There’s nothing funnier than when people start thinking the Western genre is “back”. It usually coincides with a decent-ish movie release. In the 80’s, it was Young Guns. The 90’s had Unforgiven, and in 00’s, it’s Kevin Costner’s Open Range. Newsflash: westerns were never cool. And the last time wearing a cowboy outfit was fashionable was when that dude from the Village People was doing it, and you either weren’t born then, or you’re old enough to lie about it.

There is a side benefit to the Western being the stylistic equivalent of the piano accordion, and that is game companies seldom bother venturing into it as a source of inspiration. But even that has a qualifier – when a developer does do so, it’s usually a forgettable experience at best, and a total mess at worst.

Which brings us to Dead Man’s Hand. It’s a western-themed first person shooter that tries hard to cloak its basic gameplay with some horses, six-shooters and leather chaps. It doesn’t quite work. While using the Unreal engine means that the developers have had to do less work on the visual end, the limitations of the engine show up here. There’s little of merit on the organic end of the scale, and the built environment looks acceptable, but hardly the stuff that makes the likes of top PC shooters or Xbox efforts such as Chronicles of Riddick shake in their boots.



But while the visuals can skate past on the right side of acceptable, diabolical AI is the real culprit here. Your foes are only good at one thing – aiming. Everything else seems very subpar, and for a game that relies a lot more on its single player mode than multiplayer – which people are keeping away from in droves – it's unforgiveable.

The end result: hit and miss, at best. Having five zillion variations of shotguns and pistols as your main bulk of weapons doesn’t help, either. It might be authentic, but it doesn’t stop it being limiting. If you’re the kind of person who lives and breathes dirt and cactus, watches Clint Eastwood and John Wayne movies constantly AND you not only know who Sam Peckinpah is, you own all his works, THEN you should consider this a must buy – along with those pills to cure your pathological liar tendencies. Everyone else, let this one ride off into the sunset without your cash.