Gunman And The Witch

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I rarely... wait, perhaps never before have given a bad review to such an amazing game before. I hope you will read on. If I were to title my review, I think I would call it: Amazing Game - Ruined By A Fistful or perhaps a Cascade Mountain of Bugs First, let me say, if you have read any of my reviews before, or some of my forum posts you may see a trend come through. I often take the side of the developer when pitted against the egocentric never-ending demands of players who want everything for nothing and right away. Game development is a business, and most indie developers battle a myriad of obstacles that the community who is drunk off unrealistic visions of game development from a myriad of "game dev tycoon sims" will never understand (and don't care too). When I give a negative review, it is very concerning. Now, back to the review itself. Gunman and the Witch, a game constructed in very basic pixel graphics that accomplish everything they need to, and in my case, rapidly won me over with their simplistic charm and amazing functionality. I always knew who I needed to talk to, and who I needed to "deal with". The sound effects were functional, if not exciting, and the music was... a placefiller at best (not the slightest Western theme to it). Gratefully you can always turn it down and run some Deno or some such in the background. The UI was decent, and the controls were tried-and-true for the genre. Speaking of Genre, the merge of city-builder with arcade Western arcade shooter was well done! I was most pleasantly surprised. The pacing of complexities, adding features was clearly planned out, and I appreciated how they didn't dump everything all at once... sure it needed work, but the game is free after all and still in Beta (or is it 'left in Beta'). The story, was nothing new, yet was spot on with the Spaghetti-Western Tired-but-lovingly-True theme. I don't know many guys my age that did not enjoy a childhood of fun playing Sheriff. This story gave me my own town to rule, a fiery redhead girl at my side, and a wild west to tame as the loyal town Sheriff. I've designed a game like this in my head so many times (and the occasional scraps of code even in my spare time). I suspect it's the game many of us have played with in our head, wishing it would make it into real code for real play. This brings me to the code, or rather the mess of conflicting lines. My first play-through, I got stuck because I did an action, before the quest asked me to, and the line argument broke, and it froze all subsequent plots. It's a common issue in early coding, and usually fixed quickly by the devs. Forgiving such a common glitch, I restarted. My second play through with the game, resulted in, I suspect, an glitch where the game introduced one of those complexities of features in the game (a supply-chain function), before it was supposed to, as it hadn't yet provided the tools in the narrative to correct the supply issue, which resulted in an unfair game-over. Still, this was an old dream-game come to life, and I wasn't ready to give up yet. My next playthrough went much better. I was introduced to the supply chain functions in a timely manner as the tools were made available to address it. I struggled at first, but overcame it. The game seemed to moving forward. Then a glitch - a pretty large one. One of my supply missions began to perma-cycle its rewards, and every second I was awarded the max reward of a certain supply. The whole game, burdened by the weight on the code of the perma-cycling of a mission every second, ground to a near halt. Figuring it out I canceled the mission and the normal game speed returned (aha, I out-smarted the bug). Unfortunately, all I had done was cancel the rewards - the mission was stuck. As I attempted to cancel the mission for real, the assigned civilians got stuck in the mission, and sporadically fought error code to be removed from their assignments, until the errors broke the gameplay, all plots and all missions ground to a halt. I quit to main menu and reloaded (fingers crossed). My town was gone (buildings just disapeared), but I still had all my money, and people. I tried to rebuild, but all functions were gone. I exited completely and reloaded and everything was gone... including my patience. [i]Side Note to all Devs - 101 in opening your game to the playerbase to test - always allow multiples saves, so players can reload an earlier uncorrupted place in their game they have been working on for so long.[/i] The game is brilliant in its simplicity. It is a game I really wanted to enjoy. If the devs ever return or there is a player-run attempt to mod it together (which I doubt the framework could hold it), then we may have a true classic worth it all. As it stands the game is flooded by a Rio to Grand to ford. It's a soiled dove teasing you with fantasies of your childhood only to dump you when you were just starting to enjoy it. My advice leave Custer to his last stand, and Senator Davie to the Alamo ... the game here is just a mirage at this point. Devs if you read this and return with hope, I will be delighted to give this another shot. For now. Susanna do cry, because this game really is NOT playable. ((MORE REVIEWS)) TO SEE OTHER INSIGHTFUL REVIEWS, HEAD TO https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43850782/