Six-Guns

No matter now many Hollywood flicks you watch or how many hours you put into playing Red Dead Redemption on your Xbox 360, it's impossible to really comprehend the tough and uncompromising lifestyle of the trigger-happy cowboy.

It was an existence filled with danger and excitement, and so it's little wonder that the noble art of gun-slinging has engendered such a vibrant and dramatic range of fictional interpretations.

Go for your gun

Sadly, Gameloft's Six-Guns isn't one of those examples. While it looks the part, with console-quality visuals and a massive, sprawling landscape, its piecemeal gameplay and haphazard plotting prevent it from rivalling the likes of Eastwood and Wayne when it comes to capturing that enticing Wild West atmosphere.

Now updated to include support for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, Six-Guns does at least boast a more precise control system. With directional movement controlled by the analogue pads and other commands mapped to the phone's physical buttons, the process of riding into the sunset now feels a little more assured.

Sadly, another side-effect of being ported to the Xperia Play is jerky visuals and stuttering performance.

Six-Guns shambles around like a drunken sheriff's deputy, and other issues - such as your weapon discharging automatically at random points and melee attacks hitting enemies that are actually behind your character rather than in front - serve to shoot a few more holes into the game's Stetson.

You're my favourite deputy

We've not even touched upon Six-Guns's bothersome preference for in-app purchasing, or the game's samey missions and nonsensical storyline (vampires become involved later on, which we don't recall happening in any episodes of Rawhide). The fact is, for all of Six-Guns's polish, the core game itself isn't really up to much.

It's a shame, because we'd sincerely love to play a mobile phone rival to Red Dead Redemption, and this could have been it - sadly, Gameloft's rootin' tootin' effort is a few bullets short of a shootout.