Dead Man's Hand

The Good
This game is very easy to get into. It starts out with a very short tutorial where you escape from a prison and you get some background information about what the game is all about (which is practically nothing except shooting a lot of bad guys). You play a classic anti-hero out to get revenge on his former partners in crime who have betrayed him. Simple, but ok for a game like this. Then the game starts out and you go from point A to point B and shoot a lot of people on the way until you arrive at you destination and you will have to kill a tougher bad guy. Simple but functional, although it is definitely more of a console game than a pc-game. The game is actually quite entertaining the first half hour or so. The silly comments the enemy and yourself make throughout the game is slightly humorous at first, and the few weapons you gain access to feel right.

The Bad
As I've already hinted, this game is only fun for about a half hour or so. It is very repetitive. The level design is awful, it is actually one long shooting range where the enemies pop out at the exact same location every time and they act real stupid too. The level of difficulty varies a lot. Personally I have no patience when these kind of repetitive, mediocre games are too hard. Dead Man's Hand is at times frustratingly hard at the higher difficulty-levels, and sometimes it is extremely easy even on the hardest level. This unbalanced gameplay is very annoying. Also, the levels are very short. Instead of making a lot of short, repetitive levels, the developers could have made fewer but longer and more well made levels. As it is now you walk around aimlessly a little while, shooting at everything that moves (or basically anything that looks like it can be shot into little pieces) and then a little movie-clip tells you that you've found yet another boss that you have to punish. Personally I think the main character has it coming to him and after a while I rather wanted to take revenge on that jackass instead for making me endure his endless cliches on the seemingly endless number of identical levels. On some levels you travel by horse, but guess what, you can't control the damn oat-head, you only sit back and shoot the bad guys that ride by. Way too simple and quite meaningless.

The Bottom Line
Far too repetitive shooter with mediocre gameplay, average graphics, worthless level-design and tiresome cliches.