Playtime: 66 minutes

Played: 2026

Context: I liked the original GTA back in the 90s.

Review

Rustler is a small, simple game in which you walk/ride around in a small area doing very basic missions. The only twist is that it's GTA 1/2 in a medieval setting, which is just used for jokes about horses being used as cars. Guard horses have police lights and you can escape guards by going to "Pimp My Horse", that level of "humour".

Most of the gameplay involves riding around and fighting. The riding is okay until you run into trees, because the game has a bizarre system where it hides nearby trees aside from the stumps. Which results in you constantly riding into them.

The combat is awful, clunky and overly hard, even on Easy. You can attack, heavy attack and block - that's it. Mostly it's a bunch of blocking and hoping you can heavy attack an enemy before it backs away. I quit the game after a guard killed me in about 2 seconds from full health.

Aside from boring missions, clunky travel and bad combat the game also uses save points instead of normal saving and bad checkpoints that set you back too much. I think loading a checkpoint may cost you 200 gold as well, just like Pimp My Horse costs 100 gold. This wouldn't be so bad if you could easily make money, but all you can do is try and kill people in the small starting area and hope you don't get caught.

Oh yeah, the game traps you in about 1/3rd of the map until you can do a bunch of missions to make 5000 gold, did i mention that? And side activities being bad? The camera doing a barf-inducing shift near buildings? DLC-restricted location circles being shown? Losing your horse after completing a mission and horse locations not being shown on the map? Stores not being shown on that map?

I would rather Saints Row 3 and 4.