12 is Better Than 6

12 is better 6. This one is a twin stick shooter with a gimmick. The gimmick is you always need to cock your weapon before you shoot because the setting is the Wild West and there are no automatic weapons yet. Art style is “blue pen on a note list”.

Well first things first. What’s the plot of this game? We are a nameless Mexican man doing hard labor as a slave in the ore mine. We are also having amnesia and have no idea who and where we are. Our only friend is another Latino slave named Juan. He helped us a little bit by teaching us how to push a mine cart. Some years after, Juan is brutally murdered by the warden who feeds him to the guard dogs. So we take a pickaxe and increase the iron in his body by a kilo or so. Didn’t know we could just kill our master and run away. Whatever, our nameless man decides for now to call himself Juan. We continue to whatever next settlement we can find. We enter a saloon and ask for food and water. Local cowboys are not too pleased with us and we face a lot of racism, we also dish out a lot of racism. Juan's patience run thin and he ices some fools. Sheriff of the town didn’t like it because we killed his men, so we kill the sheriff too. Ah simpler times…Oh we also meet some sleaze ball by the name Slippery Pit. He tries to use his silver tongue skills on Juan but only gets a lead bullet in his leg by result of it. But we manage to strike a deal. We get Pit out of the jail and he shares his hideout with us and also pays us 1000 buckaroos. All we have to do is to sneak into some fort, meet Pit’s friend and get a cart full of weapons. Pit will then sell those guns and shares his profit with us. 

Plan doesn’t go as we hoped and Juan just shoots his way in and out. Plan doesn’t go as he hoped even further because now Pit’s other partner, the one who would buy our weapons is stuck in some kind of lockdown. Local sheriff is planning to take down some drug cartel’s thugs who want to smuggle cocaine. We offer our help so he can lift the lockdown, so we can finally end our deal with Pit. And so we do… but where there is rain there is thunder and where there is thunder there is fire. We are hit with a classic triple bogey. While we are dealing with cartel thugs, Pit’s partner Sergio gets kidnapped by some other bandits. So we have to deal with that too, but don’t worry we double our payment this way.

So what do we need now? We need the heat away from us and we need to remember who we are. Pit can help us with the first, but for the second one we need to ask his “roommate” Caucasian dude who pretends to be Injun… hilarious just like New Vegas with their ghouls. Whatever, first we bribe a corrupt sheriff to hang some scape goat in the place of Juan so bounty hunter would get of our back. Why they are after us? Because we have a bounty on our ass for butchering rangers of Pallas town. Then we need to find Injun tribe and asks their shaman to restore our memories. But red skins don’t want to help us unless we 1) prove that we are a noble warrior 2) help them get their relics from the grabby hands of English people. It’s getting tedious but we have to do what we have to do. We even have to save shaman from the united warriors of Great Ox. That’s the second triple bogey mind you. But are memories are back, well partially but they are back. Well what do you know, we did kill those rangers and ravaged that town and we also a gang leader and our name is Jesus, but we don’t remember the name our band. Why did we do it? Because Spanish and English people committed acts of colonialism obviously. 

So next on our list some dude, who know people who are knowledgeable in the field of local gangs. We find him and he points us toward the Chinese miners. One of them knows the gang who dressed all in black. Couple dozens of dead people later we find out where the gang located is and their plans I think. But on our way we got ambushed by warriors of Great Ox. They beat the living manure out of us and leave us to fry in the sun tied to a pole. But we are saved by bunch of religious Caucasian people. Of course their prophet is a fraud and one concerned man wants to prove it.  He doesn’t want us to murder the prophet but don’t mind us killing bunch of his people in the process. Of course Jesus kills the prophet and says “if he doesn’t resurrect in 3 days then he was a fraud”. 

We back with our boys, we also made a new friend on the way back, some nutcase with a spider on his shoulder high on mescaline cactuses. Our life so far is pretty bad due to new bounty on our head. So first order of thing we drink till we collapse. After that we spread a rumor that we are going into the abandoned town for couple of weeks. There we will set up a trap and blow our every enemy up with dynamite and burry them under fallen rocks.  After we rig the place with dynamite we’ll lure everyone in the center of town. We then will signal Pit to ignite the dynamite. And then we sneak out via secret exit and KABLOOEY! Now imagine I do one of Homelander’s nervous smile. The plan goes as usual, and dynamite blows up prematurely right before we sneak out. So Jesus just stands there numb from all the crap that happened to him and thinks “Why do I even bother” before landslide forever buries us beneath the earth.

Okay now, gameplay part. As I said previously this is a twin stick shooter with a gimmick. We need to rise and cock our gun before we can shoot it. So rmb, lmb,rmb, lmb. To reload we need to tap to load each bullet individually. It’ll take a moment to get used to. Just don’t take on more than 6 men at the same time. Okay what weapons do we have? We have a six shooter revolver, Winchester rifle, double barrel shotgun and a bow. We also have bunch of melee weapons such as pickaxe, shovel, hatchet but they take a firearm slot so ditch them and don’t use them unless you have to. As our secondary weapon we have a knife, with it we can do 1 hit kill on an unaware enemy. We also have dynamite, the we can upgrade too homing dynamite by tying it to a rat. 

On our adventure we will visit several town and in some of those towns we can do couple of side tasks. We can buy an upgrade perk, there are 6 pf them in total. They are quite basic, letting us carry more ammo, making us faster at reloading our guns, better fire rate, chainmail that will give us 50% to null the bullet damage and last one is akimbo style dual wield revolvers. We can also do some bounty hunting activities to earn an extra buck.

Well that’s about it. There are some BS moments but overall it is way easier than say Hotline Miami. It is also short but there is a DLC with some extra story, but I don’t have it. So did I enjoy it? Heck yes I did. Did I like the art style? Yes, but font size is too small for my poor sore eyes. So definitely play it. The story is cheesy and full of “White man bad”. The thing is the game is made in Russia or at least by Russian people. So I’m not sure what they wanted to tell us with that. I mean it was 2015 a bit before the mass rainbow hysteria OH RIGHT! The Gamer Gate happened in 2014 so it does make a little bit of sense. Oh whatever, it’s good, play it.