Guns and Spurs 2 Switch Game Review

Guns and Spurs 2 had tempted me for weeks. It looked like a low rent Red Dead Redemption, a budget open world game set in the old west. Considering I love RDR and RDR2, I gave in, I bought it. And boy do I wish Nintendo had a refund policy. I want my thirty dollars back. It really couldn’t have been that bad, could it? Well, yes, Guns and Spurs 2 is that bad. We’re talking if Midnight Works tried to make an open world game, bad. Starting life as a mobile game, it is an insult to mobile games. It is an insult, period. If you are going to try to rip off Read Dead Redemption, also now for the Switch, at least put in some effort. I’m not sure where to start with this, but buckle up, this will be a longer review!

Lets start with story. There is none. Your a bounty hunter, you move to an area and want to hunt criminals. The local sheriff hires to hunt 25 bounties… and that’s it. To be fair, there is Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, a classic game from years ago, where you go to North Korea and simply hunt bounties, but that game was amazing for the time. You could level Pyongyang with cluster bombs. Guns and Spurs 2 wishes it was that cool. So anyways, that’s it for the story. Let’s move on to the broken game play.

Guns and Spurs 2 Game Play is Terrible

You have a horse. Press up on the directional buttons to summon it from thin air, anywhere on the map. You then have a shotgun, pistol and a lasso. You can upgrade the shotgun and pistol at the gunsmith. In each bounty, you go to a place on the map and kill a bunch of dudes. If your dealing with a regular bounty, you lasso the target and bring him to the nearest jail for full award. Once you kill the other guys, this is painfully easy. If you’re dealing with one of eight bosses, you just whittle their health down, then take part in a quick time duel and win. Bounty solved. That’s it, that’s the main game of Guns and Spurs 2.

The problems are legion in Guns and Spurs 2. First, the AI is horrendous. It just runs at you firing. If you’re behind cover(Which you automatically go into behind conveniently placed boxes), the guys will run by and shoot you from behind. There’s no strategy in gun fights, as you’ll see later. Also turn aiming assist on. With aiming assist on, you can fully miss the target, but still hit them, its ridiculous. Third, the enemies will spawn in a place regardless if you’re on a bounty. If you kill them, they respawn in thirty seconds, which makes exploring a real pain in the butt. Which brings us to the next point, the utterly lifeless world.

The Utterly Lifeless World

Nobody moves, not even the piano player.

Read Dead Redemption in 2010 has a very real feeling world. And Red Dead Redemption 2 set the bar for open world design. Guns and Spurs 2, meanwhile, has an open world, but its dead. See the image above, it could be a video as everyone in it is lifeless and doesn’t move. Characters outside just wander around aimlessly and say nothing. There’s no wildlife. I think there might be collectable horseshoes, I saw one, but couldn’t care enough to get it.

Guns and Spurs 2 has horrible side mission

Well that’s not entirely true. There are several side missions to complete in Guns and Spurs 2. They are found by finding randomly placed NPCs. They’ll unlock the side-mission types. I found 2 types(there are more but I didn’t care to go find them). The first is horse racing. You just run through the checkpoints in the time limit. The second is cattle herding, which they don’t tell you that you need your horse for, which you do. That is herding really, really stupid cows into the pen in the time limit. While doing the side missions, the enemies are still around, so they were firing at me during the herding mission I did. Bad, developers, bad.

Conclusion

I feel your meaningless existence, sister!

Guns and Spurs 2 is awful. It really is. There’s no other way to put it. It is broken and boring with nothing propelling you forward, because there’s to nothing to look forward to. There is no story, remember. Sure you can buy a house and customize your look, but why do it? There’s no point to anything. I did not beat this game, but it is so monotonous, beating it would be literal torture. Even as a mobile title, Guns and Spurs 2 is not worth it. As a thirty dollar switch title, its an abomination. I should have known better, it is only 595MB in size. It is too small to be good open world game, and it is terrible indeed. Red Dead Redemption is only $20 more, and its a classic. Buy that instead, and leave Guns and Spurs 2 in the dust.

I leave you with this video of the broken gun play. Enjoy.