Western Press from Surprise Attack Games is a 1-vs-1 shoot-out where the player with the fastest reflexes wins. That’s about as deep as the title gets, but that’s not to say Western Press is a bad game by any means. It surely isn’t the sort of game a major studio would release, or even entertain the thought of. If you have a couple of buddies and want to sling some lead, Western Press should be right up your alley.
Th game pits two characters against each other in an old-fashioned gunfight on a variety of old west inspired stages. The difference is that Western Press handles the actual shooting by having each player punch in a series of commands as they appear on the side of the screen. Think of a sort of Dance Dance Revolution sort of thing and you’ll have a good idea of what you can expect. The winner of each round is the player who can input the commands the fastest. It’s a stupidly simple system that works incredibly well.
What makes the game fun is the multiplayer nature of the whole affair. You can play the single-player portion of the game to practice your speed and train that muscle memory, but the real fun is taking the fight online with friends. The single-player is essential as it will allow you to earn a number of new characters that you can then use in the game. They don’t offer any new abilities, but each is unique and offers up some really fun animations and dialogue.
Western Press has a very retro style in the vain of the old Sierra adventure games from the 80s. It’s a charming look that is bright and colorful, giving the game a unique look and style. As each gunfight begins each the characters involved will talk back and forth with each other, spouting off pleasantries and subtle disses. It always fun to see how different characters interact with each other, so the incentive to unlock new gunfighters is pretty high.
The game features the DDR like gameplay in the main game, but there is another mode that can last far longer. You can choose to play a memory game like the old Simon toy which will test each players limits. I’m not sure how long this can go, but when I played online we got into a pretty long round until someone made a mistake. The online mode is easy to get into and runs smooth and you can set up tournaments of various size so everyone can face off. You can also include bots of various skill levels and more than once we ended up watching two bots face off in the finals, but even then it was a blast to watch them.
Western Press is a lot of fun and at only a few bucks it is definitely worth you time. It’s not the sort of game to spend hours at a time on, but its a great diversion, or a good way to settle disagreements with you friends online. Even with the small price tag the team has added Steam Workshop support so that you can create and upload stages and characters. If fair to say that in the future we may be able to see a Stomtrooper take on Master Chief on the bridge f the Enterprise.
You can check out some gameplay from our Twitch livestream session of Western Press below:
*A copy was provided for this review*
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