No. 264303 [PM]
Gun Smoke is clearly cut from the same cloth as Commando, something further evidenced by how it came out only a few short months after that game. In what does it actually improve upon, compared to his war-themed big brother? There's checkpoints now, so you can actually hope to finish the game without save states, the far west setting is a lot more interesting than the vaguely military premise of Commando as someone who grew up reading Tex and Zagor, boss battles have been added and there's no more useless secondary grenade that can barely hit anything. Sounds encouraging, right?
The 8 directional shooting inputs from Commando have been replaced with a cool new system that allows you to shoot from both your guns at different angles, like you're the protagonist of some old spaghetti western movie!
Instead of aiming just where you're looking at, now you can also press different inputs to angle your shots either on your left or right, with the option for more precision if you press 2 combined inputs at once.
Adding to that, when i said this system was "cool" earlier, what i meant to say is that it's absolutely worthless, as it now limits your range exclusively to the upper corner of the screen, meaning that for any enemy either next to to or below you you're pretty much free real estate.
Scrolling is also automatic now, so lots of enemies will find themselves in those two spots very often with little you can do about it.
This wouldn't be so bad if the starting speed of movement and weapon range weren't so pitiful, this last one in particular reaching only half of the screen while every enemy shooting at you can do so from the edges of the screen just fine. How fun. It would also help if the game didn't put you in cramped hallways all the time and forced you to angle your shots to kill enemies that would otherwise be untouchable.
Bosses are about as difficult as the amount of enemies that they surround themselves with. Play something else.
This is another kcmilan steam review