Video: 8 cowboy games to play on PC while everyone else plays Red Dead Redemption 2
Saddle up
Red Dead Redemption 2 was made by five million people working nine day weeks, but does it have a duck that collects your discarded throwing knives? Actually, I don’t know, as it’s not on PC. But a game that does feature a magic duck, and can be played on your home computer, is the lovely Luckslinger. It’s one of eight delightful cowboy ‘em ups that you could be playing while Rockstar pretends its latest won't eventually come to PC. And the RPS Video Department has gathered them in one handy video.
Playing lots of different games built from the same tropes is an illuminating experience. You see eight different teams trying to get their heads around the same sensations or iconography. How did different studios handle a quickdraw? Who has rendered the best cactus? Is it the romantic West of the old oaters, or the violent badlands of Eastwood and friends? For a genre set in the dusty plains, it’s a fertile ground for interpretation.
Perhaps we should have made a list about the best gunslinging. I love, for example, how Westerado forces you to manually reload every bullet while legging it between incoming fire, but Hard West (think: XCOM with cowboys) asks you to huddle down in cover and sacrifice an action point for a similar motion. Or you could go the Call of Juarez: Gunslinger route, throw realism out the window and have grizzled sharpshooters side-stepping bullets like Neo in The Matrix.
And now we return to waiting for Rockstar to confirm what we all expect is coming. It’s amazing that for all the press they’ve recently done (mountains by their shadowy standards) we still don't know when/if a port will happen. I like to imagine an army of unknown heroes are probably crunching through it as we speak. Of course, I imagine it without the crunching, natch.
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