The original Amiga version of Hired Guns is an enormous first person shooter/RPG style game that I lost days of my life completing back in the mid 90’s. It was never as flash as Doom that followed shortly after its release, but had an amazing and eerie atmosphere that-- combined with puzzles --made it similar in feel to the later System Shock series. The game is based around a party of mercenaries, of which the player controls 4 at any one time, who land on a planet were the usual kind of scientific shenanigans have gone horribly wrong and resultant nasty beasties are out to clobber you.
What makes this so good is the way it builds tension through quiet exploration phases only to have player actions release hordes of the unpleasant bad guys at a moment's notice. Combine this with a long campaign and high difficulty level with many characters not able to carry that much ammo and things get really jumpy. The sound effects here are awesome for a game from back in the day and give a very Aliens like atmosphere to the whole thing, which given the lack of a decent Aliens based game at the time was most excellent. The way the campaign works is nice too since each level actually represents a place of relevance on the planet the story takes place
 | | |
on, which again for its time was quite progressive over a more generic style of level generation, and its clear to see that effort has been made to give each of these locations its own feel keeping the player wanting to see what comes next. Due to the fact the game is very old, it doesn’t run a true 3D engine instead having a sort of tile based scrolling a bit like in the Eye of the Beholder games but although this may take some getting used to once you get the hang of it this won’t dampen the excitement too much. The sheer number of items and weapons available to the player in this game is staggering and the fact characters can by no means carry that much selection really adds to the challenge an makes team play an important factor whether one person plays all the characters on split screen or this is split using the internet. Overall I’d thoroughly recommend checking this out if you’re a fan of RPGs, FPS or just science fiction as a whole you won’t be disappointed.
