The Gunstringer review

You wait ages for a novel narrative conceit and then two come along at once. Or, to be more precise, the same one comes along twice. Your progress through The Gunstringer, Twisted Pixel’s cowboy-themed Kinect shooter, is constantly accompanied by the laconic, timeworn tones of a storyteller who fulfils much the same role as Bastion’s narrator.

It’s a perfect fit for an on-rails shooter – the speaker’s rambling stories and nuggets of background info often providing variety the game’s inevitably repetitive mechanics can’t. Unlike in Bastion, however, the narration’s mostly played for laughs, the portentous tones of the speaker (“He was a one-man judge, jury and executioner on the bloody vengeance trail,”) at obvious odds with the puppetry-themed carnage on screen. This is The Gunstringer’s other big idea – the whole thing’s a puppet show, played in front of a filmed live-action audience frequently seen during cutscenes. Between them, Twisted Pixel’s presentational gimmicks work hard to give The Gunstringer its surreal character.

The shooting, however, is more prosaic. Like Child Of Eden, players ‘paint’ their targets with a reticule before firing (though, to shoot, The Gunstringer opts for a slightly clearer arm-raising motion that mimes the kickback from firing a gun). There’s no provision for precise aiming, and switching weapons is only possible at predefined points – though Twisted Pixel does a valiant job of wringing out what variety it can.

Levels move at a rattling place, usually starting with on-rails shooting that sees you using your non-gun hand to pull the puppet around and over obstacles. Before long it will segue into cover-based sections, side-on platforming sequences, on-rails melee battles, boss fights and more. While Kinect manages the gunplay, at times we found the puppet protagonist overly sensitive: our attempts to duck back into cover resulting in us poking his head out the other side, for instance. And the device is definitely responsible for the game’s gimmickier moments: melee sequences which descend into flailing and boss fights which end in a pummelling being chief offenders.

The Gunstringer’s biggest problem, however, is that it’s a score-based shooter with little incentive to return. With only one weapon type available at any given time, there’s none of the tactical interplay between attacks that makes aiming for high scores in Child Of Eden so tempting. One death attributable to Kinect rather than your abilities and you’ll be switching off in frustration: Twisted Pixel obviously knows how to a spin a yarn, but this one doesn’t have the staying power to become a legend of the old west. [5]