BRIEF: Hired Guns (1993)

 

These are some grim characters.

       

Hired Guns

United Kingdom

DMA Design (developer); Psygnosis (publisher)

Released 1993 for Amiga and DOS

Rejected for: Insufficient character development

    

Hired Guns is one of many things in life—triathlons, Cirque du Soleil, Finnegans Wake, theremin music, brutalist architecture—that I find impressive without actually enjoying. It takes real effort to make a four-character game with four different view windows operating at the same time. But as a single player who can mostly only concentrate on one window at a time, why would I want to play in such a tiny window, especially in the days of such low-resolution monitors?

  

Now, gameplay doesn't have to be a one-player thing. It supports cooperative multiplayer, with two players using joysticks or up to three players sharing a keyboard. Again, impressive. We don't see a lot of cooperative multiplayer games in this era. Swords of Glass (1986) and Bloodwych (1989) are the only two that come to mind immediately, at least in the first-person RPG genre. But it must have been awfully cozy with Player 1 controlling QAOP, Player 2 with his hands on the arrow keys, and Player 3 using the numberpad. If Irene ever leaves me, I guess I could try it on a first date.

     

The character in the upper-left is shooting at an enemy on the ceiling.

           

Hired Guns defies genre. I can see why some databases call it an RPG. There are elements that feel like Captive (1990) and other Dungeon Master clones. It has attributes (even if they never improve) and experience (which despite its name is more of a score). It's fundamentally a first-person shooter, but it has the gridded movement and overall feel of a "blobber," although the four characters occupy their own squares and don't necessarily follow each other. (It shares many of its characteristics with Space Hulk from the same year, and I'm curious if there was any cross-pollination here.) Perhaps most important, the game itself calls its campaign an "RPG Game" on the main menu.

 

DMA apparently thought that the difference between an "action game" and an "RPG game" was the length of the mission.

        

The game is set in 2712, and the backstory for the game at large (as opposed to the in-game campaign) is little more than a group of four mercenaries from various backgrounds have come together for a mission. There are three types of missions: training, action, and "RPG" (which in the context of this game just means an ongoing campaign). The five training missions each get you accustomed to a different aspect of gameplay. There are 17 "action" missions that take place on a single map. Some of them are competitive. The campaign takes place across 19 maps and comes with an extensive backstory.

   

Whichever mission you choose, you begin by selecting your four characters from a list of 12. They include men, women, robots, and cyborgs, with descriptions like "Pilot," "Freelance Assassin," "Battlefield Medic," and "Marksman." Each has a different combination of physique and agility (the only two attributes), and each starts with different equipment. Each character has a very dim gray-on-black portrait but a more conventional artistic depiction, along with a full backstory, in the game manual.

     

Adding characters to the party.

     

The campaign takes place on a planet called Graveyard, and when I say it has an "extensive backstory," I'm underselling it. There's a 48-page booklet devoted to the history of the planet and a separate 48-page booklet devoted to the history of the system that the planet is in. Since I only plan to BRIEF the game, I'll just say it's a war-torn system and the titular hired guns have been sent on a hostage rescue mission.

The campaign starts on a map called "Abandoned Depot"; after clearing this area, the player has a couple of paths, and I don't think he or she has to necessarily complete every map.

       

Having completed the first scenario, I have two choices about which way to go.

      

Each character has his own window with tabs at the top that allow cycling through four screens: first-person view, inventory, area map, and character sheet. By toggling a "gem" icon in the upper-right corner, you can tell characters to follow each other or not. 

       

Each character here is on a different tab.

     

I played through the first map and part of a second. I found the graphics ugly and hard to make out; as always, my colorblindness probably played a role. There were times I only knew that an enemy was in front of me because it started attacking, or because I couldn't move forward. I found it very easy to forget to re-equip weapons after picking something up, and also very easy to accidentally shoot at nothing when I was trying to move forward.

     

Moving through the corridors in a line.

    

There were a few light puzzles in the first scenario. I had to find two keys to open a double door. There was a place with two monsters behind force fields, and I could deactivate them if I wanted to, leading to additional treasures after I killed the monsters. (Treasures include weapons, ammo, healing items, and various technical devices.) One section had a series of three platforms moving up and down. I had to cross them to find a keycard that opened the exit.

  

All characters have to exit to move on. My understanding is that characters are healed between missions, but death is irreversible. 

     

Getting my last character out of the scenario.

      

After 15 years of doing this, I have become jaded to claims that the Amiga version is better, but having watched some YouTube videos, I would say that here it is warranted. The graphics are a smidge clearer, but more importantly, there are some excellent ambient sound effects (the humming of machines, dripping water, peals of thunder) that give the game a lot of atmosphere. The Amiga version also features occasional messages from the characters that scroll across the center of the screen. They're cute but clearly drawn from a database of generic comments (e.g., "I'm itching for a good fight") and pop culture references (e.g., "Let's go back to the drop ship and nuke the site from orbit") and not necessarily context-specific save the occasional "get out of my way!"

       

A message scrolls across the screen in a screenshot from an Amiga version video.

     

As always when I play an innovative game that isn't technically an RPG, a part of me wants to push forward, but in this case that part is discouraged by all of the aspects of the game that I don't like, including an overall feeling of cumbersomeness that's hard to explain. It also isn't a good use of my time given the size of my list.

       

      

DMA, based in Scotland, came on the scene in 1988 with Menace, a side-scrolling shooter. They released several other action games (Ballistix, Blood Money, Shadow of the Beast) before scoring an international hit with Lemmings (1991) and its many sequels. Hired Guns was one of the few games released between 1991 and 1997 that were not part of the Lemmings series. In 1997, they made their biggest splash with Grand Theft Auto, which set off a chain of events that caused them to be bought by Rockstar Games and to be renamed Rockstar North. There, they are still going strong and presumably working on Grand Theft Auto VI (2035).