Review: Hired Guns - The Jagged Edge

Being forced to lower the difficulty of a game thirty minutes in is not what I would consider a well orchestrated experience – especially since twenty-five of those minutes were spent in Hired Guns' many statistic management windows. I don't expect to find refuge in the normal difficulty setting on every game, but the kind of resistance that warrants such a downgrade is rarely encountered when you've barely even learnt the control scheme.

But I digressed and proceeded to restart on easy mode, hoping that somehow the chance to re-acclimate with the game's introductory processes without fear of untimely death would breathe new life into something I had already learned to resent. I was wrong.

Have Mercy

With a premise based on the management of mercenaries hired to take out an evil dictator and win back some land in Africa, Hired Guns could've been an interesting addition to the Real-Time Strategy genre, but it goes no further in explaining how it came to this than I have in the previous sentence, and thus arouses no interest or compassion in the player. You load the game, read a couple hundred-thousand typo-ridden tutorial pop-ups - teaching you how to hire people, buy weapons, items and such – and then you're briskly shown the door. Getting thrown into the action like this can be a welcome plunge if you're playing an FPS, but Hired Guns is clearly not, and it makes your first few fire-fights cack-handed and usually inauspicious affairs.

Combat goes down in the format of turn-based attacks – the duration of which is defined by each of your character's action points (AP). You select which mercenary you wish to use and either move them or shoot at something. Conceptually it's a simple procedure, but in execution it's a horrid dance of inconsistent accuracy, shocking scarcity of ammo, over-abundant tough enemies and, most significantly, diabolical AP usage.

Little APpeal

The problem with AP is that it is expended for every movement or action you can make with your mercenaries. I can understand AP depletion upon firing a weapon or throwing a grenade – attacking, basically – but why use the same system for movement when sometimes you want to avoid an enemy grenade and return fire in the same turn? Is that too much to ask? As overtly finite as the AP is, more often than not you find yourself watching it tick down with each click of your mouse rather than the battle as a whole. You shouldn't have to pay that much attention to one small aspect of a game.

To twist the blade, Hired Guns also has a breathe system which, in conjunction with AP, can completely obliterate your chances of success unless you hawk-eye every small detail and movement on your screen. In a round-about way it's merely stamina - it depletes when your character runs a lot or carries too much weight – however, its propensity to also fade away even when firing a weapon, standing still, means after a little activity your mercenary can collapse on the floor with no stamina or AP left, only to repeat the process on your next turn. Brilliant.

Divide and Falter

Problems like this make Hired Guns ridiculously frustrating in places. There is a frankly reprehensible divide between the RTS game and the statistics management because, though deep and detailed, you see very little of each mercenary's personal traits once they're on the battlefield. You're likely to pick a certain person (if they're willing to work for you) because of their health, armour, accuracy ratings, etc, and the individual biographies and amusing if dubiously acted voice clips add a greater level of characterisation, but it's all confined to pre-battle preparations. You do hear your characters talking throughout the game, but they're about as engaging as other sounds - just stock responses to certain situations.

A Small Victory

Fortunately, though, even if the game can't compete with other titles in its genre through functionality alone, Hired Guns' presentation and graphics are top-notch throughout. Not having truly free-floating control over the camera can become a hindrance when scanning for and attacking enemies, but what you can see is brightly textured and well animated. The first architecture is a little bland, but with progression comes an exponential leap in complexity and subsequent impression.

As a statistics management game, Hired Guns succeeds in sheer scope of choices and the details found within each one, but seeing your hard-work in putting together your team largely disregarded once you enter combat is enormously disappointing. It's almost as if Game Factory Interactive couldn't decide what to class the game as, and thus ended up with a truly schizophrenic experience which, unfortunately, has little to stand on.

If the difficulty levels were sorted, the turn-based combat system rehashed and the player was told with reasonable conviction what the hell is going on, Hired Guns could be quite enjoyable, but as it is it's a frustrating, indecisive, low-level strategy game.