POSTED 6/12/10


WESTERN HEROES

Neko Entertainment/Big Ben Interactive

We have a confession to make. We’re guilty of a heinous shooting in our dim distant youth. We would hereby like to solemnly and heartfeltedly apologise to any living relatives of the drink can Dad made us let rip into with a shotty. We’re humbly sorry.

OK, this here Western Heroes is much what you’d expect from a game with such a title. It’s set in a spaghetti-meets-Dick Dastardly cartoon-coloured west, and it has good folks and it has bad folks. Yessir, it’s just your everyday on-rails shooter with a variety of enemies to take out, from big bad Professor Molina to standard gunslingers, big bruising dudes who come straight out of the screen at you and varmints with jetpacks. Yep... There’s one literally big kicker that comes with the game though: a shiny, white Winchester rifle (named after the pub in Shaun of the Dead, natch) in which you plug a Wiimote and nunchuk and start blowing stuff away.

Strangely though, despite toting serious plastic weaponry, this is a politically correct west. The four goodies available are your typical whitebread cowboy, a black guy, an injun and a chick! Uh-oh, we’re probably in trouble with the PC cops for saying ‘chick’...

It really is alarmingly good fun working through the main levels, and even going party with a saloony equivalent of Duck Hunt. The dumb fun factor helps us forgive some of the games ‘quirks’, such as scenes stopping dead for a quick posing interlude from our four heroic types, a sudden alarming arc in difficulty three quarters of the way in and a curious lack of using the entire screen width.

If you wanna be a cowboy (or cowgal) then Western Heroes is solid, if ephemeral, fun. E-i-e-i-adios!

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