Gunman Clive 2 (2015)

Gunman Clive 2 gameplay is basically the same as in the first instalment, with minor novelties like levels where you're riding a pterodactyl and shooting enemy hot air balloons (you heard right...) reminiscent of Star Fox; or others where you're riding your horse shooting foes while dodging obstacles, similar to Antarctic Adventure.

The art department is still great, with its characteristic hand-drawn feel but more colourful, and the catchy sound tracks.

The game is still challenging but kept short (it took me 3 hours to beat it for the first time), and you can expect a good number of retries, maintaining the level of difficulty of the original and contributing to the retro flavour of the game.

Gunman Clive was great and enjoyed a very positive reception, thus not much needed a change for the sequel. However, I feel the idea of turning the chase of the bad guys into a world tour has diluted the western theme the original game had and, instead, it feels like random levels are thrown at the payer. I had to check the map in the stage selection menu to understand why I went from shooting cowboys on a ship to running away from a T-Rex... Also, the motivation of first game in which you have to chase the kidnappers of the girl, although stereotypical, worked fine. In Gunman Clive 2, you find yourself chasing a weird steampunk machine for the sake of it, or maybe because it destroyed your hometown... in any case, it seems like not much importance is given to it which I find a bit careless.

THE BEST:

• Great gameplay in general, just as the original.
• Nice look and sound
• Right level of challenge
• New playable characters

COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER...

• Unlike the original, too much variation between levels make it lack a theme.

Without sacrificing anything that made the original a sweet little game, the sequel compounds upon the formula with new mechanics, a bevy of strange un-Western stages (that actually work well, especially the dino stages), new playable characters, and a feeling that the challenge has been ticked up without feeling too frustrating.

The game is still short, simple, and can be finished in about an hour or so, but it's a fun and cheap journey, definitely lending replayability to the titular Clive, the Peach-like Ms. Johnson, the strangely short-range Chieftain Bob, and the joke character with no attacks, the Duck. It's a potent package that's worth the buy on whatever platform you can snatch it on.

I seem to be in the minority, but I found this game to be a massive disappointment after the first one, which I liked quite a bit. This game is unfocused. I'm not a fan of the color palette, which is simply muddier than the totally unique, not-quite-monochrome look of the first. The style is no longer unified. We are no longer taking a unified, lighthearted jab at Old West stereotypes and mashing that up with old platformer stereotypes to interesting effect, we're just throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the game - pallete, local, mechanics, everything. I'm also not a huge fan of the level design. All of the levels with any amount of difficulty seem to follow the same formula: easy tedious part for the first three quarters followed by tricky, difficult part at the end. This makes a huge chunk of the game mindless repetition until the muscle memory is built up for the end. But most of all, I'm just not sure why we needed this game. It does most of the same things as the first game, but in a less focused way. At best, it could have been more of the same, and I'm not sure it even hit that mark. The first was such a breath of fresh air - I'd love to see what else Bertil Hörberg can do aside from the same thing a second time.

I'm still amazed at the music, though.