kind of repetitive if you’re playing solo. Running on a cycle of completing a few levels, usually with the option to save hostages in exchange for a handy AI companion or upgrades, adding a tense ambush sequence in which you must fight off a large wave of enemies, all leading up to a boss battle, it feels overly familar after a few hours, making each failure even more bitter.

Despite looking like it could run on an Apple computer from close to 30 years ago, Colt Canyon is a roguelike that delivers solid action and enough of a challenge to keep you busy for a few hours. The repeated backdrops and encounters get stale after a while, but the thrill of mowing down the enemies with a co-op partner as you unlock the additional characters almost entirely makes up for it.

8 out of 10

Pros

• Looks and Feels Like A Violent The Oregon Trail 
• Decent Cast of Characters
• Great Local Co-op
• Very Challenging

Cons

• Co-op isn’t Available Right Out of the Gate
• Somewhat Repetitive
• Easily Lost in Character Models

Colt Canyon was developed by Retrific and published by Headup Games. It was released on NS, PC, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Colt Canyon, check out the official website.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

Check out OpenCritic for a better idea of how our review stacks against others.