Hired Guns! Just typing the title makes me feel all warm and happy inside, like I’ve just eaten a bowl of porridge on a cold winter’s morning with nothing else to do all day apart from build snow men and sledge down Primrose Hill. But enough of my lyrical nonsense, you want to know what this beast of a game is all about!
Released in 1993 Hired Guns is an action RPG that tells the story of a group of mercenaries exploring a far flung planet populated with all sorts of alien nasties.
Hired Guns! Just typing the title makes me feel all warm and happy inside, like I’ve just eaten a bowl of porridge on a cold winter’s morning with nothing else to do all day apart from build snow men and sledge down Primrose Hill. But enough of my lyrical nonsense, you want to know what this beast of a game is all about!
Released in 1993 Hired Guns is an action RPG that tells the story of a group of mercenaries exploring a far flung planet populated with all sorts of alien nasties. Over the course of the game you’ll uncover a tale of biological and genetic engineering gone wrong, but unusually for an RPG the story is not the main focus here.
It’s all about the ACTION!
Your screen is split into four smaller screens, each screen showing the first person viewpoint of one of your four mercenaries (chosen from a pool of 12, with differing stats and equipment). You then take direct control of each member of your small team to explore the levels, collect weapons, and psionic powers, shoot the hell out of monsters and uncover secrets. Sure the graphics are dated, and the ‘one click equals one step with nothing in the way of scrolling’ is positively archaic but ‘Hired Guns’ has a couple of tricks up it’s sleeve that will drag you in and never let you escape!
Firstly the sound design is fantastic, the meaty boom of the shotgun and the shrieks of the worm like dragons on the second level still haunt my dreams.
Secondly, and this is by far this games killer feature, it has simultaneous co-operative multiplayer for up to four people! Awesome! You can play through the whole adventure with a bunch of your mates, running and gunning to your hearts content.
I’m a casual gamer at best but the first day I got Hired Guns on my Amiga I played it with a friend for ten straight hours. It was brilliant for its day, and it’s still great fun now. More tactical and slow paced than ‘Doom’ it still has the power to make your heart pound and your palms go sweaty. Its cyber-punk stylings gave it a very adult feel (in a similar way to the equally brilliant ‘Syndicate’) and the whole game was way ahead of it’s time. A sequel was announced about five years ago but sadly it has never materialized, so I urge you to give this gem a try today! Download it, get some mates over, and rock out!
