Colt Canyon

Review

It took you a while to plan this trip. Your partner doesn’t know anything about it until you both enter the majestic Grand Canyon, which is located in Arizona. Everything is going splendidly for the first few days. You find the right spots to camp and you enjoy each other’s company, talking about anything and everything that comes to mind while the dinner is cooking on a fresh campfire. But then, disaster strikes! A bunch of bandits ravages your camp, leaving you for dead and kidnapping your partner! When you come back to your senses, a few hours have passed. All you know is that there is only one way to get out of this Canyon, and that way is forward. All you have in mind is to catch up with the bandits and save your partner, in Colt Canyon.

Colt Canyon is a top-down/action roguelike/shooter game developed by Retrific and published by Headup Games on the 17 of June 2020 on Steam. The game is also available on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.

What a fun, addictive and fast-paced game Colt Canyon is! In my 5 hours gameplay, I managed to get to the second boss (a giant Buffalo) and failed to eliminate it on several occasions. The game consists of 4 levels per stage, which includes a boss fight.

In your first playthrough, you’ll be playing with Cade “Gunslinger” Colt, and you’ll have access to his original loadout which is a gun. As you progress through the levels, you find new weapons as well as new characters. Some will unlock straight away while others will take a while to unlock.

Essentially, each of the levels (before each boss) is equivalent to three side screens and two or three depth screens. Your goal is to push forward towards the right of the screen, kill all enemies, and gather ammunition, new weapons and health potions. These items will be scattered all around the levels as  stashes which will include pottery, crates, vases and a few other things. All you have to do is to destroy these stashes with your melee action, and you will mostly find ammunition. The crate with the gun symbol will give you a random weapon which can vary from a gun, a crossbow, a rifle, dynamite, a pan, a bottle or a flamethrower, and many others.

Each of your characters, once unlocked, will only be able to carry two weapons at a time, but most of them will have only one weapon in their loadout at the start of the game. All will have the same skills, which are Movement, Health, Strength and Accuracy, and all will be different. In my case, of the 4 characters that I’ve unlocked so far, Colt moves faster and is more accurate than the old Grumpy Buck. But Buck has a lot more health and is very strong.

On the top left on your screen, you’ll see your characters health as well as both of his/her weapons and ammunition.

In terms of enemy, you’ll have enemies with melee weapons and others with guns as well as dogs, buffalos, scorpions and bloody snakes which seem to be very good at hiding in these stashes! When you kill a cowboy, they will usually drop some ammunition and sometimes a weapon too.

In each level, with the exception of the boss level, you’ll have to liberate a prisoner.  Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to choose an upgrade, which could be having more health, better accuracy and a few others. You can also hire these liberated prisoner to fight on your side (but make sure they have a weapon at hand).

Colt Canyon is one of those games that are easy to play but hard to master.  The fact that you have several characters to unlock not only gives the game massive replayability, but you’ll have to adjust the way you play with each character. And bear in mind that when you die, you’ll have to start the game all over again.

Superb pixel graphics and the soundtrack suits the game extremely well. You can play on local and online co-op as well as solo.  The game is rather difficult at times, especially when fighting the bosses, but there are plenty of weapons to use. You might be frustrated a few times, but the game is super fun to play.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com!