Game Reviews

Guns ’n’ Glory

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Guns ’n’ Glory

For anyone who wore a holstered revolver or feather head dress around the house as a child, it’s always sad to reflect on how far we've come from the halcyon days of cowboys and Indians.

The wild west is passé, and Hollywood will only tolerate cowboys in a movie as long as they’re up against alien invaders or making friends with native Americans.

If you're looking to recover this lost innocence, Guns ‘n’ Glory is about as close as you’ll get to reliving those youthful gun battles during your afternoon toilet breaks.

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Guns ‘n’ Glory largely adheres to the tower defence formula, but with several little twists. Principle among these is the fact that you're not fending off evil swarms of angry aliens or enemy soldiers. Instead, you’re ambushing helpless pioneers as they try to navigate labyrinthine canyons and settle down for a better life in the west.

Although this twist is superficial, the game pulls plenty of tricks that force you to change the way you play.

Your defenders aren’t static towers or catapults but gun-toting or dynamite crazy bandidos who lie around the map and are roused to fight with offers of money. If the convoy of wagons and settlers moves too far, you can move your amigos along with them and pester them all the way to the exit.

What easily could have been another rehash of tower defence games gone by becomes a lot more fluid and active with just this one simple tweak.

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The game lets you upgrade your fighters and collect power-up crates scattered around you, and there's a train on which to build Gatling guns to move back and forth. All this means it isn’t lacking in interesting new features to keep you busy.

It’s just a pity the controls for the Xperia Play version aren’t as pleasing as the game’s trailblazing attitude. The left touchpad can be used to select and control the bandits, while the right touchpad controls the camera view. However, there’s an odd glitch that causes the game to pause when you stroke the left touchpad a certain way, meaning you end up using the D-pad, which makes your little guys’ movements feel robotic and sticky.

This is a bug that will probably be resolved in a future update, but along with a few other issues it makes the physical controls something of a nuisance, and unreliable if you’re playing on the delightfully panicky Hard difficulty.

Luckily, the touch controls are there to fall back on, and though it’s a bit disappointing to have all those buttons go to waste you’ll soon forgive and forget once you're engaged in a frantic race to stop any survivors getting past your posse and alerting The Law.

Guns ’n’ Glory

Guns 'n' Glory for Xperia Play has a few control issues, but that doesn’t affect the fact that it's a refreshing tower defence game with a bit of character besides
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Brendan Caldwell
Brendan Caldwell
Brendan is a boy. Specifically, a boy who plays games. More specifically, a nice boy who plays many games. He often feels he should be doing something else. That's when the siren call of an indie gem haunts him. Who shall win this battle of wills? Answer: not Brendan.