95: Hired Guns

Number 95
(58.8 points)
Hired Guns
1994: 71 (18.0)
1995: 50 (40.8)

There really was a trend for first-person party-based real-time RPGs back then, wasn't there? Well, this is less sword-and-sorcery than its contemporaries, and the Amiga Power guys liked it.

There are two types of games like this: ones where you control all four party members as a group in a single window (like Dungeon Master), and ones where you control each character through an independent window with separate controls (like Captive). Hired Guns falls into the second category, and therefore you will find yourself controlling each member in turn, depending on the task at hand. It inherits some elements of Dungeon Master in that you have to choose your team from a selection of men, women and robots with different weapons and abilities, but the wide selection of guns sets it apart from those earlier games.

I mentioned the two ways to play these games, and I think I prefer the Dungeon Master style where the gang is together all the time. At least Captive had the narrative explanation that you're a guy controlling four drones from a suitcase computer, which explains why they move the way they do, but these are four independent thinking people, who nevertheless just wait around while someone else goes ahead to clear the area, rather than working as a team. Maybe with practice you can get used to the somewhat fiddly controls and quickly switch back and forth between them, but naturally I'm not going to reach that stage. Nice presentation, I'm just not sure. You can play with up to four human players on one Amiga, and that would be pretty cool, but playing alone, I just found it hard to get into it.

Recommended TOSEC disk(s):
Hired Guns v1.08.39.25 (1993-09-24)(Psygnosis)(M5)(Disk 1 of 5)[cr Loons][f ATX]
Hired Guns v1.08.39.25 (1993-09-24)(Psygnosis)(M5)(Disk 2 of 5)
Hired Guns v1.08.39.25 (1993-09-24)(Psygnosis)(M5)(Disk 3 of 5)
Hired Guns v1.08.39.25 (1993-09-24)(Psygnosis)(M5)(Disk 4 of 5)
Hired Guns v1.08.39.25 (1993-09-24)(Psygnosis)(M5)(Disk 5 of 5)