Sombrero: Spaghetti Western Mayhem

Got this game as an impulse buy today after reading the description on the Store Page, and because the game art is reminiscent of "Guacamelee!" The most important thing you need to know is that this game doesn't have AI opponents to fill the gaping friendless hole in your soul. Note the lack of a "Single Player" tag in the game's description, that's painfully accurate. The game is fun, but in order to enjoy it you need to have real flesh-and-blood friends (local or online), or at least sarcastic siblings who will humour you and your weirdo review-writing habit. Without another person to play with, your foot will have to play the unenviable role of "Punching Bag #2" by occasionally tapping the Jump and Fire buttons. The controls are simple enough that you lonely nimble-toed gamers out there could very well play effectively with yourselves with a rolling fat-toe-pinky-toe technique. There's Jump, Shoot, and Move, and that's all you need to enjoy this game. No? That's right, you also need friends. Hey, look at that, you ARE paying attention! With a controller, you move around with a Stick or D-Pad, Shoot in any direction by tilting the other Stick, and Jump with the Trigger buttons. Contrary to what the shrieking young man in the Game Description video says, the controls are fine. If your brain can't adapt to using Trigger as Jump in a game with only 2 action buttons, then you have bigger problems than not having any friends to play with. (He does have friends though, and I'm very jealous.) Keyboard controls are familiar; Aim with the Mouse, Shoot with LMB, Move with WASD, Jump with Space or RMB. Every player starts a match with a basic trusty revolver. It fires continually as long as the Aim Stick is tilted, and reloads round-by-round whenever you stop blasting the hell out of your imaginary friend's digital corpse. Lots of weapons randomly appear as power-ups that give you a cool new deadly thing to fling around, while its ammo lasts. There are bows, knives, boomerangs, some kind of rocket fist, sonic pulse weapons, vengeful spirit skulls, you know, the usual. They're all useful, none of them make you feel bad you went for the bottle-bombs instead of the throwing axe, especially because any weapon will OHKO a player. There are currently 5 Stages to fight in, and they all look great. One of them even has destructible, regenerating platforms for more mayhem. A quirk I noticed is that I couldn't jump down through platforms, but I could jump up through them. Also, some weapons aren't stopped by the environment. For example, the Boomerang corkscrews freely through the map until it wangs someone in the neck or disappears on its own. There are absolutely no safe zones or cover from the starting Revolver, it passes through everything. Things like Dynamite and Knives do bounce off the floor and walls. To wrap this up, $4.00 gives us a solid framework on which the Developers say they will continue to build on, giving us more content in the future. And to unwrap this, with so many games like this popping up, they need every bit of help they can get. Currently it's almost impossible to find an online match, even after switching through all the available servers. And while that's not a problem for you hoity-toity types, with your local friends and families all sharing in the lead-slinging fun, us rebel loners with sweet-ass '90s action mullets are left out. The developers said there are no plans at this time to add AI opponents. Bummer. So, why am I still recommending this game even though I'll probably never play it again? Because the world doesn't revolve around me or what I want or what I think is best. The developers made a game intended to be played with friends, and that's exactly what it is. It excels at that. Good job, Devs, I'm looking forward to that future content, if not for AI players then for more of the colorful yet haunting stage art.